The cities of tomorrow need the seasoned places of today.

BY DWIGHT YOUNG

First it was 1984. george orwell’s novel envisioned a future in which warfare was constant, Big Brother knew what was best for you, and daily life was bleak and pinched and sterile.

Then it was 2001. Stanley Kubrick’s movie showed us a future in which space stations twirled to a Strauss waltz, an ominous black slab floated around, and it was hard to figure out what it all meant.

Now it’s almost 2003—and the prognostications haven’t amounted to much. We were warned that mankind would be enslaved by evil aliens from Alpha Centauri, but it hasn’t happened. We were assured that someday our meals would be compressed into pills and we’d never need dental floss, but that didn’t come to pass either. We were promised bubble-topped cars that would drive themselves while we filed our nails or played Yahtzee, but they never showed up.

Let’s face it, the future isn’t what it used to be—and neither is our idea of the city of the future.

At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, visitors by the thousands lined up to glimpse the “city of tomorrow”—a huge model of a metropolis in which everything was slick and shiny. A thicket of soaring towers downtown was ringed by suburbs where every flat-roofed, glass-walled house had a heliport in the back yard.

But in this brave new world, old buildings and neighborhoods didn’t exist. The place had no roots, no links with the shared history and traditions that give people and nations their identity. The trouble with this city of the future was that it had no past. It had no funky places. It had no Jimmy T’s.

Jimmy T’s is a café on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Here’s what happens when you walk in on Sunday morning: Cynde, working at the grill, yells “Hi” and asks how you’re doing and where you’ve been. From his station at the waffle iron, Cynde’s husband, John, grins and nods. After you sit down, Bryan or Rick comes by to take your order and offer an irreverent (and generally dead-on) appraisal of your new hairstyle, tattoo, grandchild’s photo, and/or breakfast companion. Then you settle in among the mismatched chairs and coffee mugs and consume a hearty helping of neighborhood life, seasoned with banter and gossip and cholesterol.

In his book The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg laments the disappearance of community gathering places where people can linger, blow off steam, form and cement acquaintances. When critics accuse him of trying to bring back the past, Oldenburg replies, “We don’t need the past. We need the places!”

He’s right, although I have to disagree with that “we don’t need the past” bit. Jimmy T’s wouldn’t be the same if it were located in a new building in a strip mall instead of a rather shabby rowhouse, if its booths were unscuffed and its tin ceiling freshly painted and its air perfumed with potpourri. What makes it special, what makes it so homey that you’re tempted to show up bathrobed and barefooted—what makes it, in short, the kind of place that we ought to fight hard to save if we’re serious about preserving real livability—is the years of use that have earned Jimmy T’s its role as forum for, and ornament to, community life.

The kinds of places people really care about are rarely created from scratch. They evolve, they ripen and mellow. The city of the future isn’t waiting to be built: It’s here already, in the streets and neighborhoods where we live and work. We don’t have to devise it; we just have to ensure that it makes the transition from today to tomorrow without losing the ineffable, rooted character it has gained over time.

One memorable Sunday at Jimmy T’s, the guy at the counter beside me worked up the nerve to ask another customer for a date, and when she said yes, several of us applauded. If the city of the future doesn’t have room for a place like that, I’m not sure I want to live there.

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