What an Ice Cream Truck Taught Me About Street Buzz

July’s dense humidity saturated the streets outside while inside the ramen restaurant we slurped until the steam scorched our faces. Perilously overheated we fled out onto First Avenue in search of respite.  That’s when we saw the ice cream truck. Street buzz promised an evening of potential.

Street buzz is a favorite term of urbanists looking to build attractive spaces. Unfortunately, descriptions of the phenomenon are frequently reduced to cliché. Street buzz saves the day; street buzz cures all. The concept easy to understand but hard to identify.

Street buzz describes the atmosphere of a place through the people, businesses and activities that fill it. Diverse shops, people walking their dogs and weather may contribute to the mood. But the atmosphere remains in the absence of specific activities, so long as they remain possible. Street buzz indicates the potential for an event to occur in a given place.

We didn’t immediately realize the night’s potential. But ice cream vans are always possible during a New York summer. We ordered without glancing at the sun-bleached menu: a vanilla-chocolate twist for me, a chocolate cone for him. Unfortunately, day campers had gobbled up the chocolate. So the driver dipped our vanilla cones in a chocolate shell and we feigned contentment. Street buzz revealed one potential but removed another.

Ice cream poured down our hands as we ate and we made a game of protecting our clothes. Pedestrians ignored us; we were buzz. Once our cones melted fully, we skipped to a Yelp-approved bar. Ice cream and bourbon: it was a Monday night street buzz cocktail.

These moments are the product of a good atmosphere, but mood can also be neutral or negative. A sleepy suburb has a street buzz, so does a slum, so does a queue at Disneyland. How the elements of these spaces unify create their unique atmosphere.

We all want to live in areas with good street buzz, but our notions of ‘good’ vary. For me ‘good’ is hopping from ramen to soft serve to bourbon. Someone else might prefer walking from the garden to the café to the bookstore or enjoying live musicians and farmers markets and graffiti. Street buzz impels us to live in different cities and neighborhoods. It is dynamic. We shape and reshape it through our continued interaction with a city. Street buzz is the potential of the now.

Alienation and Integration: A Comparative Photo Study of City and Country Life

A photo posted by Daniel Ernst | @germanroamers (@daniel_ernst) on Oct 21, 2015 at 9:26am PDT

Orange, grey, green: the colours strike you. Moving from vivid ones on the mountain’s sun-facing slope to majestic varieties at the water’s edge, the trees unify the image. They reflect the sun’s energy, nearly overpowering the lone human figure in the synthetic yellow windbreaker.

But this figure is far from lonely. They’re off-centre, but they fit in. Their kayak isn’t garish; its grey-white hue resembles the sky, marking the human as a natural addition. Raising the right paddle, the figure progresses toward an unseen point in the distance. Although the viewer doesn’t know the figure’s destination, the ripples in the water illustrate progression. Far from being alienated by majestic nature, the character finds their home in the landscape.

The reflections in the crystal clear water reinforce the human’s integration. The sky, the edge of the mountain — they absorb and surround the kayaker on several planes. Thus, the awe the viewer initially feels looking at the image is replaced by a calming unity with the world. Humanity isn’t isolated from nature’s glory, movement and participation makes them actors.

A photo posted by New York Times Travel (@nytimestravel) on Oct 28, 2015 at 10:34am PDT

Is the grid or the human the protagonist? Although centred, the figure’s shadow stretches to the left, suggesting that earthly constructions — the sun, the structure — push them toward the past. Their head down, their situation dominates them. Their black and white suit matches the monochrome grid. They are integrated into the world around them.

Yet this grid isn’t monochrome; it’s dynamic with colour. On the lower right hand corner the black lines are illuminated to a purple-y pink by the shadows and sun. An indeterminate geometric shadow falls on top. The shadow could be a building, the window manifesting the vivid colours. Someone is watching the scene.

Man’s progresses through the city alone, but in the shadow of others. He is connected through his phone, through the natural and artificial world that acts upon him. He is connected through concrete structures, like the grid, and intangible information, like the shadows. The contemporary city joins man in his solo progression. 

The Hidden Nostalgia of Dining in Palermo

Forget your wooden chairs, dark interiors and red check tablecloths. In Palermo dining out means plastic chairs, harsh fluorescent lights and paper tablecloths. Whether at an upscale ristorante or a quiet trattoria, eating in Palermo presents travellers with a new system of meaning that forces them to revise their expectations for eating all’italiana. 

