Although this report is from the South, I am sure that parts of NJ and
elsewhere may see evidence of the same . . . Looks like Pier I Imports is
going to get more business -- an ironic twist in modern life: in order to
preserve a longstanding cultural tradition, low income residents of Wilson, NC
may have to head out to the big box retail malls to get some inexpensive porch
furniture . . .

Mary Krugman

_____________________________
A Town's Classes Clash Over Porch Sitting

By RICK BRAGG


  WILSON, N.C. -- All Deborah Thompson really has is time, and a place to
spend it. She lives in a tiny house in a part of town where the paint peels
and the corner store still sells coal by the sack, and the funeral home is the
nicest structure around. She does not have a social calendar, cable
television, or a car.

  What she has is a front porch that catches the weak winter sunlight just
right, and an old chrome and vinyl couch where she can relax and watch life
spin by, or at least as much of life as she can see from the corner of Carroll
and Vance streets.

  "I watch the cars go by, and I say 'Hey,' " Ms. Thompson said, taking a rest
from raking the dormant grass in her front yard. "I sit there to keep from
sitting in the house. It gets lonely in the house."

  She finds it hard to believe that, soon, that could be against the law here
in Wilson, an image-conscious tobacco and factory town of 40,000 people
located less than an hour east of Raleigh. It is not the porch that may be
declared illegal, only her choice of furniture.

  In what many people here see as a clash of the classes and an assault on the
amiable rhythms of Southern life, the city of Wilson is expected sometime
early this year to ban old sofas, recliners and other indoor furniture from
porches and yards. Southern historians see that proposed ban as an attack on a
regional tradition that predates Naugahyde.

  For generations, some Southerners, unwilling to throw away a perfectly
usable piece of furniture just because of a few rips or stains, have made room
for new couches and chairs by dragging the old ones outside. Like some old dog
that can no longer hunt, the yellow plaid loveseats and sagging Barcaloungers
live out a few, last years on the porch.

  Often, the people who carry on this tradition cannot afford wicker or other
fancy outdoor "patio" furniture, furniture favored by the gentility.

  "This must be the ultimate yuppiefication of the South, to ban porch
furniture," said Dan Carter, professor of Southern history at Emory University
in Atlanta.

  While such a move may make a neighborhood more cosmetically presentable,
removing such traditions can perhaps, he believes, help destroy one, by
hampering the way people in a community interact.

  As in most such confrontations between the classes, the poor people are
expected to lose.

  "This is not junk," the 33-year-old Ms. Thompson said, pointing to her sofa.
But the idea that the sight of it would offend anyone does not seem to anger
her nearly so much as it puzzles her.

  It is the same on Viola Street, where Elizabeth Best sat reading a book in
her overstuffed chair, and on Oak Street, where Carlos Andrades stood near
some old furniture watching his nephews play in the yard, and on Woodard
Avenue, where William Riggins shared his porch with a crippled recliner.
People here say they will comply with the ordinance if it passes -- no one
wants to have to pay a fine over a 20-year-old La-Z-Boy -- but they see it as
one more instance of the rich and powerful telling the powerless how to live
their lives.

  "They don't want to drive by it," 45-year-old Moses Scriven said as he tried
to get a reluctant chainsaw to crank over on Vance Street. "We don't have the
power that the people with money have. It's aggravating, but there's nothing
to be done about it."

  "They've been trying to make Wilson a model community," Scriven said, even
if that means "stopping us from enjoying what little bit we have. They can
afford to buy something for their porches."

  City officials in Wilson, including Planning Director Jim Bradshaw, have
stressed that the porch furniture ordinance is just part of a series of new
housing laws designed to improve the overall quality of life in the town, and
deny that it is a battle between the classes.

  "This is not one side telling the other what to do," said Bradshaw. "At
least I don't see it that way."

  The proposed ban on indoor furniture is "just another tool to bring about
improvements to the neighborhood," he said, "whether it's an abandoned vehicle
or indoor furniture all over the yard. They all attribute to the blight of the
neighborhood."

  Both blacks and whites support the ordinance, he said, including some people
who live in the neighborhoods -- mostly black people and Hispanic migrant
workers -- most affected by the proposed ban.

  But poorer residents here, the ones with the indoor furniture on their
porches, say that the ordinance would not affect upper middle class people,
that wealthier blacks support the move but that poorer ones just want to be
left alone.

  It all began last spring, when the Wilson Appearance Commission recommended
that the indoor furniture, prone to get water-logged and moldy when rain blows
in under the eaves, amounted to a public nuisance.

  It was also suggested that the furniture represented a health hazard, giving
rats and fleas a place to hide and breed.

