Noticings: A Column About Public Space and Design — The City's Back Door
The spatial symbology of the urban landscape can open reveal both stigma and something else.
by V Lane Hoy
During a seminar on the subject of public art in the late 1990s, art historian Rosalyn Deutsche outlined how a renovation of Jackson Square Park in New York City’s West Village introduced a new gate around the park’s perimeter. The New York City Parks Department entrusted a community group with keys to close the gate at night and prevent houseless people from taking refuge there. This was but one of the ways the underfunded parks department offloaded maintenance tasks they weren’t able to accomplish in-house due to ongoing budget cuts initiated in the late 1960s. Deutsche uncovers one of the assumptions embedded within that decision: ”People without homes are not residents of the neighborhood and are therefore not part of the public. Rather, homeless people are intruders in public space.”
These assumptions, Deutsche notes, are never consensus-based and are instead established through specious discursive processes that take their own logic and values for granted by framing them as neutral, self-evident, or simple common sense. And in this case, they also cast a distinction around who (and, by extension, what behavior) is legitimate inside society and what lies outside that figurative, and sometimes also quite literal, boundary.
Humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has theorized about the spatial articulations of figurative framings of cities: insides, outsides, fronts, backs, lefts, and rights. Tuan writes:
Many buildings have clearly demarcated front and back regions. People may work in the same building and yet experience different worlds because their unequal status propels them into different circulatory routes and work areas. Maintenance men and janitors enter through service doors at the back and move along the “guts” of the building, while executives and their secretaries enter by the front door and move through the spacious lobby and well-lit passageways to their brightly furnished offices. A middle-class residence typically presents an attractive front to impress and welcome social adults, and an unprepossessing rear for the use of people of low status such as delivery men and children.
I am reminded of a classmate from graduate school who worked by night as a DJ. They similarly conceptually mapped the front stage / front door and the back stage / back door onto waking life and night life and, by symbolic extension, the productive city and the illicit city. We find another version of this binary in the lyrics of blues musicians who sing about the “back door man,” the stealthy guy using the back door to get in and out of the house of the woman with whom he’s having an affair. In Howlin’ Wolf’s rendition, he sings, “When everybody’s sound asleep / I’m somewhere making my midnight creep.” Here, too, the back door suggests stigma in the form of someone up to no good, and also, curiously, gives the sense that those who use the back door might be having a little more fun than the front-door types. Or, if not fun, that they may desire something different than just a simple longing to be the type who uses the front door. To put it in slightly more neutral terms, something else can be created amidst the banal fact of exclusion.
In Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African American Slang, interdisciplinary artist Clarence Major writes about the connection between the denial of front-door access African Americans experienced during and after slavery when working in the homes of wealthy white people. Slang expressions like the “back door man” began to act as “a secret tongue,” a language that maintained “its own center of gravity, integrity, and shape.”
In an interview in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Fred Moten spoke about this something else that can emerge within the experience of oppression. He identifies one of the pedagogical practices used in the Mississippi Freedom Schools that were developed during the Freedom Summer of 1964 in response to racist voter suppression laws. A prompt invited students to take inventory of not just what they wanted to see transformed in their communities, but also what they cherished and wanted preserved. Moten describes what made this approach stand out: “There’s a way of thinking about what was going on in Mississippi in 1964 that would be predicated on the notion that the last question you would ever consider to be relevant for people in that situation, for black folks in Mississippi in 1964, is what do they have that they want to keep?”
The philosophy behind that question embedded in the curriculum, Moten goes on to say, “presupposes…(a) that they’ve got something that they want to keep, and (b) that not only do those people who were fucking them over not have everything, but that part of what we want to do is to organize ourselves around the principle that we don’t want everything they have.”
I observed a related pattern while working overnights at The People’s House, a low-barrier homeless shelter that at the time was hosted in the basement of the First Christian Church in downtown Olympia. While we were grateful for the church’s and the surrounding neighborhood’s willingness to host the shelter—which was no small feat after an arduous process of permit rejections and community meetings where residents often took anti-homeless stances—the church basement proved a less-than-ideal setting. The physical environment, with its long hallways, labyrinthian dormitories, and low ceilings, was difficult to traverse for many of the elderly and disabled residents, who rightfully made their frustrations known.
Yet after residents finally secured housing, some would keep coming back to hang out at the shelter, even though, during their tenure living there, they were desperate to get out and into their own place.
One former resident continued to come by regularly, often helping the overnight staff mop the floors in the morning after the residents had left for the day (the permit for the shelter was granted with the condition that it had to close during “business hours”). On one of those mornings, I asked him how it felt to have his new apartment, my tone cheery, expecting a moment of celebration. But, in his endearing Boomhauer-like mumble, he said, “Yeah, it’s alright… kind of lonely though. Everybody’s just in their apartments all day.”
For all the dysfunction within that run-down environment, something in the culture that grew out of the motley crew of residents and staff met a real social need that became evident only after residents transitioned into permanent housing and would return to visit, notably restless with boredom and isolation.
So there is this tension between the real suffering that occurs when some are rendered to the outskirts, the alleyways, the proverbial and actual back doors of buildings and cities, and also the possibility that there might be something meaningful that subjugation reveals, something that those using the front door can’t always see and maybe wouldn’t understand anyway.
Dembart, Lee. 1975. “Parks Agency Plight Epitomizes the City’s.” New York Times, October 23. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/10/23/archives/parks-agency-plight-epitomizes-the-citys.html.
Deutche, Rosalyn. 2021. “The Question of ‘Public Space’.” In Public Space Reader, edited by Miodrag Mitrašinović and Vikas Mehta. Routledge.
Devi, Debra. 2012. “The Language of the Blues: Back Door Man.” American Blues Scene. https://www.americanbluesscene.com/2012/07/the-language-blues-back-door-man.
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Autonomedia.
Major, Clarence, ed. 1994. Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang. Puffin.
Tuan, Yi Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press.