I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, like author Michael Chabon. His article Maps and Legends came to my attention from this thread on Metafilter. After reading the article itself and the comments of a MeFi poster named breezeway, I wrote the following:

I’m another product of Columbia, although substantially later than Chabon and breezeway - I lived there from 1985-1998. And yet the experience was not substantially different, because Columbia still likes to think it is a utopia even though it hasn’t been for years. It’s got crime, social strata, suburban sprawl…but it’s always pushing the idea of being such a fabulous New Town like it was in the 1960s.

Like breezeway, I graduated from Wilde Lake HS - the only class (1997) to attend all three schools. The crunchy granola old building from 1971, the temporary building in Clarksville River Hill, and the new shiny one on the site of the old one. Honestly, the old Wilde Lake was a lot like the old Columbia - there were no walls for many years, and even when I got there in 1993 there were still no ceilings - you could hear everything everywhere. The library media center was literally in the center of the building. It was a place designed for interaction, learning from each other, and communication. The new Wilde Lake is more for compartementalized learning styles - you are in this class, learning this at this time. You can’t see other classes, you can only learn from what’s going on in your room. It’s like you’ve got blinders on…like the rest of the world.

This sounds overly philosophical, even to me - but I think it’s true. It’s obvious to someone who’s seen both buildings - they really speak to what’s going on in the rest of the city.