is it real?

Architecture confounded and amazed the post-modernists. So much of  perception runs into  a kind of roadblock when you walk into a building. You are  aware of enclosure, you are aware of place, you are aware of events that happened there--fictional or otherwise. I wrote once how I enjoyed walking through parts of Boston that Robert Parker's Spenser walked through. I can say to myself: "I work just around the corner from his office." In the end it is all real, despite the stories we invent to describe places and impose meaning on them. Cities are even more terrifying in their reality. It is so much simpler to speed through the lesser ones, sometimes stopping--at the Rose restaurant, for instance--but not really experiencing. Even the oldest, most social, and most adventurous native never knows the entire city.

A person who I consider to have good powers of observation remarked acidly that Springfield, Mass. is a repository and not actually a city. He was worried that he was ignorant, or racist, or not well connected enough, but he could not deny the things he observed: The towers that rise from desolate city blocks, grim parking garages, and the constant roar of the highway that protects the river from human visitation. He also took note of what was lacking: Parks, restaurants, diverse markets. In short, all the charm that the New Urbanists point to when they talk of "knitting together the urban fabric" in those polite, corn-syrup tones of voice.

And what do I care of Springfield? John Updike pointed out that cities and towns keep on existing long after they have completely outlived their usefulness. They do not have a life like humans do, which can be charted in convenient arcs and assigned specific moments of triumph and tragedy. And yet, every city has a personality that is the sum total of everything in it and more.