STOLEN HARMONIES

(From “Safe Passage on City Streets” by Dorothy T. Samuel)

On one of the "dangerous" streets of Baltimore, a weird, wacky, wonderful fairy tale took form recently. A woman, sighing for the piano she had never had, touched the heart of her son—one of those angry young men we so often fear. He rushed out of the flat, broke into a building, stole a piano, and began to push it down the street, a gift for the mother who had never had very much.

A piano cannot be camouflaged or hidden in a jacket pocket. Someone saw, reported, and the police soon drove up. The young thief was carried off to jail, but no one had time to send for the piano. In majestic incongruity, it sat alone on the city street.

Baltimore streets are almost empty at night, only an occasional person flitting home from work, a couple dashing from car to doorstep. Eventually one of these rare pedestrians came down the deserted street, saw the piano, stopped, and fingered a chord. Somehow the chord held him. The chord expanded into a melody; one melody expanded into another.

People began to come out from behind their locked doors, to rub shoulders around the old piano, to join voices in well-known songs. Eleven o'clock, midnight, one o'clock, and the impromptu party went on. Young and old, black and white, people who normally rushed by each other with suspicion or coldness, formed a happy circle of friendliness and sharing and song.

There were no holdups on the street that night. No drug pushing, no burglary, no rape, no murder. Instead, there was a party, a night that residents described as one of the happiest of their lives.

The modern tragedy is that all this simple, human joy had to spring from a theft. A theft, what is more, that probably would not have occurred had the neighborhood been less barren of music and song, sharing and fun—the pleasures of human fellowship,

There are lessons on the streets as surely as there are sermons in stone. Were we to pour forth from our homes, to walk our streets, to visit with neighbors over curbstones and steps and grocery packages, there would be no hiding places for muggers and pushers and rapists and con men. There would be friendly faces and responsive personalities when we were frightened; friendly faces and responsive personalities for growing children to relate to; friendly faces and responsive personalities to laugh away loneliness and suspicion.

We may dream of a simpler life; we may remember the neighborly streets of small towns where members of my generation grew up safely forty years ago. But we cannot go back. We cannot wipe out the giant cities. We cannot remove the thirst for knowledge which draws people to the massive libraries and museums and theaters only cities provide. We cannot undo the technology that masses thousands of workers in close-packed houses and apartments. But no technological imperative requires that we become, ourselves, interchangeable cogs, programmed things, isolated products of the city. Every street can become a neighborhood or a hive according to the voluntary actions of the people who reside along it.

Fantasize with me a moment. What would happen to the most dangerous street in your city if human beings sang hymns or ballads or labor songs or even so-called drinking songs under the streetlights? Together. A piano is just a bit too way-out, but the guitars and recorders of the younger generation could accompany tunes all ages know. The harmonicas and even the Jews' harps could come out of old folks' pockets, the mandolins from closets where they now gather dust.

There will be safety on the streets when there are people on the streets. Busy people, happy people, socializing people. People who are not fearful. Anyone who has roamed Union Square in San Francisco at night, or Fisherman's Wharf, or Chinatown, knows that city streets can be festivals, that strangers can greet each other, that laughter can ring in the air. And security increase.