thin trust piazza
I grew up on the Connecticut shoreline. Twenty minutes east of New Haven. The town was affluent, our family was not. The town was bisected north and south by a road - Green Hill - that divided the have-to-work-in-high-schools from the do-not-have-to-work-in-high-schools. When I was sixteen, I worked at Lenny and Joe’s Fish Tale as the only boy working the registers with the girls. That is, except for the times I prepped Cole Slaw or scooped Libby’s Italian Ice outside near the carousel for families-a-waiting.
Our family would buy their Italian Ice - I was partial to the watermelon - at Libby’s Italian Pastry Shop. It was located on Wooster Street in New Haven. Also on Wooster Street were two institutions and an also-ran in the New Haven-style pizza game: Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana and Sally’s Apizza the Yale and Harvard to Modern Apizza’s Cornell.
A dear friend of mine refers to New Haven-style apizza (pronounced a-beets), as “burnt water pizza”. Like when you try to cook with electric instead of gas: somehow it’s both raw and burnt at the same time. Things can be two things; friends can still be wrong. Apizza is thin on crust, fired with coal, Neopolitan in style and delicious of taste.
While a Yale University student, Robert Putnam probably ate apizza. In his book Bowling Alone,1 he described how trust can be based on experience, what he called thick trust, or “general community norms,” thin trust. He used the examples of the shop owner whose store you’ve frequented for years and the person you smiled at while getting coffee in your neighborhood.
Thick trust relationships are important. The data show how vital it is to have deep friendships. Many would say that since we have too few, the key to reducing loneliness is by having more, deeper friendships.
That is necessary; that isn’t sufficient. Things can (sometimes) be (one of) two things.
I recently came across a quote by John Muir, in the book Landscapes, by Robert MacFarlane: “Instead of wearing thin they wear thick, and in their stratification have no small geological significance.” It regarded the greasy trousers of Muir’s friend that collected the humus and detritus of the woods as he roamed. But it could have easily been about thin and thick trust. The seemingly meaningless interactions with your community deepen your connection to it. They - both the interactions and the community - leave their mark. They show your age like rings of a tree. They tell a story. Your story.
We aren’t just friends though thick and thin. We are friends through thick trust and we build a community through thin trust.
We were a Pepe’s family. Our neighbors across the street were a Sally’s family. We didn’t know a single Modern Family until the Dunphy-Pritchett clan showed up.
In summer, we went to Pepe’s with family friends of ours who lived on Green Hill Road. With a line starting well past its original location next door, The Spot, we would note with a nod the familiar faces from past visits as we walked to the end. Stomachs yearned for a bite of that first triangle of apizza. They were famous for their White Clam pie. Even has a kid, even before I tried it, even when the concept alone disgusted me, I felt the majesty it possessed.
Starting with a hush, a message would rush from the front to the back in the most accurate game of telephone: OUT OF CLAMS. Crushed, like a can of San Marzano tomatoes, we’d let out our communal sigh. At sixteen, I would experience derivative disappointment déjà vu when putting up a similar sign between taking orders at the Fish Tale: SORRY, NO WHOLE BELLY CLAMS TODAY.
The Fish Tale was located a mile from our town’s core. Our community of 14,000 convened along that half-mile strip of Route 1 we called downtown. As kids, our mom would take me and my brother to Friendly’s for dinner on Wednesdays. As a teen, I was allowed to ride my bike the 6.8 miles into town. I’d meet friends for a greasy slice at Village Pizza. The two-screen movie theater across the street is where I saw Forrest Gump. Rumor had it the place held a basketball court underneath from the 1930s where the town would cheer on their high school teams.
Back across the street was R.J. Julia Booksellers. Opened in 1989, it welcomed book buyers and browsers alike. It hosted authors’ talks until the crowds got too big. Scranton Library down the block served the larger audiences. The First Congregational Church, located the other way down Route 1, had doors that opened onto a classic New England town green and for events too large even for the library to handle. Town meetings, a staple of New England life since colonial days, were held nearby.
