Becoming What They Were By Becoming Something New
Historic towns present a challenge and an opportunity for urbanists
Every time I visit Flemington, things are a little different. It’s still the same town and the same surroundings and certainly the same county. If anything, I’m struck by how much things look the same when I get off one of the main roads—how little I’d be able to mark or measure the passage of time over years, even decades. But the pace of change, in the old town and the commercial areas in the surrounding township, is definitely more than it has been for the 30 years I’ve known this place. And for the most part, I feel hopeful and excited.
As I’ve been mulling in Saturday’s and Monday’s pieces—not for the first times, if you’ve been following me awhile—I’m thinking about what it means to support these kinds of things, not in the abstract, but in a place you grew up or still live in.
There’s a really insidious idea I’ve come across, which kind of inverts the (sometimes unfair) charge that older homeowners bought houses cheap a long time ago and then pulled up the ladder behind them. It’s something like the idea that favoring new development or new housing in the place you grew up is a kind of ingratitude or disloyalty. Something like, “You got to enjoy this childhood and this life, and now you want to take it away from the next generation.” As if by not passively receiving the community of our childhood as adults, we’re spitting on the past and on our parents who worked hard to raise us in a place like this.
I take this kind of charge seriously, because it isn’t just bland, typical anti-development sentiment. At its best, it’s actually a kind of localism and love of place and particularity, a desire not to see one’s whole physical and mental landscape made unrecognizable. I do not think that desire is wrong, and the task of those of us who favor growth and development is to channel love of place into something that does not merely put our neighborhoods under glass.
But that idea that we young people who struggle with the cost of housing are somehow ungrateful or entitled, or whatever—that is so different from anything I’m thinking when I write favorably about the big projects in Flemington or about development and new housing in general. I’ve tried to express this idea before, but I’ll do it again here, and maybe capture it a little better.
I keep thinking of the fellow I know who moved here from Northern Virginia suburbia, got married and had kids (maybe that happened when he was still in Virginia; I don’t recall), and opened up a little store on Main Street. The folks who’ve lived here forever miss the town’s old vitality, for sure, but in some ways they don’t see the decay. A young person, seeing a tired old Main Street full of history but punching way below its weight economically, sees something…alive but asleep.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that I find something almost mystical in the phenomenon of new construction within these old towns, new buildings side by side with the ones from the 1800s or early 1900s that comprise “Historic Main Street.” (I’m thinking of Flemington, of course, but most small towns of any size that were not completely gutted economically have the same dynamics.) Somewhere along the way, we sort of forgot what these places were and why they existed in the first place.
We lost our continuity with the people who built them, and began to see them merely as lifestyle amenities, not as real live communities. Businesses left the old town for the township, for lower taxes and larger stores and more spacious parking lots. People wanted newer homes with garages and central air. Without changing their form, these old towns truly became something else.
And so when I see a new building in an old town, especially one which respects its surroundings and slots itself into the long evolution of the place, I don’t see something cutting against its character. I don’t just see a building. I see a broken thread sewed back together. Some ancient, forgotten thing rumbling at long last back to life. I see that curious urbanist counterfactual—“what if instead of suburbia, we had kept evolving our towns and cities throughout the 20th century?”—tested in the real world. It is the most fascinating thing to me to see these sleepy, timeworn places rediscovering their old vitality—becoming what they were by becoming something new.
My friend and I always have these long conversations in the car, or walking down Main Street. There’s something about moving that keeps your brain sharp, I guess. We both wonder why it is that America has such a deep anti-urban bias. We understand well enough the problems that big cities underwent in the 20th century, and why a lot of people left and never looked back. What’s harder to understand is why even a moderate amount of growth in our old towns seems to activate some deep fear of the city. But it isn’t just fear, crime, noise, and all that. There’s something else at play, I think, that is even stranger.
On the one hand, we obviously don’t “do urbanism” because we find it inconvenient in many ways. For example, the slight annoyance of having to parallel park or go through an alley to a rear parking lot. My friend’s parents like this little breakfast spot in town, but they don’t really go there because of the tight parking. This is a clear example to me where urbanism is something like “eating your vegetables”—doing something maybe unpleasant up front to get something really worthwhile later on.
In that frame, suburbia sort of spoils us with facile convenience with no payoff. I think it’s interesting that we suburban upper-middle-class kids were raised with these virtues—work ethic, delayed gratification, living below your means, swallowing discomfort and putting in your best effort—and yet in a lot of ways living in an urban community is a great way to actually practice them. In other words, urbanism can entail a kind of good discomfort or good friction.
Yet on the other hand, I keep having this thought in the back of my head that part of why we look askance at urban living is because it’s delightful. My friend and I were thinking about this as we walked by the derelict Turntable Junction with its erstwhile gazebo and sitting areas and winding brick pathways, the Lone Eagle craft brewery with its great big patio, the empty benches scattered around town. Even when they were bustling, people were there for specific reasons. We’re getting ice cream, we’re shopping, we’re in town to go to the bank but sure we can sit on the benches for a little bit.
