The front door in America is one of the landscape’s most intimate and personal of borders. It’s the place where the public sphere encounters private space. And that occasionally has dis…
NEW YORK — The American front door is a place where the welcome mat offers friendly greetings, where affable neighbors knock or ring, where boxes brimming with possibility are delivered. It is where home meets a world full of potentially good things.
In a land where private property is venerated and “get off my lawn” has become a mantra of jokey crankiness, the American front door is the landscape’s most intimate and personal of borders, the place where the public sphere encounters private space — occasionally with disastrous results. “There is so much division in American society, so much polarization, so much animosity and so much fear,” says Bill Yousman, an associate professor of media studies at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. “The front door does in some ways embody all of that — as that last place that separates your internal domestic life with the life of the public.”The United States, more than many countries, has made private property a priority — a fetish, some would say.
“This is a space where we have to kind of choose whether we’re literally going to throw open the door or bar the door,” says Nicole Rudolph, an associate professor at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, who teaches a class called Domestic Politics: The Public Life of the Private Sphere. Or dip into Nextdoor, the hyperlocal social network in which neighborhoods’ residents exchange information. It is also a clearinghouse for people noticing what they consider suspicious activity around their front doors — some of which might not have been considered menacing a generation or two ago. A recent sampling: “Yesterday afternoon, someone pounded on my front door.” “I just had two people knocking on my door handing out pamphlets.
Stand-your-ground laws and the “castle doctrine,” which says residents don’t have to retreat when threatened in their homes, are based on the notion that “certain people have the right to occupy space while others don’t,” Murib says.
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