The town green hosted antique fairs, flea markets and concerts on the green. We would go with our fellow Pepe’s family. Townsfolk would arrive early on summer mornings to put out blankets and chairs marking their place. The best spots were center stage, in front of one of the large oaks, chartered to provide shade from the setting sun. No one ever had their belongings or their spot taken.
Between space saving and concert start, we’d head to the Surf Club. Its name was doubly ironic as there was no surf, and you didn’t have to pay to enter. It was our town beach. My brother and I were lifeguards there in our late teens. The only thing we ever saved was the decoy beach ball. Meat tenderizer was applied to salve a few jellyfish stings of our community’s guppies.
With wind cracking off Long Island Sound, Surf Club’s Strong Field was where our high school football team hosted teams from around the state. As kids, our parents would take us to games. They sat in the stands. We walked around meeting up with friends, saying hello to teachers. In middle school, we’d try to flirt with girls. We weren’t that successful. But our team usually won.
In high school, we marched in the band on the same field during half time. On Wisconsin was our fight song. We weren’t Badgers; the song a loose connection to another place with the same name in Wisconsin.
When Mr. Putman wrote Bowling Alone in the late 1990s, he noted the generation prior lived, worked and shopped, more or less, around a town center - piazza if you will - seeing familiar faces from the community every day, something those of the Greatest Generation would have done in Madison - Connecticut or Wisconsin.
But Putnam noted we lived in “large suburban triangles, as we move[d] daily from home to work to shop to home”. For me, that triangle was more a quadrilateral: our county. According to County Highway, a magazine masquerading in newspaper ink, “[a] county is a chunk of earth big enough to allow for a variety of human types, but small enough to get to know a decent number of your neighbors, where they come from, what they’re proud of, what they fear, what they smoke, what they drink, and what they love.”
Extending west and north from town, our county was where we spent the majority of our time. My mom taught in town, my dad down the road in New Haven. My brother and I loved to buy gag gifts and inappropriate posters at Spencer’s Gifts at Milford’s Post Mall. We played rec sports in town with the other boys. We weren’t able to afford travel teams. Or we weren’t skilled enough. We were latchkey kids, getting off the bus at the top of our street with a half dozen other boys. We played baseball in the cul-de-sac before it got dark. We knew all our neighbors. Even those without kids.
Fresh out of college, I drove to work in one city, shopped at the mall(s) in others, and slept in a bed in another. Even a move to New York City evinced the same phenomenon, but with more vertices: from home in Brooklyn to work in Midtown to a bar in Chelsea to shopping in the Lower East side to home to sleep before brunch in another part of the city the next morning. I still had some loose connections to the bodega owners and the coffee shop patrons I’d see most mornings, but I was the only common denominator among them.
After my wife and I married, and had our two kids, we tried to make the city work. But we found ourselves doing the suburban triangle from one place to the next, albeit all within Manhattan. Within a few miles in fact. While others can, we couldn’t.
When we started looking at place to move, we had a few stipulations. It needed to be commutable to the city via train, ideally on an express train. That train needed to be walking distance from our home. Ditto shopping and preschools. My wife doesn’t drive; I didn’t own a car.
We took the train to White Plains. We ambled through the city streets towards the downtown. There were workers, both white- and blue-collared. Stores both big and small - many even locally-owned - welcomed shoppers. My wife would work at the large library in those early months. She would take in a showing or two on Fridays at the movie theater. There’s a bookstore, and while it’s not independent, it was still an actual physical place to buy actual books. The multiple restaurants and bars along the main street were filled with couples, families, friends and strangers alike.
We knew this was our hometown. Our mortgage made it official. We toasted with the bar staff at one of those restaurants when we closed.
That was 2016.
An updated edition of Bowling Alone was released in 2020, and included new research on the impact of the internet and social media. But it predated the impact of the pandemic. Since then, we have not just closed the piazza where we lived, worked and shopped, we collapsed the suburban triangle. With our shopping done from our smartphone - which rarely gets used for talking - we first compressed our world into a single line between work and home. The coronavirus erased the place we worked outside the home, turning a straight line into a single dot.
An island.
We have lost much. But as John Donne wrote in 1624,
No man is an island, Entire of itself; Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, As well as if a promontory were: As well as if a manor of thy friend's Or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
A hopeful reminder that we need each other. That we need community. That we need a place to gather. Together.
