Good Fences Make Scarce Neighbors
The cheerful couple across the street got me thinking about Robert Frost’s famous line, the one about good fences making for good neighbors. A construction crew showed up one day not long ago, tore up their asphalt driveway and dug into their frontyard. Soon after, a low brick-and-wrought-iron wall rose from their lawn. I hope we don’t see less of this family now that the job is finished.
A few months earlier, a lovely family down the street put up a waist-high concrete wall, now attractively landscaped, to screen part of their frontyard--the yard where their two young boys don’t seem to play as much anymore. Down the block, rows of pickets circle two frontyards, and a split-rail job is going up around the corner.
Judging by the fencing boom underway in my tract, it seems that each new row of pickets, each new concrete wall, has produced more circumspect neighbors and a bit less neighborliness. Folks who get more cautious about treading on their neighbor’s lawn and more polite, if reserved, in their dealings across property lines.
The desire to mark off turf is certainly a rational reaction to this city’s growing congestion and our universal ache for a little privacy and personal space. In poorer neighborhoods, chain link is the fencing of choice if not necessity. In Bel-Air, Hancock Park and in the hillsides and canyons, the rich seclude themselves from the riffraff behind curlicued iron gates or massive Romanesque walls, illuminated and landscaped.
The fencing impulse can be contagious, according to Bob Steinbach, chief residential inspector for the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety. “Sometimes when one person on the street builds a fence, someone else says, ‘Hey, that’s a good idea,’ and they build one too.” (The Los Angeles Municipal Code requires property owners to obtain a permit and inspections to build any masonry or concrete wall higher than 3 1/2 feet. Yet everywhere, those walls work the same lamentable effect: We tend to retreat behind the boundaries we’ve erected. When neighbors do meet, speaking across squared-off turf or on the neutral sidewalk, those encounters often lack an easy informality. I’ve seen it happen in my quiet corner of West Los Angeles.
No sudden burst of fear or paranoia would seem to explain the fencing boomlet around me. Burglaries and car break-ins are far from uncommon, but residents in other parts of town have much more to worry about in terms of crime. And since most of the new fences near me are low and easily hopped, they’re not much of a deterrent to a would-be home burglar.
Nor is fencing a new phenomenon in my neighborhood. A few streets away sits a house with frothy pink trim that for the 20 years I’ve lived nearby has been encircled by black wrought-iron spikes. A sign screwed to the fence warns that the owner packs a gun.
My tract was built half a century ago without fences--900 homes, six floor plans. Only driveways interrupted the dichondra that crept from one street corner to the next. The first fences sprouted after folks had settled into their three-bedroom, two-bath homes. A few owners fancied a Don-the-Beachcomber look with lava rocks and heavy nautical chain. Others gave a nod to the tract’s ranch-style floor plans with roughhewn, low rails straight off the Cartwright ranch. But most houses stayed fence-free, and old-timers recall those first decades, the 1950s and 1960s, as a time when kids trooped from yard to yard all summer and parents migrated next door for a cup of sugar or a bridge game.
As a child in this neighborhood, I remember just hanging out on the front lawn, summers and weekends, certain that eventually something would happen, that someone would appear. Those same lawns are much emptier and lonelier now--and as often as not, fenced off. My kids call friends before they get together, and then they disappear behind closed doors. When my daughter walked our dog recently, the only one who acknowledged her was a glowering man, bent on making sure she picked up after the pooch.
We can round up the usual suspects--Mom’s not home as much anymore, the kids schlep to lessons most afternoons--but I wonder if all those darned fences aren’t part of the reason suburban streets are so quiet.
Look down my block now from a certain angle, and it resembles a steeplechase course: Hop one fence and another one looms in front of you. I’m tempted to blame Martha Stewart and her compulsion to decorate everything, including frontyards. One of the picket fences on my block encircles an idyllic garden where flowers cascade from window boxes and spill over the fence, and an old-fashioned wooden swing sits on a well-tended lawn. The place is so gorgeous it looks like a page from Martha Stewart Living. Frontyard as still life. Except I’m more certain that I can recognize the owners’ car than their faces, so seldom do I see them on their porch or in their spectacular yard.
Maybe it’s pretensions to estate life that tempt us to build fancy brick walls adorned with brass carriage lights more suitable to Southern mansions than stucco tract houses. Every home a castle, every homeowner a king, no matter how tacky the royal taste.
“If you have disposable money, you want to dress up your house a bit,” observed Juan Salido, manager of Kavin Fence Co. in Culver City.
Or maybe it’s just that as this city gets denser, people understandably want a tangible symbol of what’s theirs, a boundary really, even if building that boundary can sometimes touch off bitter disputes between neighbors.
Salido notes, “We’ve had to tear down 70 feet of fencing over a half-inch discrepancy” in the property line.
Robert Frost advised, “Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out.”
The fences sure do keep things orderly. The weeds stay in one yard, the leaves in another. I know where your land begins and mine leaves off. But does anyone wonder, as we sit inside our perimeters, why it’s gotten kind of lonely in there?
