Sidewalk Hatches

Visible Traces of Public Domesticity

2021 summer | chinatown, philadelphia

On a given morning, sidewalk hatches open up the underside of buildings to the street: bodegas, dim sum restaurant kitchens, private homes, nail salons, bakeries, bars, and other brick-and-mortars. Cooks on their smoke break will step out to chat with neighbors; aunties carry trussed up zhongzi down to the basement for storage or up to the shop for sale; delivery workers and shopkeepers unload sacks of bread flour, crates of beer, heavy cans of coconut milk or crushed tomatoes, sliding boxes down makeshift chutes or muscling them down steep staircases. Domesticity spills from the front door, out onto the city sidewalk, and down back into the home.

“Sidewalk Cellar Doors” or “Basement Hatch Doors,” as they’re called by the steel manufacturers who supply them, populate the east coast of the North American continent. In Brooklyn, Manhattan, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, the sidewalk hatch is a portal to the private basement that interrupts the public sidewalk. Participating in what 1961 Jane Jacobs calls “the ballet of the good city sidewalk,” it facilitates diagonal movement through an opening that is perpendicular both to upright bodily orientation and to the path of travel: a disorienting conveyance of both people and goods which “never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”¹

Flung wide or locked shut, the sidewalk hatch is guarded by sentinels in the form of plastic milk crates, orange traffic cones, locked bicycles, cardboard boxes stacked high, hard plastic folding tables perched on rusted metal legs, and other domestic paraphernalia. Walking past, the sharply angled view down into a commercial kitchen shifts to reveal gas burners, produce piled high in steel sinks, cooks running in and out through swinging doors, and the chaos of service labor invisibilized below-grade.

2019, 2020, 2021 | brooklyn, manhattan, new jersey, philadelphia

Contemporaneous to Toronto-born Jane Jacobs writing about New York, UK-born Reyner Banham writes that Los Angeles “leaves no room for accident – even for happy accidents. You plan the day in advance, programme your activities, and forgo those random encounters with friends and strangers that are traditionally one of the rewards of city life.”² In prevailing literary and cinematic narratives of Los Angeles, there is no opportunity for domesticity to spill into the public realm. It is contained within the private sphere first of the home, then of the vehicle. Writing in 2017, Susanna Rosenbaum observes that,

“As individuals drive from home to work and other private places – supermarkets, shopping malls, restaurants – in parts of the city where they feel safe and at ease, they hardly ever come into contact with people from different social classes or ethnic/racial backgrounds. They drive over uncomfortable, “dangerous” areas on raised freeways that are not integrated into neighborhoods and that, in a sense, renders those neighborhoods invisible.”³

But Los Angeles has long been sustained by a pedestrian life of informal economies and domestic labor, undergirded by street vending, mutual aid, resource sharing, and the public life of bus stops and roadside stands, strip malls and gas stations.

As a phrase, “public domesticity” calls to mind most immediately the tents and encampments of unhoused neighbors. Homelessness in a housing crisis is criminalized, even as seventy thousand unhoused residents of Los Angeles sleep on the pavement, in the doorways of buildings, underneath bridges, every day. “Defensive” and “hostile” architectures of public space: sharp metal spiked teeth on curbs and bars cutting across park benches, guard against loitering, sleeping, skateboarding, and demonstrations. The violent design of public space is, by varying degrees, dissuasive, preventative, treacherous, or deadly to inhabitants of the city. 

Domestic workers, including nannies and housekeepers, are often reliant on buses to navigate their dispersed workplace across Los Angeles county. The gas station is crucial to their foot trafficked map of the city, providing a public bathroom and a pay phone. Taco stands inside of gas station mini-marts and styrofoam cups of coffee curbside provide breakfast and respite. Amid salted nuts and crinkly bright purple packages of chips, the subtle significance of interactions with security guards and bus drivers evokes the intimacy of strangers in cahoots.

I remain charmed by acts of public domesticity. These acts are an intimate portrait rendered public, a revelatory display of tactics and endurance, by choice or by necessity, the traces are people’s designs for the city. At my coin-op laundromat, I watch strangers wash their underwear and towels, borrow their detergent, wave to friends hollering from car windows to my bike, and soak in the comfortable proximity of strangers milling around. At coffeeshops, cafes, and bars, I will sometimes pay for the right to linger, often guiltily, another round while another customer hovers for my bar-counter seat, and baristas reliant on tips side-eye my delayed exit.

The contemporary city is a place where our attention is increasingly commandeered, our interactions increasingly commodified, and our movement increasingly choreographed. If predictable patterns are often propelled more by the exchange of money than by the exchange of time, energy, ideas, or care, then it is an act of defiance to insist upon imbuing public space with our own idiosyncratic uses. It’s our responsibility to maintain and care for the traces and remnants that have been asserted by others. I want these textural details of human movement and interactions with people I don’t know to hold more weight than money.

I am grateful for, and accountable to, the standing invitation to occupy the logistical nodes: the sidewalk hatch, the metro platform, the bike path, the taco stand inside the mini-mart, the korean food court in the mall basement, the postal truck route, the dilapidated curb at my local hole-in-the-wall restaurant or corner store, the front porch, the stoop. I want to imbue care into the smallest of casual details; to eat together in public and be rendered vulnerable by the small act; to harness anger about under-resourced public housing and under-funded public schools; to collectivize our attention toward ambient interaction in the street; to celebrate each other in our misuse of the city.

One well-established non-building bustles around the corner from my Lincoln Heights apartment: a taco stand housing multiple mobile grills and an assortment of short, four-footed plastic stools in bright, primary colors. Visible from my metro stop platform, wrinkled, worn thin blue tarps stretch over thin plastic bars, trussed together against a chain link fence wrapped in a green mesh moire. On a given weeknight, the space hosts kids holding their parents' hands, tired people bantering at the end of the workday, waiting in line for mulitas and burritos, foil-wrapped packages sitting heavy on flimsy white paper plates, laden high with peppers, pickles, cut limes, red onion, and all varieties of habanero, avocado, and tomatillo salsas in shallow, thumbnail-sized plastic tubs. The consistent gathering in space becomes place. “On the street and on the bus, you talk to people. Individuals often take the same buses every day, so they become friends and tell each other about their lives, their work, and everything in between.”⁴ Public domesticity is an act of reclamation.

2021 summer | chinatown, manhattan

1. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Netherlands: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1961.

2. Banham, Reyner. 1968. “Encounter With Sunset Boulevard.” Transcript of speech delivered at the School of Architecture at the University of California. Los Angeles. Thursday 15th August, 1968. https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/b74bdc19c00847ef921b82968a948ece

3. Rosenbaum, Susanna. Domestic Economies: Women, Work, and the American Dream in Los Angeles. United Kingdom: Duke University Press, 2017.

4. Rosenbaum, Susanna.