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The human unit of time might be useful in conceiving cultural policy for many of the local establishments that continue to resonate for the cultures that created them even after they have moved out of particular urban neighborhoods.

Photo: Martha Cooper

Steve Zeitlin is executive director of City Lore and codirector of the Place Matters project, 72 East First Street, New York, NY 10003; steve@citylore.org.

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In her memoir, Blackberry Winter, Margaret Mead devotes a chapter to the joys of becoming a grandparent. Gazing at a child as one’s grandchild, she writes, makes it suddenly possible to "visualize that same child as a grandparent, and with the eyes of another generation . . . see other children, just as light-footed and vivid, as eager to learn and know and embrace the world, who must be taken into account—now." Grandparenthood inspired her to consider how we need "a human unit in which to think about time." This span cannot be as short as a human lifetime, and yet it cannot rely on the scientist’s notion of time stretching back millions of years to the Big Bang, or even the historian’s notion of time spanning centuries and dating back to Colonial America or the Middle ages. A friend of Mead’s defined this human unit of time as "the space between a grandfather’s memory of his own childhood and a grandson’s knowledge of those memories as he heard about them." This human time span, based on experiential reckoning rather than scientific exactitude, stretches from ourselves as children to our grandparents’ memories of their own childhoods, encompassing five generations. Elders bracket the human unit of time, with their memories on one side and their legacies on the other. As folklorists, we often present the work of elders and advocate intergenerational exchange, encouraging young people to interview their grandparents, to stretch the measuring tape of time beyond their own lives—not an easy task for Americans, who continually embrace the new. A boy once told Mead that "long ago was before his grandfather’s grandfather’s time." It’s occurred to me that we need the human unit of time not only to extend the way we think about families and time, but in some cases, to limit it; to distinguish what happened in living memory from what happened "long ago," when an individual’s human unit of time fades into the historical record. Folklorists echo Mead’s notion when we speak of a living cultural heritage because we are often referring to traditions and histories passed on in living memory. We privilege stories passed down by word of mouth over historical episodes learned from books. A human unit for thinking about time might become a useful tool as folklorists, preservationists, and other cultural activists take on roles in cultural policy. For instance, the Human Unit of Time might be applied in arenas such as copyright law. Corporate interests led by Disney and the Gershwins have continually argued for extensions of the copyright law beyond the current 75 years. This means that descendants continue to receive royalties from people who are often not connected to the creative artists in living memory, preventing art from returning to the public domain. The human unit of time may even serve as a meaningful measure as folklorists become involved in wrestling with issues of intellectual property. Similarly, historic preservation has favored places of architectural rather than cultural distinction because bricks and mortar can be preserved for hundreds of years. As history unfolds across centuries, certain community-based sites need to be landmarked with permanent designations that mark the contribution of a particular ethnic or labor group, or the dramatic contribution of an individual to our collective memory. The process of landmarking needs to be broadened to fulfill its mandate to preserve sites important to our "historic, cultural, and aesthetic heritage." In addition, we consider employing the human unit of time to craft designations that foster a sense of living memory in the city. Perhaps these designations might, for simplicity’s sake, demarcate sites for a hundred years (even though Mead’s human measure is often a bit longer). In New York Newsday, Jimmy Breslin poked fun at the name of Haggerty Park on 201st Street and Jamaica Avenue in Hollis, Queens. "There hasn’t been a kid with the name and face of a Haggerty in that park in a quarter of a century," Breslin wrote. A human unit of ime encompasses much more than twenty-five years, however. The human unit of time might be useful in conceiving cultural policy for many of the local establishments that continue to resonate for the cultures that created them even after they have moved out particular urban neighborhoods. On the Lower East Side, for instance, establishments like Yonah Schimmel’s Knishery, Katz’s delicatessen, and Russ ’N Daughters still mean something to New Yorkers, even though Jews are no longer a majority in the neighborhoods. Little Italy is no longer an Italian neighborhood, but Italians flock to its restaurants and shrinking strip of stores on weekends. These places flourish because Jews and Italians continue to patronize them, in some cases bringing their grandchildren to hear stories of the neighborhood from grandparents. A few generations hence, the need for protection may no longer be pressing, and cultural policy could allow for a new generation to remake the neighborhood and its establishments after its own image. There is no clock that measures the human unit of time, except, of course, our beating hearts. Listening to that fleeting tick, we can sense the importance of the five-generation span, of an intergenerational unit of time. Places are containers of memory, and attention to sustaining the places that harbor the stories is one way to encourage intergenerational exchange. Attention to the human unit of time can motivate us to think beyond our own brief lifetimes and take our grandchildren’s world into account—right now.

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