I live in a social experiment.  My home is a three story townhouse built where Lincoln Court, the southernmost of the nineteen-forties housing projects that once flanked Ezzard Charles Drive, which was once Lincoln Park Drive, about halfway between Music Hall and Union Terminal, which stands on what was once Lincoln Park, all of which was a stone’s throw from an Indian mound at Sixth and Mound Streets that was leveled in the city’s earliest days.  

The social experiment is to see whether replacing a concentration of low income renters in outmoded metropolitan housing with a mix of rental units and owner occupied houses and a mix of subsidized and unsubsidized citizens will be a good thing for the city.  

I didn’t have dreams of living in a social experiment.  After thirty years of rehabilitating old houses, I had dreams of living in a house with electrical outlets where I needed them to be and a garage with an automatic door.  I’ve lived in the social experiment for four years now, and I can tell you that being able to plug in the vacuum cleaner in the room it/s going to be used in is worth any amount of money.  As it happens, the price on the house was very good, there’s a pleasantly long tax abatement, the neighbors in my row are better dressed than I am, and my wife, who grew up in the suburbs and wasn’t keen to go back there, is happy.  So my particular experiment is working.

I still get a kick setting out on foot for the opera from a front door that’s just a couple of blocks away from where I used to park on the street in order to beat the rapacious fees charged by the Music Hall garage.
From time to time, people whose ideas of city life are formed by breathless local newscasters ask if it isn’t dangerous here.  I don’t know whether to tell them that the most menacing aspect seems to be the surprisingly large population of fairly aggressive crows that hang around the neighborhood.