The scene outside of sophomore Boris Khentov's Lower East Side apartment building last week was picture perfect. During one of the first sunny spring afternoons New York has seen this year, a group of Orthodox Jewish girls were engrossed in a game of whiffle ball with a group of African American playmates.

Austin and other city dwellers agree that the biggest bonus to inner-city living is the incredible diversity of people who live next door, sell you your newspaper or, as Khentov delights, are always ready to join your game of whiffle ball.

"It's kind of corny," says Khentov proudly, "but my neighborhood is unique...There is total harmony, from Puerto Ricans to an expanding China town, as well as Orthodox Jews, African Americans."

In Khentov's neighborhood one routinely hears at least 10 different languages, and the casual passer-by will smell an array of ethnic foods including tacos, five varieties of noodles and maybe even a little gefilte fish. For Khentov, even the long return trip to Cambridge could not erase thoughts of such casual beauty, of his racially and ethnically diverse neighborhood.

"Where are you from?"

Responding to one of the first question in the string of interrogations proffered by eager pre-frosh this weekend, students will reply with a variety of inaccurate responses. As Bloomfield Hills, Santa Monica and Newton pass as Detroit, Los Angeles and Boston, next year's Yard community will remain comfortably metropolitan.

Come fall, however, Harvard's claims of geographic diversity will soon evaporate. Those students who call safe city townhouses, a string of similar picket-fenced suburban tracts or the occasional rural town home begin to identify with each other, and the few from inner-city areas struggle to find space for their experiences in the halls of Ivy.

Director of Undergraduate Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis '70-'73 declined to speculate on the number of inner-city students at the College since it is "not a way in which [the Admissions Office has] counted or categorized students." However, Lewis says that Harvard does actively seek inner-city students who have overcome geographic and economic obstacles to academic achievement.

"We look for students who have done well in their environment," Lewis says.

All told, Harvard students from inner-city areas are fewer than may appear from casual conversations about hometown high schools and pre-frosh hang-outs. Yet, undergrads from urban environments have an undeniably different story to tell than those from the burbs.

Often, the reaction students from low-income urban areas find themselves expressing to life in the Yard is strongly shaped by unique neighborhood experiences. And their decisions of what life to pursue after they leave the Yard--from careers in I-banking to social services--may have similarly home-grown influences.

A Whole New World

The kids at Sound View are undisturbed by the steady roar of the six-lane interstate highway across the street. They keep themselves out of trouble with sports--football in the colder weather, baseball when it's warm and basketball, well, basically all of the time.

Of course, certain unique city games are also invented, various forms of tag and follow the leader, played in asphalt parking lots and alleys throughout the neighborhood. As Quincy R. Evans '00, a veteran of such childhood frolicking, recollects, everyone on his block has always understood how to have a good time.

"People always have something funny to say," Evans says. Striding through patches of fresh cut turf in the Yard, it is the smells of the city that Evans recalls--the cars, people, food, even the pollution.