Back in the 1960's our neighborhood was like that. We actually knew very little aobut each other's private livesin any intimate sense, but the families knew who had what skills.
There was a period when the cities began burning out the neighborhoods. Only the race riots got historically recorded. All the other burnings such as the burning of North Village in Webster, Massachusetts alongside the burning of Bondsville and followed by the burning of Holyoke and many others across the country were not recorded, but we were at war for survival.
I grew up in North Village. It was such a purely Catholic village that my mother did not have to set an alarm clock for holy days since she knew she would hear the neighbors leaving for the Irish church whose services were earlier than our French, and the others in the neighborhood were either in our parish, the Irish, or the Polish.
New Year's morning, about 3 am, she thought she heard the neighbors and began to wake up to get us all up for Mass, but discovered that it was not the banging of a door, but the explosions of buildings that she heard.
We woke and the neighbors gathered as we watched the mills near our houses go up in flames, and the men organized a watch on our roofs with garden-hoses while the women gathered with the rosary in our livingroom. There were three or four rosary circles in the various tenements while the men got up on the roofs, and the fire department came through to tell us they would not try to save our houses and we must leave.
I remember my father's back blocking the door as he argued with them. I could not believe my 11-yr-old ears and I understood what the adults were saying when they turned and said "we won't leave" and the prayer ring was set up while mother and brother and I gathered some things in preparation in case we do leave. I remember picking up a statuette of John-John saluting and packing it while my little brother cried because he could not fit his racing-car set into the bag mother gave him.
The fire raged out of control for a week. Barricades were put up around our neighborhood, and we thought they were just to keep sight-seers out but when my father drove my little brother and me to Mass, leaving my mother and big brother to hold the house, and all the men were emphatic we were going to Mass although I don't remember that they met to speak, only to show each family's face...
When we were going home the police sauntered out to the middle of the street of the barricade and stopped my father and said we would not be allowed in. He showed his license and said "my wife and son are there, let me get them" and the police said "no" and my father was a gentle quiet man but I saw a look of angry disbelief on his face as he repeated and the cop laughed and repeated, and then my dad leaned around and told my brother and me to get down behind the seat and he backed up, then he sped forward through the barricade that was on North Main Street, and I poked my head over the windowsill enough to see the surprised cop jump sidways, and thought we would grab my mother and brother and keep driving, but when we got home dad said we are staying.
There were lots of meetings that week and us kids sent upstairs whenever new adults showed up, and dad and neighbors he never socialized with were standing in the yards talking like brothers, and one time after a lot of yelling with some men and my dad yelling about no violence, he then came up stairs with a shot-gun and shoved it to the back of the closet and turned to my brother and me and said "don't touch that, don't speak of it, we will not keep it long and we will not have to use it!"
My little brother and I were enrolled in new riflery classes set up in the basement of the boys' club and I got a marksmanship certificate. I don't remember when the shot-gun disappeared from the closet, but we never did use it and one day it was not there, and we never spoke of the question of why it was suddenly ok to use the rifles provided by the boys' club, because we were a pacifist family, things just seemed to be happening on their own momentum.
We survived. OUr parish made it through a bare handful more years before the betrayal of the parishes by our own church did what the flames and threats failed to do to destroy our community, but I know that you are right Matthew, today people are not prepared, yet how prepared were we, back then? We were taken completely by surprise when our own gov't began to burn down our towns.
Too many of us have held our silence about this history of surviving an all-out war against us, letting the media spin its mythology while we always believed that somehow our old world would re-appear, as waking from a bad dream.