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Essay: 'Detroit' maps out the change in U.S. neighbors and neighborliness

Last week I saw the play Detroit at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. It wasn't really about Detroit. It was about neighbors. About the randomness of who might chance to move in next door. About the strange intimacy that can come with neighbors who just may invade your lives and change them.

Genevieve Perrier and Steven Rishard in "Detroit," a play about neighbors. MICHAEL BRYANT /Staff Photographer
Genevieve Perrier and Steven Rishard in "Detroit," a play about neighbors. MICHAEL BRYANT /Staff PhotographerRead more

Last week I saw the play Detroit at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. It wasn't really about Detroit. It was about neighbors. About the randomness of who might chance to move in next door. About the strange intimacy that can come with neighbors who just may invade your lives and change them.

Detroit addressed how the whole concept of neighborhood has changed over my lifetime. One of the characters in the play summed it up in one line: "Neighbors - the word is really archaic."

A down-and-out couple moves into a derelict house next to a presumably upwardly mobile couple. They size one another up as if on opposite sides of an invisible fence.

But fate has other plans, and the four become enmeshed in a connection none could have imagined. 

Detroit was at once real, disturbing, sobering, and strange. And yes, engaging. It reminds us that it can be dangerous to get too close to neighbors - and terribly lonely not to get close at all.

It's an American theme, as I and many others know from experience.

Back in our family's modest rowhouse in the Wynnefield section of Philadelphia, neighbors were inextricably connected. If the lady next door saw me doing something I wasn't supposed to, the news traveled with the speed of light to my parents. And if they weren't around, she scolded me herself.

It was the in loco parentis theory of neighbors. But that was in the 1950s.

When I grew up and left the old neighborhood with my new husband, it was on to what was then Levittown (now Willingboro), N.J., complete with schools, pools, and, yes, neighbors just a small lawn away. Vic and I were the new kids on the block, in more ways than one. I was 21, two weeks out of college, and suddenly the mistress of a little Cape Cod house. He was a rookie in a law firm a few towns away.

My neighbors on either side - Barbara and Rose - already had kids, and knew how to cook and how to measure for curtains. I revered them for their superior knowledge. Soon enough, they were teaching me how to soothe a colicky baby. Within five years, two more babies would fill that little Cape Cod to overflowing.

Back then, you turned to neighbors for recipes, solace, and, if you walked outdoors most days, conversation. Barbara taught me how to double-diaper a baby at night, and Rose was my steadfast guide on all things commonsensical about domestic life.

I cried when we moved away to a bigger and presumably better house in the same town. In that neighborhood, people were less connected. The push toward upward mobility seemed to cool things off. I missed our old neighbors. The kids in this new neighborhood didn't catch fireflies together on summer nights.

Our next move was to Moorestown, and an old English Tudor house. We had a pleasant friendship with the neighbors on one side, but we never met the neighbors on the other side for years. When they moved away one day, a new couple arrived, and we were invested in their lives in a very special way: We were character references for them when they adopted a baby.

As we arrived home from Detroit last week, we pulled into the driveway in our current condominium community. Here, even to sight a neighbor is rare. We come and go through our garages, barely stepping out of our bubbles.

I thought about those early childhood days in a Philadelphia rowhouse and in Levittown, when the world was younger, and so were we.

And I thought of the new social ethic that so many observe these days: Don't get too involved - keep your distance.

And somehow, I couldn't shake the sadness.