CHART I
Schematic Representation of the Division of a Community into Neighborhoods by the Intersection of Two Business Streets.
But if the intersection of two business streets determines the trade center, these same streets divide it into neighborhoods. In Chart I on this page is offered a schematic representation of a Chicago local community, Woodlawn, with its economic center at the intersection of the two main business streets of Sixty-Third Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. At this intersection land values are five thousand dollars a front foot. Woodlawn falls into four neighborhoods, A, B, C, and D, divided from each other by these same intersecting business streets. It is interesting that each of these neighborhoods has its own public school. Even more significant is the fact that an attempt to unite two struggling churches of the same denomination in two of these neighborhoods into one strong church failed because neither would surrender its location.
It seems almost axiomatic to state that community and neighborhood work must take into account the operation of these silent but continuous ecological forces and work with them rather than against them. Yet how often are social centers located on the edge, rather than at the center, of a neighborhood. In the location of a neighborhood center the consequences which flow from the play of ecological forces must be heeded, because they condition the development of its work and the radius of its influence.
Cultural forces.—Ecological or economic forces are naturally basic to the play of cultural forces. Culture, as the social heritage of the group, implies both a locality to which it is indigenous and a constant, rather than a changing, social situation. Chicago, like other large cities, has its cultural communities, each of which has, if not a local area, at least a local center. Hobohemia, Bohemia, Philistia, the Ghetto, and the Gold Coast are cultural communities.
Movement in the person, as from one social location to another, or any sudden change as caused by an invention, carries with it the possibility or the probability of cultural decadence. The cultural controls over conduct disintegrate; impulses and wishes take random and wild expression. The result is immorality and delinquency; in short, personal and social disorganization. An illustration of cultural decadence as a result of movement is the excessively high rate of juvenile delinquency among the children of immigrant parents. To what extent have neighborhood workers gauged the effect of the daily newspaper, the motion picture, the automobile, and the radio, in releasing the child, the youth, and the adult from the confines of the neighborhood and of bringing them into contact with the city-wide, nation-wide, and world-wide life of our time?
These changes taking place in community life may be observed in a dramatic form in commercialized recreation. The day of the neighborhood public dance hall and the neighborhood motion picture show has passed, or at least is passing. Young people are deserting the neighborhood recreation centers and are thronging to centers outside the local community, to the high-class, magnificent dance gardens and palaces, and to the so-called “wonder” theaters of the “bright light” areas.
A realignment of the leisure-time movements of urban young people is taking place, which every agency engaged in neighborhood work must take into account. Is the neighborhood as a factor in the lives of youth soon to become a situation of the past? Can settlements and social centers expect to hold back the tide of the forces of city life?
A map of the residences of dance hall patrons which shows both the disappearance of the small public dance hall from the neighborhood and the concentration of large dance halls in “bright light” areas is all the more significant because it portrays the phenomenon of promiscuity. By promiscuity is meant primary and intimate behavior upon the basis of secondary contacts. In the village type of neighborhood, where everyone knows everyone else, the social relationships of the young people were safeguarded by the primary controls of group opinion. But in the public dance hall, where young people are drawn from all parts of the city, this old primary control breaks down. Is not this the basic reason why social workers find the dance hall so recurring a factor in personal disorganization and delinquency? As yet, however, we have no satisfactory study of the dance hall as a social world of youth. Two new social types—the “sheik” and the “flapper”—have been created by the dance hall and the motion picture, but they are regarded as subjects for jest rather than for serious study.
