Fool's Gold

A prime example of how we changed our thinking about cities in the 20th century

Take a look at this Google Maps screenshot of a commercial corridor leading into downtown Frederick, Maryland:

This is the Golden Mile, the once-new commercial strip built outside the lovely old city, before its resurgence. Frederick didn’t always have a prized downtown and a rundown suburban edge. Here’s a really interesting and well-done story from 2017 on the downtown’s fortunes, with this bit at the end:

Ironically, it’s now the suburban areas on the western side of town that need help. Fifty years ago, the word “customer” became synonymous with “motorist.” Today, the vast parking lots that flood the town creek with dirty runoff water stand largely empty. The Frederick Towne Mall shut its doors in 2013 after a painfully slow death, and many of the other strip-mall anchors along the western corridor have low patronage and high turnover.

A special committee of suburban business and property owners has been formed to revive the sprawling area locally called “The Golden Mile.” So far, few major changes have been implemented, but most of the proposed solutions involve making the sprawl more like the downtown that it nearly destroyed.

The Golden Mile suffers high vacancies and general visual unpleasantness. Like so many of these corridors that exist around almost every old city, there are some interesting stores and restaurants because the space is cheap. But nobody today would dream of going to Frederick and doing nothing but shopping along the Golden Mile.

I posted that satellite image on social media, and someone left this interesting comment:

This is what all towns do though for the most part. They leave the Main Street USA Downtown quiet and quaint, then build all the commercial big box stores, fast food joints, strip malls and chain restaurants out on a State/US Highway on the edge of town.

I say “interesting,” but I mean wrong—specifically, anachronistic. As I understand it, the idea of using the ugly car-oriented commercial strip as a sort of preservation tool for the quaint old town is a modern interpretation of what we’re looking at. In reality, 50, 60, 70 years ago, we wanted those strips, and the old towns were left for dead.

I wrote about this in my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey, tracing the history of our supermarkets. TLDR, most of them began on Main Street and moved away. Our last full-service supermarket, now in the township adjacent to the town, began life decades ago on Main Street.

This wasn’t called “The Golden Mile” because it was some grudging way to let people buy stuff in their cars without ruining downtown. It was what was new. It was exciting. The old cities—even, I always remind you, Old Town Alexandria and Historic Annapolis—were grimy, disinvested, unloved. I wrote about Culpeper a year and a half ago, a lovely small town in Virginia, and someone remarked that in the 1970s, Culpeper was pretty rough looking. We inherited these old cities the way we inherit grandma’s dusty old stuff before it becomes antiques. Now we know what we were ready to throw away.

I do sometimes wonder what we urbanists today aren’t seeing in these old commercial strips. Anything?

What was it like to look at the Golden Mile, newly built, with its gleaming, delightful expanses of easy, free parking and its visual buffet of shopping and dining options as far as the eye can see? What was it like to effortlessly perceive this as superior to the grimy, overcrowded old city? I wonder sometimes what we’re missing when we make the opposite judgment. I want to make sure that we really see what we’re looking at and that we understand that distinction.

My best answer to this is that the old cities are still here; all things being equal, something about the old urban pattern gives a place staying power, the energy to revitalize itself. It inspires the sense of place and loyalty that drives people to invest themselves. A city has a longer lifespan and a stronger identity than a commercial strip.

Commercial strips can reinvent themselves too, often with the arrival of an immigrant community—here’s a good example of that, in Edison, New Jersey. Even some of the poorer suburban areas around D.C. are full of life, and while the buildings might be in poor condition, the vacancy rates are low. That’s an interesting phenomenon.

My point, then, isn’t to bash commercial strips or suburbs or shopping by car. It’s more conceptual; it should humble us and on some level unnerve us that our collective judgments about superior land use were so different a mere few decades ago; that we can snicker at calling a collection of strip malls “The Golden Mile” without understanding how that felt appropriate at a moment in time.

And in the same respect, we can look aghast at “urban renewal,” and assume that we today know better. But I wouldn’t necessarily bet on it.

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Related Reading:

Urbanism Without Cities?

Does Anyone Like Suburbia?

What If I Should Drive An SUV?

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