haunting street
My bike got stolen this morning, so I’m walking everywhere today. I figured I’d revisit an essay about walking that I began writing in 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, when I still lived in Berkeley.
Walking is a kind of freedom. In Rajasthan the Hawa Mahal, Palace of the Winds, has windows latticed as fine as lace: tiny perforations through which the women who once lived there could see without being seen. In modernity the ability to lead a public life, without being regarded as a “public woman,” remains elusive.
When I was sixteen, I emerged out of the Embarcadero BART station into a street that had gone quiet for the night. I was meeting a new friend in this city that did not belong to me yet. A man in his 30s or 40s looked me up and down, said “Hey girl, you look good enough to eat,” licking his lips. Dumbstruck, I grimaced and said nothing. Eventually, he slunk away. That moment was an initiation into a series of similar incidents that never really paused.
The man who spends most days lingering on Euclid Street near the garbage bins outside a sandwich shop took a swing in the direction of my head as I was walking with a friend and it barely registered to me as extraordinary. The friend said a moment later, alarmed, “Are you alright?” I do, genuinely, think the Euclid man (who has yelled “Whore!” in my general direction, though not at me nor anyone else on our plane of existence, I think) is harmless. Seeing me walk up the street, he gave some hint of recognition, remarking derisively, “You’ve been here for ten years, it doesn’t take that long to graduate.” Philippe Rochat writes in Others in Mind: The Social Origins of Self-Consciousness about walking around in traditional villages of South Pacific islands:
“it is almost impossible to cross paths with someone, young or old, woman or man, familiar or absolute stranger, without some greeting, without some acknowledgment of your existence, either called by your name or being asked what you are doing and where you are going, even if the response is very obvious. For individuals like me who grew up in rich postindustrial regions of the world, who struggle for their career and place in society, constantly under the spell of a panic fear of failure, of having failed, or of being an impostor, such simple, yet constant social acknowledgment amounts to the experience of tremendous relief.”
It would be a little glib to say that the Euclid man and his invective provide “tremendous relief,” exactly, but walking past every day I recognize him and he (maybe) recognizes me. Do with this what you will.
Euclid Street emerges out of the north side of campus and trundles up into the hills, growing progressively more residential. On the block across from the school of journalism there are some restaurants and small shops: a corner store called Seven Palms, a travel agency whose doors have been shuttered since March, a pizzeria with arcade games, places for breakfast and sandwiches and burritos and frozen yogurt and coffee and cafeteria-style Indian food. Everything shuts down at night, some in the afternoon. A series of bars have tried to make it and uniformly failed. Euclid’s neighborhood (Northside) is quiet, especially in contrast to raucous Southside with its fraternity parties and drunk undergraduates stumbling into white-tiled Artichoke Basille’s for pizza so drenched in white sauce that it slides down the throat like soup. There are some exceptions to Northside’s quiescence. One night across the street from where I live, a co-op of maybe 40 students plays Bad Romance and sings along with such gusto their own voices drown out Gaga, but they’re done before midnight.
I love to walk around here. I walk past a house painted with a textured pink that makes the sides resemble mottled skin. An old Victorian with a sun-drenched turret. The Episcopal church whose progressive bona fides are demonstrated with posters that don’t quite say “Fuck Donald Trump” but whatever the Christian version of that is — on some days, “IMMIGRANTS AND REFUGEES WELCOME,” on others “BLACK LIVES MATTER.” They have a chalkboard with a question at the top and people can answer. It always gets some light vandalism. The Episcopal church has a playground in the back and I used to hear the glad shrieks of children there. At the top of the hill is the divinity school, the theological union, and the Muslim liberal arts college. I didn’t know until recently the popular moniker for this place, “Holy Hill.” In a place this beautiful — at the apex of three streets, between the religious schools, you can see the palm trees and the fog crowning San Francisco towers and the giraffe necks of the container cranes in West Oakland — I can understand the impulse to believe.
When I get coffee some mornings, I walk through the divinity school’s campus. On an overcast and windy morning, it’s not crowded. A man and a woman wordlessly slip into a building with a great reinforced wooden door; by the lawn, elderly white women in masks make the synchronized motions of Tai Chi. When I ran earlier in the morning there was no one on the campus but the Euclid man, wandering without direction. Upon seeing him I took a side route. When I left my apartment in the morning, I heard clattering in the apartment courtyard. Remembering the first-person account I read once by a woman who had been brutally raped by men who’d been working in her apartment complex, saw her comings and goings, and knew she lived alone, I consider yelling “Bye!” behind me, at no one. (A. is gone.) Instead I lock the door and say Good morning to the man on the ladder by the complex gate.
