This week marked an important birthday for television’s best known street; Sesame Street turned forty this week (… after enduring race riots, fiscal crisis, the crack epidemic, and gentrification).

While the distinct urban twinge of Sesame Street is not often a subject of focus, the show is in fact imagined to take place in New York, the famous green-doored house at 123 Sesame Street modeled after a Brooklyn brownstone. In fact, the  show’s creators originally thought to name the show 123 Avenue B, until it was critiqued for being too New York specific.

From the get-go, he show sought to attract non-affluent urban audiences, a desire which drove the commitment to depicting a street-scape to which inner-city children could relate. From its inception, Sesame Street prioritized diversity in the human cast and attempted to produce realistic relationships among the muppets.

By having them live close-by to one-another but not all together, Sesame Street explained the idea of neighbors with ease and clarity— Bert & Ernie live together in the basement apartment of 123 Sesame Street, Grover lives down the block with his mother, Elmo lives with his fish Dorothy in well-lit apartment at an undisclosed location, Big Bird and Oscar live outside in their nest and trashcan, respectively. Yes, sometimes things get strange— Bert & Ernie with their bird fetishes, Elmo with his excessive singing— but all neighbors are accepted (or at least tolerated) regardless of their loudness or grouchy behavior.

The community structure replicates this pattern— there is a corner store, a repair shop, a garden, a bus stop. People who know and care about the muppets from Sesame Street make their livelihoods in these places, watching over the neighborhood during both life’s everydays and its big events.

Beginning with its first show in November 1969, and during the challenging decades afterward, during which cities across the country (not least of which NY) have suffered painful identity crises, Sesame Street has successfully created and preserved the institutions and relationships which Jane Jacobs had already mourned the loss of in her 1961 groundbreaking text The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

To date, Sesame Street is perhaps the most concrete and accessible model of a U.S. urban community.

We can only hope that during the decades to come, Sesame Street will continue to inspire our neighborhoods and our cities.

Happy birthday, and thank you, Sesame Street!

Planting and Puppets:

As the longest running children’s program on television celebrated its fortieth birthday, The Planning Farm was delighted to see Michelle Obama and Sesame Street support urban community gardening.

Arthur Avenue:

Nestled in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx, just south of Fordham Road, Arthur Avenue has been extolled by regional media outlets as a charming, unique example of Italian-American New York. And Facebook, that great finder of bizarre and overlooked truths, has a fan page: “Arthur Avenue, The Real Little Italy of New York”, where 9,271 fans can share memories, directions to their favorite stores and the occasional criticism.

Lured by the promise of delicious Italian food, lively pedestrian life, and the possibility of making new discoveries, The Planning Farm decided to investigate.

The approach to Arthur Avenue is really where the adventure begins; ten, five, and even three blocks away from the 187^th Street intersection that marks the generally recognized beginning of the Little Italy, it is difficult to fathom that this mini-neighborhood of cheese shops, sausage makers and bakeries exists. The corner-cutting, diagonal-heavy streetscape of the Bronx— with extra-wide avenues and cross-streets angled every which way—does not lend itself to imagining a neighborhood of aging Italians walking along shady, clean sidewalks.

But, alas, just before the Arthur Avenue street-sign comes into reading sight, we began to see the familiar tri-colored Italian flag among the awnings along 187^th Street. Bakeries replace the bodegas of blocks past, and the street suddenly seems to enjoy the presence of a few more trees (not to mention the bocce court nestled away in a neighborhood park at 188^th Street).

The change in retail typologies is notable; restaurants and food stores dominate, many of the later with fresh fish or fowl in the window. The restaurants are almost exclusively Italian, but in a surprise mirroring of immigration patterns within Italy, Albanian cuisine is also represented. Visiting during election season, we noticed that Mike Bloomberg has been careful to post signs acknowledging the presence of (and need for support from) both nationalities.

At the southern end of the three block strip is the seemingly appropriate Christopher Columbus park; a small oasis with not much more than a statue and a few benches, part of the New York City Parks Department “Triangles, Squares and Sitting Areas” small open-spaces program. Around the corner from the park, hints of the Italianisms from “the Real Little Italy” can still be found. Most notable among these gems is a shuttered “social club”, closed by New York State Court order due to illegal sale of alcoholic beverages and gambling activities. We cannot legitimately point any fingers at Mafioso friends, but the shuttered storefront does satisfy stereotypes of what kinds of activities Italians spend their time getting up to.

The walk was lovely, and as planners we always enjoy seeing a new neighborhood and slightly different sample of New York’s mélange of building typologies and streets.  In the end, we found ourselves slightly blasé. It was The Planning Farm’s first field trip; had our expectations been too high? Was the romanticized coverage in The New York Times and New York Magazine to blame? We think so.

We certainly weren’t transported to anywhere that the MTA can’t reach, but Italy was there; her people and her pasta products well-represented within this piece of the diverse patchwork of the central Bronx.  Let us hope that New Yorkers do take advantage of this cultural treasure.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

From Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino