1st Blog

The idea of boarders in the excerpt from Jane Jacobs, can be applied to the Loyola Campus. Jacobs describes how boarders can be seen as keeping people who socially are not expected to mix, from mixing. This is similar to the idea of walls in Robert Frost’s poem, Mending Wall. Frost speaks of how the best neighbors are behind fences and this can be applied to Loyola and its neighbors in the surrounding neighborhoods.

In chapter 14 of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs talks about boarders separating people of different social and economical status. She said, “It is curious, too, how frequently the immediate neighborhoods surrounding big-city university campuses…are extraordinarily blight-prone, and how frequently, even when they are not smitten with physical decay, they are apt to be stagnant-a condition that precedes decay” (Pg 258). This clearly can be compared to Loyola. Loyola is in Baltimore, a big city, and in the surrounding neighborhoods there is some poverty. The boarder around Loyola can be seen as the neighborhoods moving out from Loyola continually worsen.

The poem by Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”, it talks about walls and how people like these walls. A man in the poem says, “ ‘Good fences make good neighbors’” (Line 27). The reason people say this is because that people like fences as neighbors so that they do not have to know what is happening on the other side of the fence, and if they do not know what is going on, then they do not have to care or worry what is happening over there. This is again, like Loyola. Many of the students here do not see the poverty that is happening in the surrounding neighborhoods, so they do not care.

What these two pieces of work have shown me, is that it would be beneficial, while my time here at Loyola to learn about the surrounding community. Once I learn about the community, I can try to do something to get out there and try to do something to help change or just help the community even if it is small. If everyone in the Loyola community were to get out and help a little, perhaps the surrounding neighborhoods would be a better place.