About two days ago, I saw a new fence going up – or going across, I should say. It is one of those modern fences that I liked when they first started appearing a few years ago: broad-plank, horizontal. It’s a widely acknowledged discussion, these days: the walling of Los Angeles. My friend Greg Goldin wrote about it nicely in the Los Angeles Times Magazine a couple of years ago. Feelings are mixed. I was pleased as punch a year-and-a-half ago when we had a fence built in front of my own front yard.

I had been ambivalent about a fence, feeling that it was wrong to cut ourselves off from neighbors. But I had a toddler and a wandering dog, and it was a safety issue. And our backyard, while enclosed, presents severe hazards of its own. We mitigated the enclosure issue by leaving about two inches between vertical slats and by making the fence only five feet high. The result was we could see the street and other houses and we began using the yard in earnest. The fence brought us closer to neighbors and the life of our street. It has been nothing but good. Our house is visible from the street, but the fence provides something of psychic scrim, not to mention a safety barrier. But our neighbors can see us, and we can talk to people over and through the fence.

Still, who am I to say that people who haven’t allowed two inches between slats aren’t equally happy with the way their space is defined? Inside the now-secret spaces that used to be postage stamp yards – often enclosed in chain-link, which is not always so charming – there could be happiness and use! But when I saw the new fence going up the other day my heart sank. It may be an issue of style, but the horizontal-plank fences look more like a wall than almost any kind of fence (excluding, of course, an actual wall, and some of those have gone up in the neighborhood, too). The broad-plank fences look nifty at first, but they don’t age well. After a while, water-stained, forgotten-looking they look like a sour-pucker scowling down at the street. The three-foot chain-link fences of the neighborhood are looking better and better to a re-trained eye.

Then yesterday I saw yet another set of posts sunk into the ground. I could almost feel our collective psychic space shrinking in the air around me. I never subscribed to the dream of suburban yards without fences, where children run from lawn to lawn without impediment and without danger -- because that myth is so well-tainted by now. And, as far as Echo Park goes, the dream of an unbroken lawn among houses was never remotely close to reality. What we had was a lot of house-to-house social life. But it seems that as the neighbrohood gets richer, it's also getting smaller.

Not all walls are offensive, of course. All through Latin America the houses exist behind walls, and we don’t question the integrity of the narrow wall-defined streets. But those cities also have public squares, which make all the difference, at least to a visitor.

I have never minded walls made of plants (also known as hedges): they add something to the neighborhood by giving us something green. I guess my fondest wish is that people who put up a fence consider the life of the neighborhood on the other side.