When I was in my early teens, a man in England began expressing his obsession with me in frightening ways. He had seen a documentary series on TV, “The World’s Cleverest Child and Me,” in which I was one of the eponymous children profiled. I came across as smarmy and very short next to the presenter, Mark Dolan. The film crew visited for three days, during which time I was instructed to wear the same clothes so they could edit all the clips together and make it look like a single day. The English man became a fan, added me on social media, and commented frequently on posts. Sometimes he emailed out of the blue as well. This seemed fine, if a bit odd, for a while. The unrelenting attention, which became more insistent, eventually made me uncomfortable. When I blocked him on social media, he began harassing my family, somehow tracking down email addresses for my mother, my father, and my sister. He called my father’s mobile. We told him in no uncertain terms to stop and not contact us again. He found my home address in Redmond and sent mail there, and made new accounts under fake names with which to contact me. Things had been silent for some time until I was a sophomore in college, at which point he sent via email a threat that unless I responded he would come and find me in Berkeley. The campus police said brusquely that there was nothing they could do. I cried uncontrollably on a wooden bench under a small copse of trees on campus.
People who have looked at the statistics of crime that takes place on the street may wonder why many women feel an omnipresent sense of fear, like a low-grade fever. In many urban areas, men are more likely to be the victims of violent crimes like muggings at gunpoint. There is a lot that never gets counted. Many things, added up, create the bogeyman.
For weeks after the English man threatened to come to Berkeley and find me, when I went on walks I would scan the faces of passersby with added scrutiny. My mother looked up the police department near his home and called them; so far as I recall, they also did nothing. Somehow, the issue was handled. I may have forgotten the details out of some self-protective instinct. I have not heard from the English man since. But when I write about the places I like to walk, it becomes impossible not to recall those weeks. Women are often cautioned not to reveal too much about where they live. Indeed, I remember being shocked when I saw home addresses in the CVs of some professors at school. Had they never had their English man, or did they not fear the possibility?
This is where I left the essay, incomplete, back in August 2020. Now that I look back I worry I didn’t adequately communicate the joy of walking around (and thus the full loss when the right to do so unmolested is abridged). There’s a lot of debate about gender and the term flâneur, a French word that connotes leisurely, purposeless walking and looking at things, almost loitering. Idling, sauntering, loafing are other associated words. Can a woman be a flâneur? Or is the freedom to look at things without being consumed by others still reserved largely for cis men who conform to gender norms? And is the way I think about freedom in urban space — which largely looks like going on a walk and being left alone — fundamentally an impoverished neoliberal vision? To go street haunting, flitting around my city of strangers? Of course I want things that are good for everyone: well-maintained public bathrooms everywhere, public safety that doesn’t rely on police, no men saying gross things on the sidewalk. But I can’t claim any saintliness for these desires: they are also things that would make it more frictionless for me to move. And the frictionless of my movement is not altogether uncomplicated or unpolitical. A geography lecturer I spoke to at Berkeley told me that when the city of San Francisco sought to gentrify the SoMa neighborhood, they used “women’s safety” as a justification for policing and shooing out dockworkers who’d previously hung around and given the neighborhood its rough character. I think about that sometimes when I patronize businesses that sell letterpress cards and $5 mochi muffins.
Right now, I’m sitting in a pretty coffee shop a block away from a decrepit old factory long fallen into disuse, and a street named for the rifle company that was born in this town. Another few blocks and you’ve hit the line in this city professors and older students tell you not to cross. Change for this doesn’t happen on the level of the individual flâneur. I like walking around, love it even, but I know its limits.
If the weather’s nice, I often ask people to take a walk with me instead of sitting somewhere. Sometimes I suggest the cemetery. It’s a beautiful place, esteemed bodies old and new — those exhumed from under the New Haven Green and moved there, or (some) more recent professors and university presidents. The well-trodden dirt paths unfold underneath the spreading canopies of orange trees in the fall and naked branches in the winter. We go round and round the dead, and I feel safe.
image credit: Sophie Calle at the Museé D’Orsay in The Architectural Review. (Calle is herself an eccentric flâneur. Her art projects have included hiring a private investigator to follow her around Paris photographing her; in a subsequent project, Suite Vénitienne, she followed someone else).
Would also recommend:
Lauren Elkin’s essay on the flâneuse and/or her book, Flâneuse!
Feminist City by geographer Leslie Kern, as well as her latest book, Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein