This is Barack Obama walking through the Honolulu neigh- bourhood in which he grew up.
What struck me, in addition to the poignant quality of the picture, is the character of the lane itself. (I’m a big fan of lanes, or alleys as they’re sometimes called. Here’s a whole issue of Price Tags on the subject.)
In some ways, this could be (minus the palm trees) a typical Vancouver lane – the power poles, the garbage cans, the parking spaces. It’s narrowly paved, no curbs, a few stones to mark the edge. The apartments at the rear look on, making it more of a mews, and as a consequence it seems rather well maintained, accommodating comfortably both single homes and highrises.
Perhaps it was once a single-family neighbourhood that was densified, like the West End, sometime from the 1950s to the 70s, about the time when Obama was living there with his grandmother. Which means, I suppose, that the likely leader of America grew up in a neighborhood of density and mixed use.
Didn’t seem to hurt.
