A Moment in Time

And Some Deep Resonances

Vine Street Expressway, June 1.

I keep coming back to this picture. It's from June 1, during the protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Protesters had walked onto the Vine Street Expressway, which runs east-west in a trench through the center of Philadelphia, and the police tried to do - what?

If they were trying to remove the protesters from the roadway (it's actually an Interstate, with the designation I-676), they were remarkably maladroit. After all, the protesters had no way out. They wound up on an embankment topped by a concrete retaining wall, which in turn was topped by a fence. The police had the protesters pinned, and they were using them for target practice.

The story behind the picture has been well covered. For an article and an editorial in the Inquirer, click here and here. For a video story in the Times, click here. For the City's response to the Times piece, click here. 

I lived through the sixties, so police riots are hardly a novelty for me - Birmingham in 1963, Selma in 1965, Chicago in 1968. I was expecting those images to come back to me. But the resonances went deeper. At first they were fuzzy, but as I kept coming back to the photo, they became clearer and clearer. 

First was the wall. In 2013, I was in Terezin, in the Czech Republic. Also called Theresienstadt, it's a small fortified city built in the eighteenth century to help protect the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire from unwanted visitors. It's named after the Empress Maria Theresa.

Fast forward to World War II, and the Nazis are using Terezin as a concentration camp. You can use walls to keep people out, or you can use them to keep people in. 

Terezin was a prison but not an extermination camp. Still, lots of people did die here, mainly of diseases fostered by malnutrition and overcrowding. Towards the end of our tour we came to yet another blank wall. It looked like all the others, but it was here that difficult prisoners were shot to death. (For more, click here.)

And as I looked at the photo of the Vine Street Expressway for the umpteenth time, I finally knew why I found the embankment and the wall so creepy. It reminded me of the execution wall in Terezin.

The tear gas didn't help. Gas means Auschwitz, it means the Western Front during World War I. My God. How many of my buttons is this photograph going to push?

One more. I sometimes call I-676 a trench, but more often I think of it as a dry moat. When I look at Vine Street today, and think of its unbuilt southern twin that apparently would have bulldozed the house that I now live in, the desire to separate, to divide, is what jumps out at me. (The use of Interstates to separate people is well documented in Atlanta. For a story, click here.) 

Back when people were actually using moats and city walls - hey, let's throw in some turrets, and don't forget those massive gatehouses - back then, separation served a useful purpose. It helped city dwellers stay alive when the four horsemen of the apocalypse were stalking the land.

We don't do city walls anymore, but I think the impulse to exclude remains alive and well. Usually, though, it doesn't reveal itself quite so dramatically as it did on the Vine Street Expressway on June 1. 

One angle is obvious. Peaceful demonstrators were protesting police brutality, and the police responded with a demonstration of police brutality. 

There's a second angle that's less obvious. I-676 is an Interstate, and it is actually illegal for people to walk on its pavement. It's also illegal for horses and bicycles. Only motor vehicles are allowed into this inner sanctum of the car culture. Walking onto the Vine Street Expressway was a highly transgressive act.

I'm sure the police would say they were just trying to maintain the traffic flow; but there's a little something else going on here.

I wish we could get over the impulse to exclude. I don't think that's going to happen. But I do think we need to find a way to rein it in. 

Tearing down the walls and filling in the moats should have been a liberating moment in the history of cities. All of a sudden, the other great force behind cities - the desire of people to be with other people - had the field to itself.

Things haven't worked out that way, at least not so far. But perhaps the idea of an open, inclusive, and welcoming society has a better future than its past.

I hope so. 

Terezin, 2013.

See also Lidice and the Power of Nothing, Getting From Here to There, How Do We Put This Back Together?