“Americans feel like they need a reason to loiter,” my friend observed. There has to be a bar or a sports game or a street fair or a festival. It’s so difficult, mentally, to just let yourself sit and rest and take in the views. There’s this tendency to say, “Alright, let’s get going, can’t lounge around all day.” Americans travel to lovely walkable European cities and have fun and feel healthy, and then come back and make cracks about how Europeans don’t work.
“There’s a part of you that doesn’t really want to do something unless a part of you doesn’t want to do it,” I replied.
Maybe it’s the Catholic notion of sacrifice. Or maybe it’s the Protestant work ethic. Maybe it’s just the attitude you absorb by osmosis in a very market-driven country. But I can’t shake the impression that the American imperative to always be moving, working, hustling cuts against our ability to slow down and take in a place without a reason.
It’s so damn hard to look at those pictures of old Italian or Greek or Croatian men with a glass of wine sitting by a table in an old city and shooting the breeze, and not thinking that they’re participating in a kind of minor vice; that they’re getting away with something. But haven’t they earned it? What’s the virtue in working till you’re dead? Don’t you in some sense owe yourself in your old age to your family and your community more than you owe it to yourself not to feel lazy? How do you unlearn the idea that leisure is laziness?
I don’t really support density and urban growth and housing because of environmentalism or social justice or any of those things. I don’t mean they’re not important, but that they don’t explain my interest in this issue. I think that if you knew nothing about anything except human tendencies and human needs, and were asked what a human society should look like, you would describe what we today call urbanism.
That could be at the scale of the village, or the town, or the city—anything from Manhattan to Flemington. It isn’t the “big city” only. It’s the life, if you listen to lots of Americans, that we idealize, with our nostalgia for Main Street and small-town life. The irony is that those same people see a big new building on Main Street and somehow don’t connect that this is how that life can be made possible, today, for a new generation of people. That our towns, which lost their essence while their form was set in stone, may regain their essence by changing their form. Just a little bit. Over time. The current American relationship with our old cities and towns is like that of a Catholic who devotes himself to Eucharistic adoration without ever actually taking communion.
None of this is to say the suburbs should go away, if that were even possible. Just as much of Hunterdon County (of which Flemington is the county seat) remains rural and agricultural, most of suburbia will remain as it is now. But everything can’t always stay the same. I’m not “targeting” our quaint small towns. I’m not spitting on them. I don’t want to turn them into something they aren’t. That’s the rub, and you can drop the metaphysical bit if you want, but they already aren’t what they are.
Look—when the handful of big projects in Flemington are done, and if they fail or the local economy deteriorates, I’ll write about that too. I just don’t think that will happen, and I think old-timers underestimate how many young people would jump at the opportunity to live on a classic Main Street. It just has hardly been an option in most of these towns for a long time.
The central question for urbanists, at least in our old cities and towns, may not be about policy or financing or construction. It’s the question of how to grow a thing without changing it; how to love a thing without exclusively claiming it; how to preserve a thing without reducing it to a specimen.
This might all sound like a lot words. But it’s important to understand what things are. And I believe we have to understand our legacy towns as neither museum artifacts nor blank slates to remake, but as heirlooms—inheritances—which we must in some way both honor and make our own.
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Addison, there are three ultimate values in Christian tradition: truth, beauty, goodness. You don't love urban life because it is morally good, you love it because it is beautiful to contemplate and experience. For me, beauty is also my favorite. Those old guys enjoying the glass of wine and fresh air are also savoring beauty.
Observing the trajectory of my own hometown (Wallingford, CT; est. 1670) often generates similar thoughts. Wallingford has that classic Main Street with a walkable downtown, a legacy of its manufacturing heyday and connection to the railroads and a regional streetcar network. Its recognizable urban form of course did not extend beyond the historic downtown during the era of post-war suburbanization, as car-centric subdivisions gobbled up much of the developable farmland. That process seems to have peaked around 2000, while the town's population peaked around 2010; today, they are talking about consolidating the two high schools as they project a future with fewer children and fewer overall people.
Wallingford, like most of Connecticut, is zoned almost exclusively for large-lot single-family housing. Since there's not a lot of land left on which to build that, the town has sort of maxed out its housing capacity, which invariably means as the younger generation grows up and starts families, they're doing it elsewhere. As their parents age, the workforce will likewise shrink, and the town will become a glorified retirement community, which will lead to economic decline. No new buildings have been built downtown, as far as I can tell, in my entire life.
By not allowing the town to naturally evolve, to gently densify, Wallingford has essentially zoned out its future. I think dynamism, evolution, growth—whatever we want to call it—is an essential aspect of urbanism. By preserving the historic, suburban form as it is, by stifling natural growth and rejuvenation, the town is accepting long-term decay, which puts it at risk of eventually becoming a blank slate, a dead place. Not embracing some kind of reform, some kind of change, does not prevent change from happening—it will just be for the worse!