You wake up on a Saturday in July and the street is closed. Somebody dragged a sawhorse across each end of the block and now the street belongs to the people who live on it. That is a block party. No permit. No committee. No budget. Somebody ran an extension cord out a third floor window and plugged in a speaker and now the whole block has a soundtrack. The fire hydrant is open and the kids are running through it and the water is hitting the asphalt and making steam and the steam is rising and the music is playing and the street smells like charcoal and summer.

The grills are on the sidewalk. Every family brought something. The Puerto Rican family on the second floor brought rice and beans. The Italian family across the street brought sausage and peppers. The woman from Trinidad brought curry. The old man from the first floor brought a folding chair and opinions. He does not cook. He judges. He sits on that chair like a king on a throne and he tells you your chicken is dry and your coleslaw needs vinegar and he has not paid for a meal since nineteen seventy-four.

The music at a block party tells you who lives on the block. You hear salsa from one speaker and Motown from another and somebody down the block is playing reggae and none of it clashes because the block party is the only concert where every genre gets along. A kid with a boombox sits on a stoop playing hip hop and nobody tells him to turn it down because today the street is a dance floor and the dance floor has no dress code and no cover charge and no bouncer.

I played a block party on East Fifth Street in nineteen seventy. No stage. I stood on the back of a flatbed truck with a guitar and a microphone plugged into somebody's apartment. The extension cord ran through the window and across the fire escape and down to the truck. If the man in 3B flushed his toilet the amp buzzed. That is a sound system. That is production value. I played for two hours and they paid me in beer and a plate of ribs and I walked home at midnight with sauce on my shirt and a song in my head.

They do not close the streets anymore. The city wants a permit. The permit wants insurance. The insurance wants money. The money does not exist because a block party is not a business. A block party is a neighborhood deciding to be a neighborhood for one day. You cannot permit that. You cannot insure that. You cannot regulate a man grilling chicken on a sidewalk while his kids run through a fire hydrant. But the city tried. And the blocks got quiet. And the streets stayed open to traffic. And the neighborhood lost the one day a year when the street belonged to the people who lived on it.