Here’s more from Michael Nolan:

  I love street life. There was more of it growing up in Brooklyn than I can find in my adopted city of San Francisco. Certainly, front-stoop architecture, warm evenings, less TV-addiction were contributing factors. And my mom, bless her heart, didn’t call me in from a tough game of Ring-a-Levio or Hide-and-Go-Seek to do my homework. She knew I would get to it and do it well and excel at school.

And yet the yearning is there to connect. We had a wonderful block party on Elsie Street – the 2nd annual – last month here on Bernal Heights. Featuring a bouncy house for the kids (and then us adults), a bake-off contest (Liz’s lemon tart won), salsa lessons, a hula dancer, and a clarinet-flute-accordion trio of neighbors. We relocated our cars, and officially closed the street to traffic.

We have abundant commmunity glue, or "social capital", here on Elsie Street and yet the demands of daily life, two-income households, childcare, long commutes, the convenience of automated garage-door openers, remodeled homes that face more to the back of the house, make casual and frequent serendipitous encounters and conversation difficult.

At the age of 7 in Brooklyn, I could walk around the corner, buy a quart of milk for my mom, a pickle for myself, or at the corner of Coney Island Avenue, have a lime rickey or a chocolate malted at Phil & Jack’s, and then wait at the trolley stop for my Dad to come home from work. I pressed my ear against the pole to hear the rumbling sounds of the approaching trolley.