Making big cities feel small-town

Fremont, California is the fourth largest city in the Bay Area

I’ve lived in this city for more than half my life, and yet it still doesn’t feel quite like home. Don’t get me wrong: Fremont is a great place—it has been the hometown of my adult years where I have raised all five of my children—but it’s a big place with lots of people.

Fremont, incorporated in 1956, spreads over almost 77 square miles and is home to almost 220,000 people, giving it the dubious distinction of being the largest suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

In striking contrast, South Pasadena, my hometown in Southern California, is almost 125 years old. It covers less than three and a half square miles and, since I left home 30 years ago, has only grown by a few thousand residents. My hometown houses only about one-tenth the number of people who live in Fremont. And, although it sits just 10 miles from the heart of Los Angeles, this sleepy little bedroom community feels worlds apart from the mega-metropolis.

In Fremont, loyalties are divided among five high schools, whereas in South Pasadena, a town small enough to have just one high school, everyone roots for the same football team and most know the name of the quarterback. Consequently, small hometowns like mine have the good fortune of growing two layers of loyalty—one for the school and one for the town itself—and they are often expressed as one and the same.

Besides a strong tradition of school pride, South Pasadena to this day boasts only one library, one fire station, one police station, one post office, and one theater. When you live in a town that size, paths cross often. Folks shake the mayor’s hand at a Boy Scout Eagle Court of Honor, and they share their opinions with school board members at pancake-breakfast fundraisers.

Instead of chain stores, the streets of my hometown were lined with stores carrying the names of real people, like Tom’s Market and Balk’s Hardware. 

Street names were important, too. Tell someone from South Pasadena that you lived on Milan Avenue or Huntington Drive or Buena Vista Street, and they could probably tell you which of the elementary schools you lived by or may have attended, and they might even be able to name a few of your neighbors. In fact, just a few weeks ago I met a colleague in Colorado who does most of her work in Hawaii and Nevada—all places far flung from Southern California. So, imagine my surprise when told me she was from South Pasadena. “Where,” I asked? “Monterey Hills” (neighborhood) “just off Via Del Rey” (street). These pinpoint markers helped me quickly make sense of where she came from and launched us immediately into a discussion of landmarks and people common to both of us. Though we both now live many miles away from South Pasadena, for a few moments our small town bonded us.

So, what’s a small-town girl like me to do living in a big city? Although Fremont will never shrink to the size of South Pasadena, I have found a few things that can help big cities feel more small-town: make friends with your postman, talk to the neighbors, and go to church.

When our youngest son Mark was five years old, he made a habit of waiting for the mail truck to arrive, but it wasn’t the mail he was after; it was the rubber bands. You see, he had made friends with Mario, our mailman whom he counted on to give him a big wad of rubber bands every day. That simple connection was the beginning of our family’s friendship with a fine man. Over several months through brief conversations we learned Mario was an immigrant from an Eastern European country, now seeking the American dream, who lit up whenever he talked about his own three children. He thanked us politely when we gave him drinks of cold water in the summertime and smiled shyly when he discovered little boxes of chocolate and other small presents we left in the mailbox during the holidays. One day, we were saddened to hear about his wife leaving him, and soon after he told us he was being switched to a different mail route. Unfortunately, we lost track of Mario; however, just this week Mark told me he had been “thinking about Mario” who once made his little world a more interesting, fun place.

Striking up neighborhood conversations makes a big city feel a little friendlier, too. My husband Ken has a knack for this. Even when he is busy rushing from work to home and out again to meetings, he takes time to greet our neighbors. He makes jokes or inquires about a child, thereby building bridges with those who live nearby. He looks for ways to serve our neighbors, too. For instance, years ago on a stormy night, the power went out in our court. Fortunately, beforehand Ken had spent a few minutes welcoming into the neighborhood a young couple who had recently moved here from Oregon. So, in the emergency, he was able to supply them with batteries, flashlights, our phone number, and a little reassurance. We’ve been good friends ever since.

Formalizing these neighborhood connections is not a bad idea either. About ten years ago, our family decided to start participating in National Night Out, a program originally designed to fight crime by helping neighbors get to know each other. The first year we intended the event to be a simple potluck barbecue in the court, but our neighbors got excited and decided to make it a real party, complete with a mariachi band. Kids climbed in and out of the visiting fire truck and police cars while parents collected names and phone numbers to make a neighborhood map. What I remember most about that first year, though, was having one neighbor thank me for organizing the event. He followed up by quoting someone as saying, “We can send people to the moon, but we have a hard time walking across the street to talk to a neighbor.”

Finally, one of the most effective ways to make any big city feel smaller is by going to church. In our church, the size of congregations tends to hover right around 500 people. Try anything smaller, and staffing the church with a lay ministry becomes tough. Try anything bigger, and you run the risk of marginalizing some of the members because they won't all be needed. Interestingly, the company Gore, famous for its durable outer gear and one of only a few to consistently appear on the list of "100 Best Companies to Work For," seems to also understand 500 is an organizational tipping point. It has a long-held policy of splitting teams when they become bigger than 500 people. Although we’ve moved within the city boundaries a few times, during our 24 years in Fremont, we’ve managed to keep many familiar faces within our circle of church friends. Naturally, some have come and gone, but working and worshiping alongside some of the same people week after week and year after year has given our family a sense of stability and consistency, much like what I felt in my hometown congregation.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first printing of To Kill a Mockingbird, one of my all-time favorite books. 

Atticus, the novel’s moral hero and father to Jem and Scout, does his best to explain racial prejudice and other complicated issues to his children. However, it is largely the Maycomb County stereotypes, such as Miss Stephanie (the gossip), Miss Maudie Atkinson (the wise but sharp-tongued widow), Boo Radley (the misunderstood recluse), and even Bob Ewell (the white-trash drunk) who actually help Jem and Scout begin to make sense of an adult world interlaced with both injustice and undeniable goodness. Similarly, such characters in small church congregations can help children navigate their way to adulthood. Fault-ridden though they may be, these kinds of people who know us well and worship with us weekly can offer advice, correction, and reminders of family reputations, and at times their mistakes can be even more powerfully instructive than Sunday School lessons.

“It’s like Mayberry,” my friend said of South Pasadena, still claiming his residency there. Indeed, the city’s website concurs, bragging that “Few cities in California are better recognized for the quality of its small-town atmosphere and rich legacy of intact late 19th and early 20th century neighborhoods and residences.” Even though I realize Fremont will never be South Pasadena, I’ll keep working to make it feel like home.