Walking the Boulevard

The Boulevard and Dos Palmas are not just roads to get somewhere: they are the daily promenade of a neighborhood that greets itself while walking.

Whoever wants to truly know Levittown should not drive it: they should walk it. Along the Boulevard, early in the morning, parade those who get their exercise in before the sun presses down; along Dos Palmas avenue, in the afternoon, the whole neighborhood descends to sort out its life: the errand, the chore, the chance encounter that ends in conversation.

Walking changes your relationship with the place. By car, the street is a procedure. On foot, the street is a story: the house finally painted, the new business that opened on the corner, the tree that bloomed earlier this year. Whoever walks their neighborhood notices everything, and what is noticed gets cared for.

It is also a matter of health, and not only of the body. Walking tidies the head. Many neighbors solve while walking what cannot be solved sitting down: the worry, the idea, the decision. The neighborhood, without knowing it, acts as a silent therapist.

Levittown’s avenues were designed wide and tree-lined, and they still keep that promise. Walking them at different hours is reading the neighborhood in chapters: the morning of exercise and coffees, the midday of errands, the afternoon when the carports open and the kids come home. Each hour has its people and its music, and all of them are the same neighborhood.

Walking is also a form of loving vigilance. A sidewalk that is used is a safe sidewalk; the broken streetlight is noticed when someone passes on foot; the park stays alive when walkers’ routes cross it. Without meaning to, the one who walks is caring.

And there is something more: walking makes us equal. On the sidewalk there are no ranks or titles; there are neighbors at the same speed, under the same sun. From those walks come greetings that later become favors, and favors that later become friendships.

Some make the Boulevard their gym and others make Dos Palmas their therapy; both are right. And there is a third group, perhaps the most important: those who walk accompanying — the father who already walks slowly, the grandchild who walks discovering. The shared walk is among the longest and most useful conversations a family has.

So the next time the day allows it, leave the car and walk your street. Levittown was made for human scale: low houses, short distances, palm shade. Use the advantage. A neighborhood is known — and loved — on foot.