The sidewalk is the oldest public space in the world. It belongs to everybody and it belongs to nobody and that is what makes it dangerous. The sidewalk is where people meet without permission. The sidewalk is where people speak without a permit. The sidewalk is the only stage in the world that does not charge admission and that is why every government in history has tried to control who stands on it.

Jane Jacobs wrote a book in nineteen sixty-one called The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She said the sidewalk is the ballet of the good city sidewalk. She said the sidewalk has a choreography that nobody directs and everybody performs. She said the eyes on the street keep the street safe and the eyes are in the windows and the windows face the sidewalk and the sidewalk is the thing that makes a city a city. Robert Moses wanted to bulldoze her neighborhood in Greenwich Village and put a highway through it and she stood on the sidewalk and said no. She won. The sidewalk won. The highway was never built.

In Birmingham Alabama in nineteen sixty-three the children marched. They were six years old and ten years old and fourteen years old and they marched on the sidewalks of downtown Birmingham because the adults were afraid to lose their jobs. Bull Connor turned fire hoses on children on sidewalks. He turned police dogs on children on sidewalks. The photographs went around the world and the world saw what America did to children who walked on sidewalks. The Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-four started on a sidewalk in Birmingham with a child who was not old enough to vote.

Tiananmen Square started on a sidewalk. Before there was a man in front of a tank there were students on sidewalks talking about democracy. The Berlin Wall fell because people walked on sidewalks toward the checkpoints and the guards did not shoot. The Stonewall uprising started on a sidewalk outside a bar in Greenwich Village in nineteen sixty-nine when people who had been told they could not exist in public stood on a sidewalk and existed in public.

I played on sidewalks in Ann Arbor and in the Village and in Amsterdam and in New Orleans and on every sidewalk the lesson was the same. The sidewalk does not ask who you are. The sidewalk does not check your identification. The sidewalk is the last truly public space in a world that is privatizing everything. The shopping mall replaced the sidewalk and the shopping mall has security guards and the security guards decide who belongs and that is the difference between a sidewalk and a mall. The sidewalk belongs to the people. The mall belongs to the landlord. Every revolution in history started with people standing on a sidewalk and refusing to move.