  "There could be some family health problems from the weatherization of the
couch," said Bradshaw, who is admittedly sensitive to the attention his town's
ban on the furniture has drawn.

  Others here echo his rationalization of why the indoor furniture must go,
and these are the people who make up the committees that will consider the ban
before it becomes law.

  "People who say I want to keep my couch are looking at it from a very narrow
perspective," said Sarah Rasino, a member of the Wilson Appearance Committee
and a cosmetologist at Redken Laboratory. "Those become weather-beaten, and I
don't think there's anything pretty about that."

  But to other people here, the ban flies in the face of common sense. In
others, it pricks their pride.

  "Why are they messing with poor black folks around here," said Andrades over
on Oak Street. "Why don't they deal with the real issues."

  That is what Carter, the Emory University history professor, is wondering.

  "There's nothing more inviting than an old front seat from a 1957 Chevrolet
sitting on a front porch," he said, and while he laughed as he said it, he was
not kidding about the symbolism that such things hold down here.

  "I think people have totally gone berserk," he said. "Think about all the
things we need to be concerned about: 50 million people with no health
insurance and 30 percent of minority children in this country living in
poverty, and what are we concerned about? We're concerned about banning porch
furniture."

  Wilson is conscious of its image, but in that it is little different from
most small Southern towns -- or towns in general.

  Coming into town from the east, from the flat, muddy tobacco fields dotted
with tumble-down drying sheds, a signs welcomes travelers to "Wilson, a
community committed to educational excellence, economic growth and cultural
fulfillment." A sign just down the road announces the Carl B. Renfro Bridge,
even though all it crosses is railroad tracks. Most small towns do not name
their overpasses.

  On Raleigh Road, the main drag coming into town, the road is lined here and
there with beautiful, towering homes, with red brick and massive white
columns.

  But just a few blocks away, Mexican migrant workers live in houses that are
little better than shacks, and elderly black women heat houses with coal-
burning stoves.

  It is in neighborhoods like these where the people use indoor furniture in
their outdoor lives.

  "My grandma has me drag her big chair out every weekend," so she can visit
with passersby, said Scriven, who drives a fork-lift in a tobacco warehouse.
On Sunday night, he drags it back in again. His grandma does not visit much
during the week.

  It is much easier to disappear inside, to music or videos, if there is not a
soft place to sit outside, people here said. It is more important to the poor,
because, as entertainment goes, it is about as cheap as it gets. Talking does
not cost anything.

  City officials in Wilson have made it clear that they are not banning
porches, only indoor furniture. But for people here, and elsewhere in the
South, the furniture is part of that culture.

  "I hate to make it sound like banning porch sofas is going to be an act of
community destruction, but I think it's totally consistent with it," Carter
said. "That is, that people who would propose such a thing have no sense that
this is something worth keeping or valuable at all. I'm making this sound like
social science. It's not. It's just friends and neighbors."

  What it all boils down to, in Wilson, is that there are two distinct Souths,
two distinct ideas of what is tradition, what is not.

  To Ms. Rasino, there is "nothing Southern" about a ratty-looking sofa,
water-logged and leaking cotton ticking.

  To Ms. Thompson, "it's how I get to know people in my neighborhood."

  John Shelton Reed, a professor of sociology at the University of North
Carolina, says it is the sitting, not what one is sitting on, that makes it a
Southern thing.

  "I've got a sister in northern Vermont, and if the weather allowed it, I'm
sure her neighbors would" sit on their porches, visiting, he said. "But
there's not much point in it, in Vermont."

  But Carter sees the indoor furniture as a part of the South's past that,
however tasteless it might seem to some, is still superior to the rigid
gentrification that seems to be its future. Houses in new, planned communities
are being built with porches, to promote that sense of community, but custom,
zoning and the simple fact that those new houses will be occupied by more
affluent people will probably mean that only wicker and other tasteful outdoor
furniture will be used.

  Meanwhile, Southern towns and cities continue to be eaten up with garish
neon strip developments.

  "I find nothing more depressing than to ride down one of the strip streets
with thousands of neon signs," he said. "I think that is ugliness on a mass
scale. I have much less objection to individual, idiosyncratic
'tastelessness.' "

  Ms. Thompson knows her vinyl couch is not beautiful, but nor, as she said,
is it junk. It is only a place to sit on the warm days and wave at cars.

  <NYT_LINKS_OFFSITE version="1.0" type="main"> Other Places of Interest on
The Web

Wilson, North Carolina , Demographics and Statistics.
<A HREF="http://www.ibest.net/WelcomeToWilson/wilinfo1.html">
http://www.ibest.net/WelcomeToWilson/wilinfo1.html</A>



Friday, January 2, 1998
Copyright 1998 The New York Times