Signs of social collapse surround bus, but for sheer graphic economy, it’s hard to beat the now standard Rittenhouse stoop decoration: a classical urn of dainty flowers, chained with a vengeance to the railing.

     A poet would die for an image like this, striking and pathetic and loaded with enough symbols to choke a sophomore.  Beauty, art and nature hold forth in the urn of flowers; ugliness and barbarism counter in the chain.

     And together they create a nicely modern absurdity: the opposite qualities cancel each other out so that the net addition to beauty is zero.  The chain, by its look and its implication, does not so much secure the chain as negate it.

     Alas these poor pots’ owners can be excused for not seeing the futility of their solution.  Weary of spending their life’s earnings on their stoops urnings, they forgot their original intention to beautify when a more pressing ambition crept over them, namely, to see their flowers the following sunup.  And so is the first benign gesture undone in the doing.  It is the lullaby bellowed, the joke explained, civitas turned savage.

     This is how the city gets to you.  Subtly.  It is the lofty idea made mean, the generous one guarded, the beautiful one made ugly.

     Citizens!  Unchain your flowers!  And if you cannot bear to have them stolen, move them to the back garden.  Better to walk past a naked stoop and be able to imagine that beauty is possible than to see the chain and know that it is not, and that barbarians, in more guises than we like to admit, are on our doorstep.