ON SPRAWL AND OUR HEALTH

Sprawl Sucks. It’s ugly. Its architecture appeals
to no one no how. Parking lots are accident-prone concentrations of car
exhaust. Driving around wastes gas, is expensive, forces parents to sit
with their backs facing their children, which doesn’t help in the
eye-contact department, and like OTBKB said, is a great way to make
sure you get NO exercise. Where I live, people drive to their fitness
club, which is one of those places I draw the line. I do drive my
daughter to the YMCA for swim lessons, and feel icky doing it. On the
other hand, my husband and I have upheld our commitment to being a
one-car family, and we have found ways of living a life on foot, less
than in Brooklyn, but more than in your average "suburb" (remembering
that many suburbs are now urbs in their own right, just not The Urb).

One
of the reasons I moved up the Hudson to Kingston was to get us closer
to trees, hiking, water, mountains and beauty, and farther from the
dense traffic that spewed out of Grand Army Plaza into my children’s
faces as they sat in their strollers while we waited to cross the
street. Car exhaust pipes are right at a two-year-old’s eye level.

Granted,
Prospect Park is great, and so is the Botanic Garden, but in neither
place could my children gambol barefoot. In the Park there was too much
glass; in the Botanic Garden, the guards wouldn’t allow it, so my
outlaw children, who were always encouraged to remove their shoes and
feel the grass, were always being told to get them back on by garden
authorities. Not that it’s so safe to go barefoot in a place that
sprays pesticide