What I Learned From Urban Walls About Writing in Tight Spaces
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What do brick tenements and balcony plants have to do with writing? More than you think. On decorating the margins and making space for your voice. Welcome to What I Learned From… “She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” — J.D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew What I Learned From …You can walk through any major city and know exactly which buildings used to house the working class. They stretch like repetition. Imposing, narrow-windowed, jammed-in-place. The architectural version of a blank stare. Whether it’s mason blocks in London, brick tenements in Boston, or the pastel-worn facades of Lisbon, you’ll find the same blueprint at work. Dense rows, copy-paste layouts, lives packed in like file folders. This wasn’t some design trend. It was a response to pressure. With economic strain and industrial growth, leading to mass migration, people needed shelter—fast, cheap, and in bulk. So cities were built, upward and inward. No wasted space. Row after row of uniform housing with a front door and maybe a flicker of light through a back window. And yet…people found ways to make them beautiful. Lace curtains. A potted plant balanced on a windowsill. A clothesline strung like bunting across a courtyard. In cities around the world, even when they didn’t have two coins to rub together, people still managed to leave their mark. A sign that someone lives here. Sometimes the builders got involved too. Especially when housing competition ramped up and landlords needed to stand out. That’s when ornamentation started to bloom. Cast iron balconies. Carved lintels. Brickwork and stone detailing elaborate enough to catch the eye. It wasn’t only about showing off, it was about showing care. This building serves the same purpose as the one next door, but it’s special. Historian Zachary Violette calls these “decorated tenements.” His research on New York and Boston reveals how immigrant builders, often living in the very buildings they constructed, brought beauty into the margins. Not to erase hardship, but to assert pride. Flourishes weren’t a waste, they were a message: You might not have much, but you deserve to live somewhere with character. (And not just “quirky pipes and a mystery draft” character.) This didn’t only happen in the U.S. It’s not a New York City story. In Cairo, homes once built with wind-catching towers and carved wooden screens, mashrabiya, created cooling breezes and dappled light. They were also stunning. Spirals and latticework in repeating patterns, like a woodcut prayer. You’d recognize them in Baghdad too, where they’re called shanashil. In both places, even modest homes wore intricate faces. In Zamość, Poland, old townhouses crowd the edges of the market square, their facades painted in russet and sage and gold. Pillars and scrollwork rise between the windows. The buildings were meant for working people, but they still got arches and cornices and color theory. In Buenos Aires, conventillos evolved from grand colonial homes divided into many rooms. Each family had a room or two, but the shared courtyard was the center. That’s where tango first echoed, where kids played fútbol barefoot, and where grandmothers grilled meat over an open fire. Walls were adorned with leftover pigments, often in bright, bold clashes. Nothing matched, but everything mattered. In Hong Kong, tong lau buildings from the early 20th century stacked homes over street-level shops. These weren’t elegant towers, they were dense and adaptable. But look closer and you’ll see balconies ringed with metal filigree, pastel tile mosaics under the eaves, and sea green shutters. The design blended Southern Chinese and European elements, adjusted for humid city heat. Even in Mumbai, where the chawls feel like a blueprint for overcrowding, each doorway tells its own story. Gods painted above lintels. Wreaths or garlands hung for festivals. Plastic stools arranged just outside the threshold, waiting for conversation. These weren’t luxury homes, but they had style. More importantly, they had humanity. Now compare that with the West’s obsession with utility and mass production. The U.S. and Britain chased efficiency like it was a virtue. Standardized layouts. Uniform design. Everything engineered to fit as many bodies into as few square feet as possible. Decoration became indulgence and character got sidelined by cost-per-unit, but people still found ways. Even when the system boxed them in, they hung art on the walls. Painted the doorframe. Named their building. Left offerings on the balcony. The impulse to make a place yours runs deeper than profit ever will. I saw it for myself in Aberdeen, Scotland when I lived there. Walking down the winding maze of streets from my rosy mount to the seaside alleys, the buildings look like slabs you were meant to pass quickly. Stone stacked on stone, unbroken. Cold and grey and sharp. The Granite City. But walk slower. Look closer. There’s a cat stretched across a windowsill. A rusted iron balcony, curled like a spine against the back wall. Pipes clustered around the chimney like a tangle of thoughts. Honestly, the only thing missing was a rogue sock and a takeaway container. (Ok, I sometimes found those too!) You start to see the lives inside the walls. You start to feel them looking back. Writers live in stacked housing, too. Publishing houses. Digital spaces. Platforms and timelines and timelines-with-algorithms. It’s like a grade-school hallway of gate-kept doors, but hey, there’s probably some bulletin boards you can post on somewhere? We don’t always get to design the structure, but that doesn’t mean we’re stuck with blank walls. There’s always room for a weird rug or an aggressively sentimental set of knick-knacks. Even in the tightest spaces, we can leave a sign that says: This one’s mine. Because maybe the essay looks like a dozen others. Maybe the layout is familiar. Maybe you’re constrained by what’s affordable or allowed or expected. But the words you put in the window? The line you hang in the courtyard? The small, intentional flourish that makes your reader pause? That’s all you. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Thought Threads …For when you want to tug at the edges of your own thinking.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. i wish i was like that. always so happy. one of the most frustrating things abot being creative is that the more u care about something the harder it is to do Creativity needs constraints, my dear! When the constraints get tighter, you will find more opportunities to be creative! — Jomny Sun, Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too: A Book Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Coign [koyn] (n.) — From 13th-century Middle English coign or coygne (“corner” or “wedge”), rooted in Old French coing and Latin cuneus (“wedge”). Originally architectural, it described a projecting angle of a building or the wedge-shaped stone that locks an arch in place. Later adopted by poets for its metaphorical possibilities, a coign of vantage is a place you see from, often in stillness. Tucked away, but perfectly placed. Sorta Synonyms: cornerstone, pediment, lookout (especially if you're brooding or holding a notebook) Fun Fact: This is also the root of the word coin, because of the wedge-like stamp used in minting. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Instructables - A treasure trove of DIY guides for everything from home hacks to weird art projects. Scroll through a few categories and let someone else’s obsessive creativity spark your own upgrades. The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. You win some, you lose some? ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS - Know someone quietly building something beautiful in the corners of the internet? Would you mind forwarding this issue to them? Every writer deserves a little decorative stonework in their inbox. 🏛️ |