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SITE OF THE WEEK

It's a z cozy little neighborhood where all the brick houses look alike. It began as the nation's first low-income housing project. Now things have changed in Atlantic Heights and new neighbors are using the Web to get neighborly again.

VISIT the ATLANTIC HEIGHTS web site

The computer and the Internet continually take the rap for their insidious role in dissolving the social glue that holds humanity together. We have become, according to the doomsayers, a nation of Dilberts living isolated lives of quiet desperation, each in our private cubicle, linked only by fiber optic cable and flickering images on a screen. We've forgotten how to interact IRL, that is, in real life, face-to-face with other corporeal members of the species. The neighborhood is dead and technology killed it.

OK, it's partially true. Someone directed me recently to a singles web site where lonely men and women chat online using NetMeeting, each person visible to the other in the glare of their personal webcams. It was not a pretty sight. There were hundreds of them, each broadcasting from a home computer in various stages of undress, typing frantically away like rats in a cage co-designed by BF Skinner and George Orwell.

But the Internet can also foster a sense of community in the real world. Take my neighborhood, for instance. I live in Atlantic Heights, a cluster of not quite identical brick houses along the Piscataqua River halfway between lovely downtown Portsmouth and the increasingly unlovely shopping mall strip upriver. In 1918 during World War l, The Heights was built to provide emergency housing for shipyard workers so the workers could build more ships. It took 10 days to design and a year to build this instant neighborhood of 150 buildings to accommodate 278 families, complete with store, school, dormitories, park and a cafeteria. All the streets were named for Portsmouth-built ships. The whole project cost a million dollars.

Having built only 10 ships, the Atlantic Corporation disappeared quickly after the war and the homes were sold to families or to landlords who created a low-rent neighborhood. The store closed. The school was converted to housing for the elderly. When the massive I-95 bridge was built two decades ago, the overhead highway cut through Atlantic Heights like new mown hay, removing the old factory buildings, the dorms and a few private homes.

Old timers, some of whom have lived their full lives in the Heights, say things got dicey here for a few years, crime rose, many houses fell into disrepair, and cars (no one had assumed shipyard workers would own their own vehicles in 1918) filled the streets and yards. But the neighborhood is making a comeback. People who visit say it is simply charming with the feel of an English working class suburb. There's an improved baseball field and there are tennis courts beneath the singing bridge that looms above. The evolving neighborhood group has championed a couple of federal improvement grants. Kearsage, the main street was completely repaved last year and we got granite curbs and a sidewalk. Two little parks have been redesigned and landscaped. It’s a gentrifying process, to be sure, but it’s a grassroots effort, activated by members of the neighborhood.  

And my neighborhood, I discovered recently, even has a web site, AtlanticHeights.org. It's a crisp, attractive site by my neighbor Rob Sylvan up the street. His wife Paloma is active in the neighborhood group and he volunteered to take over from an earlier webmaster, rebuilding the site in Dreamweaver. The neighborhood group shoulders the $3/month hosting fee at DigitalSpace.com. It's not really designed for outsiders, but you can have a look.

Sylvan, who bought a house in the Heights four years ago, says the isolated nature of the neighborhood dangling at the end of a single access road, makes it almost like an island.

"It's unique, stuck out here between the river, the bridge, the railroad tracks and the power station. It's historic too. The way the houses are built so much the same creates a common shared living experience."

It's true. The similarity of the homes and their postage-stamp yards has made the annual garden tour a growing success. People want to see what their neighbors have done with nearly identical real estate. Pot luck parties, sponsored by the neighborhood group, provide a means to check out nearby homes and steal renovation ideas. All this is reported on the web site.

"I've seen it happen," Sylvan says. "After the first house tour, we went through one of the homes on Kearsage. Someone had pulled out a bedroom ceiling and made a loft in the attic. Now I know of three other houses that have done the same thing."

Although he keeps up with the local news, like this week's community-wide yard sale, Sylvan sees the web site as performing a largely archival role. He includes photos of past events, the group bylaws, updates, local links, contact information about movers and shakers. It's not scintillating reading for outsiders. One recent photo shows three elderly residents painting a garbage can. I pass that garbage can every day and never knew who painted it. CNN it ain't, but there's something very cool about seeing your own street online.

Good fences make good neighbors, Robert Frost told us, but he never knew about web sites. Atlantic Heights is only one of 30 Portsmouth neighborhoods with its own community group. Many have web sites that ebb and flow in effectiveness with the efforts of their webmasters.

Now I'm not a very social guy by nature. I lived in a nice little Dover neighborhood for ten years and never spoke a word to the elderly man across the street. He used to walk around his yard all the time with no shirt working on a junky car. I bet he's on NetMeeting right now, trying to convince some lonely woman in Alaska to be his bride.

I'm not saying that this Web site, in and of itself, is uniting the residents of Atlantic Heights. We're not all standing, hand in hand, singing like the Whos in Whoville. What's going on in Atlantic Heights is part of a much larger movement sparked by some very energetic people.

The web site is only one of a grab bag of communication tools used by the Atlantic Heights Neighborhood Group. They also publish a newsletter that is posted on most refrigerators. And there is a neighborhood list server on Yahoo. So far only about 60 people subscribe, according to Sylvan, but the number is rising. Essentially a list serve is a giant e-mail conversation. Anyone registered can post a message which goes to everyone else on the list.

When one Atlantic Heights resident spotted a fox in the neighborhood, others on the list serve confirmed the siting, and we kept our cat safely indoors for days.

"The big hoo-ha lately has been someone peeling around Kearsage Street in their car," Sylvan says of the lasted List Serve gossip. "Other people saw the car, somebody got the license plate and description, and reported it to the police." Those on the Heights list serve watched the drama unfold online.

A fast car in a neighborhood full of kids, some of whom play basketball on the street, is cause for alarm. While list serve messages often read '' Don't forget to pick up free mulch now available at Rock Park," the speeding car incident turned the Internet into an instant crime watch alert.

There's a danger here of course. If the Atlantic Heights Neighborhood Group takes to wearing arm bands and leather logo jackets, we could be in trouble. We don’t want the neighborhoods to go to war like they did back in the good old days. And then there’s the issue of too much neighborliness. My cat, if the truth be told, got busted just last week by the people over the fence. Seems she repeatedly mistook the sandbox of the little kid next door for her litter box. An innocent mistake, sure. We worked it out privately. But that's not the kind of news you want spread all over the Internet. Am I right? I mean, a cat could get a reputation in a small town like this -- and what would the neighbor's think?