Profiling Place: A Rough Draft

Vine

Once upon a time on a dull and drizzly Monday afternoon, I found myself trudging what would become a very familiar five and a half blocks. It was the first time I had made the walk to my new home from campus since moving in as a student tenant in the spring of my junior year of college. This particularly drab afternoon was the tail-end to the kind of Monday that drives people to eat ice-cream for dinner and promptly go to bed. But what started as a dreary, prototypical Monday afternoon walk home in the rain, turned into an unexpected unveiling, a discovery of place.

In the heart of Kalamazoo, Michigan, sandwiched between downtown and two university campuses, there is a neighborhood named Vine. The place, which borrows its name from Vine Street, running east to west through its approximate center, is a vibrant haven for a diverse community of college students, young families, and entrepreneurs. 75-80% of all properties in the Vine Neighborhood are rentals according to the Neighborhood Association which also describes the surrounding tree lined streets as a place for “committed urban pioneers who are reclaiming historic beauties as single-family homes”. It’s an eclectic place bubbling with a distinctive culture – not quite like any place I have ever lived before.

As I followed the rippled and cracked sidewalks of my new neighborhood I was forced to cross the street in order to detour a half-block-long pool of rainwater collecting haphazardly in a low point on Davis Street. As I cut across the road, lamenting the melancholy afternoon, I caught the sight of two children – they couldn’t have been twelve years old combined – as they were jumping and stomping in the puddles I had been trying to avoid. Their shrieks of laughter forced a smile in the corners of my mouth. It seemed to be getting brighter as I walked past and waved.

I recently met with Stephen Walsh, the proud Director of the Vine Neighborhood Association and a neighbor of mine. We talked for nearly an hour about the history of the place we both now call home. Steve, as he prefers to be called, bragged about the neighborhood, one of the oldest in Kalamazoo. He told me about the original Dutch immigrants that first called these streets home back in the 1840’s. Most of the original buildings have been lost to the passing of the decades but some of the larger, Queen Anne mansions that originally housed the town’s wealthy and influential families have been saved by owners and organizations like the Neighborhood Association. By the turn of the century, the Vine Neighborhood was one of Kalamazoo’s most fashionable neighborhoods. As a result, small businesses, grocery shops, and bars began to pop up and prosper in the neighborhood. Steve explained that by the early 1900’s residents could live, work, and shop all within the borders of the neighborhood. The place was alive with youth as well as students from all over the area attended The Public School established near the center of the neighborhood along Westnedge Avenue. Today the building houses the Kalamazoo Area Mathematics & Science Center. Original pieces of both Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University can be found in the Vine Neighborhood as well, Steve said with a grin.

As the years past and the twentieth century rolled on, the Vine Neighborhood became an ideal place for all types of people to live – a trend that Steve believes still holds true today. Steve explained that as housing demands continued to rise for university students and families alike, once large properties were subdivided to create smaller lots with more homes. In several cases, he told me, older buildings were moved back in from the street in order to make room for new houses, resulting in the helter-skelter patchwork of properties you can see in the neighborhood today. As the neighborhood’s composition changed significantly, students and other low-income groups took advantage of the newly available, convenient, and affordable housing niche.

As I neared the intersection of Vine and Davis, I noticed something new; a pair of Chuck Taylors hanging next to hiking boots along the telephone line. The sacrificial footwear seemed less like a gang sign and more like artwork; the reality of which I will never know. As I stopped to snap a picture of the soaked shoes, I suddenly heard music – saxophone music. Four doors down, a Western Michigan University graduate student was sitting, shirtless, playing a silver alto sax under the cover of his porch. I walked up, bewildered by the sight of him, and introduced myself by asking permission to take his picture.

On Saturday and Sunday mornings the patrons of the Crow’s Nest – a local breakfast spot –line up out the door and onto the sidewalk waiting for a table and a good hangover remedy. The house parties and block parties that fill Vine Neighborhood evenings with music and drunken pedestrians often end hear at the east end of Vine Street.  [Insert information from interview with Chris, the owner and Manager of the Crow’s Nest – Scheduled for 4/33/12] And it’s not the only good eatery in the area. Half a dozen small scale, locally owned restaurants and bars dot the neighborhood.

The rain was definitely letting up now. I rounded the corner at the base of the hill I lived on, past a tall rose bush, and was nearly run over by a girl on a bicycle. It was a girl named Michelle, a classmate, friend, and neighbor of mine. She had been racing her antique Schwinn down Austin Street, where I lived, also on her way home from class. Fortunately, the forty-year-old brakes on her bike still worked and she narrowly avoided knocking my block off. When she stopped to say hello, and reprimand me for walking so carelessly, she brought up a poem she had recently written (Michelle fancies herself a poetic soul) about the street she lived on. “This place is like walking through a poem!” she exclaimed. And suddenly I too wanted to write about our neighborhood.

Today I still live in the Vine Neighborhood, in a large, three-story, mold-accented, rental house – with seven other people. My housemates include an aspiring photojournalist, an Ultimate Frisbee guru, three National Science Foundation sponsored scholars, two practicing microbrew specialists, and a bike mechanic. The walls of our nearly 100-year old home hum with activity. And we are never alone. Across the street, three starving artists endure and smoke and paint. Next-door, our neighbor Mike – or “Mikey” as his uniform reads – can be found most nights either barbequing on his front porch or working on renovations to his recently acquired 1980’s RV out back; his engorged American Bulldog, Liza, is always by his side, or pooping in our lawn. Our block perpetually smells of marijuana, charcoal, and mildew. It rings with the drone of stereos and window fans, punctuated by occasional screams of laughter and carburetor backfires. Garlic mustard shoots outnumber flower beds, and it simultaneously looks as if everyone has just moved in is about to leave. I live on a street named Austin, on a hill named Prospect, in a neighborhood named Vine. The place is dynamic, potent, and very much alive, and I have to admit; it’s rubbing off on me.