Economics and guidebooks offer compelling reasons for the proliferation of cheap, family-run restaurants in Palermo: many palermitani don’t have the money to dine out regularly, those who do are more likely to splash out on a meal they couldn’t prepare at home. Tourists, on the other hand, want to taste the authentic, to discover what the so-called real people eat. This experience must be marked as different to be perceived as bona fide. So tourists head to the restaurants that resemble a grandmother’s kitchen where entrepreneurial cooks open tins of sardines and defrost shrimp to provide a budget-friendly meal. Economics and guidebooks ignore the dialogue between foreigner’s expectation of the menu and the alarmingly new vocabulary they encounter.

Dining at Trattoria Zia Pina — hidden in central Palermo’s tangle of crumbling streets — suggests that the divide between the tourist’s diet and the Italian’s isn’t as stark as visitors might anticipate. The meal begins informally; you seat yourself. Soon Zia Pina — or a teenaged waiter — hands you a printed menu encased in a plastic file-protector. The font is off-brand comic sans. There are no prices, just the dishes your guidebook promised epitomised the Sicilian diet: pasta con le sarde, pasta al nero di seppia, pasta con pomodori, pasta ai frutti di mare. The second courses are simple: pesce di spada, pesce di mercato, fritto misto di mare, gamberoni grigliati and a few meat dishes. There’s an antipasto selection hidden inside and house wines available in various sizes and colours. That’s it.

Finding a similar menu in America would mean leaving the realm of Italian dining. It might appear in a small town diner or a long-time local-favorite. The menu might promise nostalgic standbys like meatloaf and mashed potatoes or regional favorites like hoosier pie. There probably wouldn’t be wine but maybe beer and a selection of soft drinks. Americans would go there for nostalgia or tradition rather than quality.

Zia Pina presents the Italian version of this nostalgia. The pasta is cooked al dente, the fish reasonably fresh and obviously tinned. The wine sips easily. The free bread has a pillow-y interior. There is nothing wrong with a meal at Zia Pina. It’s familiar in its exoticism. Thus, for an American tourist it wouldn’t elide with their perception of Italian food. The symbols are absent. There are no red tablecloths and no hand-painted ceramic plates. Instead, the symbols should be read as indicators of nostalgia. Within its exotic veil, Zia Pina presents an immensely familiar experience.

Zia Pina, and Palermo’s proliferation of budget and tourist friendly plastic table restaurants offer a new sign system for tourists to integrate into, allowing tourists to understand Italian food not as an exotic other of red checked table cloths, but as a familiar and nostalgic cuisine. The printed menus and no-frills cooking bears a closer resemblance to mom-and-pop restaurants where the food served up evokes another time as opposed to another place. Eating a plate of pasta con le sarde doesn’t transport the diner out of Palermo, but rather roots them there through a new understanding of what the average Palermitano eats. The normal pasta, the tinned fish: these are the tastes of nostalgia. These are the tastes of travel.

Un Cannolo Siciliano from Palermo's Figli Rosciglione

I ate it before lunch because I was there and wouldn’t be tomorrow. When she said ‘vi faccio subito’ — I’ll make them straightaway — I knew this cannolo wouldn’t taste like the concrete-filled versions I grew up with.

For many American tourists, the cannolo — or Americanized singular cannoli — epitomises Italian pastry. But following the American Grand Tour of Rome-Florence-Venice won’t yield any. At least not any good ones. That’s because the cannolo — and all manner of ricotta stuffed pastries — hails from Sicily. While certain foods have banished their provincial affiliations to become symbols of italianità — like pizza, tiramisu and risotto — others have stayed within regional borders. Asking for un cannolo in a mainland pasticceria yields a light, flaky pastry stuffed with cream as opposed to the crisp, chocolate-chip and ricotta filled dessert familiar to Americans. In Italy, the cannolo’s territory is Sicily.

Accustomed to choosing a crostatina over a cannolo, I didn’t think of them until my final day in Palermo when I found myself standing in front of Fratelli Rosciglione on the edge of the city’s gritty Piazza Ballarò market. A small, graffiti covered sign advertises Rosciglione on the rundown residential street. Appearances don’t improve inside. Empty metal tables gleam where you expect to see pastries on display. Only flimsy plastic boxes of cookies suggest you’ve entered a pastry shop. There were none of the Italian-bakery symbols from my youth. There was nothing that prepared me for a cannolo.

Then it arrived. The woman behind the counter brought out my pastry on a cracked plastic tray. She placed it down and asked for the money with such nonchalance that I realized serving a la minute cannoli was to her as normal as eating leaden, pre-packaged pastries was to me.

I waited until I was outside to begin. My teeth pierced the crunchy shell, still light from frying. The sweet, tangy ricotta dissolved like frosting. Occasionally a mini-chocolate chip offered rich relief. Then, just as I hesitated to take my first bite, I reluctantly ate my last. This wasn’t the cannoli I grew up with. It was un cannolo siciliano. It was the best thing I ate in Sicily.