South of South Campus

My daily route to work takes me through the area just south of South Campus--a mixed area, mostly off-campus student housing. (A notable sign, hanging from a second-floor balcony: The Brick House, painted on the hood-flap of a car). The rhythms of the quarter are marked by the amount of trash in the streets. It is, apparently, a local custom to toss empty beer cans from the porch onto the sidewalk, in the belief that the homeless can collect them for cash.

I've never taken much notice of the architecture before: there are houses converted to housing, of course, and a lot of generic mid-70's apartment buildings, complete with mansard roofs. I hadn't noticed a recurrent stylistic whim: the number of two-story buildings, brick below and shingled above, a kind of brownstone/Cape Cod hybrid. There are also a number of somewhat older buildings, with quite nice yellow-brick facades over red-brick, many with decorative neo-gothic touches. Then up onto South Campus, with its massed phalanx of apartment blocks, Corbusian concrete tricked out with red-brick corners, apologetically.