Issue 23 · Thresholds

Ordinary Sacred Places

The lot at 321 Steele Street is twenty-six feet wide and about five-hundredths of an acre. An 1890s brick building occupies the street end. Behind it is a small courtyard, then the alley. The property is zoned commercial. It contains our home, our studio and gallery, a place where people have gathered for music and events, and the usual equipment that keeps an old building operating.

One of those pieces of equipment is a black iron gas pipe on the courtyard wall. It is rusting and needs a protective covering.

This is a useful fact to remember before calling the courtyard sacred.

I am wary of that word. Sacred can mean consecrated by a religious community, protected by law or custom, or connected to events whose importance is not mine to judge. It can also become an easy adjective for any place with plants, old brick, and flattering light. In that weaker use, the word does little except improve the photograph.

The courtyard at Yonder is not a church, a burial ground, or a wilderness. It is private property with a tax parcel number. People need to carry things through it. Snow has to go somewhere. The gas line needs work. Any account of the place that removes these facts also removes the reason it matters.

Still, there is a practical meaning of sacred that I want to keep. A place becomes sacred when we decide that some things may not be done to it, even when they would be legal, efficient, or profitable. The decision creates a limit. It also creates work.

By that definition, sacredness is not a quality hidden in the ground. It is a relationship expressed through restraint. A side yard might be kept open because neighborhood children use it as a passage. A porch might remain a place where visitors can sit instead of becoming enclosed storage. A parking lot might be turned over to a market, a meal, or a performance for one evening, temporarily interrupting its assigned purpose. None of these places is automatically sacred. The important question is what use has been withheld from them, and for whom.

The National Park Service uses the term cultural landscape for historically significant places shaped by the interaction of people and the physical environment. Its inventory can include land use, paths, vegetation, buildings, and small features such as fences and curbstones. Cultural landscapes may be urban and smaller than an acre.

Our courtyard is not a designated cultural landscape, and I am not trying to smuggle it into the National Register through an essay. What interests me is the method. Instead of asking whether a place looks important, the method asks how it has been organized, used, changed, and maintained. It treats a path or a drainage ditch as evidence. It notices that the humble parts are often what allow the whole arrangement to continue.

This is close to how I understand the building. We own it, but ownership is only one of the relationships operating there. It is also where we live, where we make art, and where we have invited people in. Each use limits the others. A gallery arranged only for sales would be a different place. A home sealed against public life would be a different place. An event venue that ignored the daily work of the studio would quickly make itself unwelcome.

The meaningful place is not underneath those compromises, waiting to be revealed once the practical concerns are cleared away. It is made by the compromises.

That makes maintenance part of the argument. The Park Service describes maintenance as systematic work that slows wear and deterioration. This is less romantic than preservation is often made to sound, but it is more accurate. To keep a place available, somebody has to handle water, weeds, masonry, trash, access, insurance, and the pipe on the wall. Neglect can produce a convincing ruin for a while. It cannot host people indefinitely.

There is a related question at the front of the building. We have planned a cedar planter on casters for the sidewalk edge, planted with corn, beans, and squash, with the food available to people passing by. The stated purpose is simple: gift, not display. The lumber has been bought. The planter has not yet been built.

Even this generous object has to negotiate where it stands. Wisconsin transportation guidance notes that urban sidewalks and terraces may be part of the public right-of-way. Raised beds, tables, chairs, signs, and other objects can become encroachments when they interfere with safety, access, or maintenance. That general guidance does not settle the exact boundary in front of our building, but it corrects a common fantasy about placemaking: good intentions do not grant ownership of the sidewalk.

The public edge belongs to other bodies with other needs. A person using a wheelchair, a delivery worker with a cart, a parent with a stroller, a city crew, and somebody approaching from the opposite direction all have claims on the same strip. If the planter becomes an obstacle, calling it a community gift will not make it one.

This is where the ordinary sacred place differs from the picturesque hideaway. It must survive other people’s legitimate uses. It cannot depend on everyone sharing the owner’s taste. Its rules have to include people who did not help make it and may never understand the story attached to it.

There is also a danger in treating community use as a kind of moral polish. A privately owned courtyard does not become public because it hosts events. Hospitality can be withdrawn. Owners change. Insurance companies object. An invitation to an event does not create an enduring right to the space. These distinctions matter because the word sacred has often been used to hide power as easily as to restrain it.

So I would not make a sign declaring the courtyard sacred. I would rather give the word a job.

It can remind us that maximum yield is not the only measure of a property. The narrow lot could be asked to produce storage, sales, parking, or rentable square footage. Some of those uses may be necessary. But if every foot is assigned to its highest financial return, there will be nowhere left for the uses that are difficult to count: a small performance, a shared meal, a garden, an unplanned conversation, room for a child to make up a game.

Protecting those uses does not require pretending the place is outside commerce or law. It requires deciding what portion will not be optimized, then maintaining that decision when space, money, and time get tight.

That is the test I trust. A summer evening can make almost any courtyard feel enchanted. The harder evidence comes later, when somebody has to clear the path, repair the wall, leave room for another person, or refuse an improvement that would make the property more valuable by making the place less useful. At 321 Steele, calling the courtyard sacred would obligate us to keep a portion available for uses that do not maximize its return, and to do the unremarkable work that keeps that availability real. If the word cannot hold us to that, it is only decoration.

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