Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

 

Peter Lovenheim’s project of sleeping over at his neighbors’ homes had an inauspicious start.

“The night I left for my first sleepover,” he said, “my then-14 year old daughter Valerie saw me about to go out the front door and said ‘Dad, you’re crazy!’”

But Lovenheim persisted, eventually spending the night at the homes of the families on his street in suburban Rochester, N.Y. The result was his book In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time, which was awarded Zócalo Public Square’s first …