R.J. Julia continues to thrive. During the pandemic, I ordered my books from them to have shipped to me in New York. Each box would contain a handwritten thank you. The short time it took to put pen to paper serving as a thin but lasting layer of warmth. I still make it up there a few times a year. I usually see a familiar face, albeit aged, from when I bought my first Matt Christopher books 30 years ago.
Lenny and Joe’s still welcomes families like mine, albeit with a replacement carousel after a previous hurricane destroyed the last one. Friendly’s no longer welcomes families. Or anyone. In its place is a Starbucks. Families are welcome there.
I concede the town has punched above its weight when it comes to controversy. Village Pizza burned down, replaced by Grand Apizza. Insurance fraud, they said. (Maybe it was just a grease fire.) To save space and push pace, I leave it to the reader to explore the rabbit holes on your own time with some suggested searches: police + corruption or lobster or prostitution, teacher affair, football coach fired, murder.
Scranton Library’s footprint continues to expand to serve a growing town. The church still avails itself to congregants as does the cinema, albeit under new ownership, which also hosts authors’ events. The Historical Society still holds fairs throughout the year on the same town green. Music still plays at the concerts on the green, families still mark their spot in the morning, take a dip in the salt water, and come back for dinners al fresco as the sun sets to their backs. Lifeguards still keep watch, but out-of-towners can enter with a small fee at the Surf Club.
Football games still take place under Friday night’s lights. Town meetings still take place, but in the halls of the sprawling town campus where my brother and I played soccer when it was still a private school.
Libby’s is still there on Wooster Street, as delicious as its look derelict. Pepe’s still remains in New Haven, CT. But it also exists in Fairfield. And at Mohegan Sun. And in both of the the Burys: Dan and Water. And in nine other cities across the East Coast including Florida. Fucking Florida.
I took my kids to the one in Fairfield last summer. It was peak time on a Saturday. We were the only family. We used to say what made their apizza great had something to do with the water. As suburban sprawl has dried up the Colorado River out west, the expansion of a once great institution has caused a drought out east. Perhaps now my friend would only complain about the charred bits.
Later in Landscapes, during a passage on Childish nature words, MacFarlane shares a study that looked at the “roaming radius” of children from 1970 to 2010. It “tightened from generation to generation, until in the third it was cinched right down to house, garden and pavement.” The triangle of childhood eaten away like that piece of White Clam pizza with each bite of over-protectionist parents.
But again, there’s hope.
My brother and I lived too far away from school to walk as kids. Other than the time I ran home from cross country practice, we relied on busses and cars. We now live less than three-quarters of a mile from my oldest’s school. City rules dictate that within this radius, children must walk or be dropped off. Our daughter walks, mostly. She picks her friend up along they way. They chat. They look out for others; others look out for them. A thin trust pulling them towards the hallways of 7th grade.
My wife walks to work, two miles one way. She gets to see our city wake up and welcome commuters on their way to work. She waves to neighbors both known and new.
In a Wildsam Pursuits book about Vermont, but just as easily applied to the town I grew up in 150 miles South, or if you squint, the town in which I now raise a family 80 miles West, the Editors ask us to “[c]onsider the fine web of connections that bind people to a complex place. Weight the nuances of tight-knit community, or balance of tradition and the new.”
After my daughter walked home last week, she stopped at the front door. She was taking a picture with her phone. I inquired. She pointed to a spotted lanternfly. It was caught in a spider’s web. A spider was eating it. A flitting fitting reminder: sometimes, even in a “fine web of connections”, we still have to watch out for each other.
With that as good a reason as any, I’ve invited some local guys over to join me for a morning fire next Monday. We’ll start at five a.m. with coffee, conversation and candor and without our phones. I know some of them well and others only in passing proximity. I’m sure we’ll deepen our connections to one another and to our community. Because I am involved in mankind.
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Calling New Haven style pizza "Neapolitan" is an insult to pizza, Naples, and frankly even to burnt water.
That said I loved this stroll through my youth. I found myself thinking - is a well lived life a scatter plot or a triangle? Both? Something in-between? Can one be a citizen of the world?