If You Love Something, Let It Grow

NIMBYism is a denial of the natural order of the built environment

Gene Meyer, a veteran Washington Post reporter and now-freelance journalist, lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. Back in March, responding to news of an iconic diner’s closure, he penned a piece at his personal website.

It’s a bit melancholy, a bit ornery, and a bit snarky:

“Where will I get my pancakes?” my wife wondered.  For me, the Tastee was my office away from my home office where I would often meet friends and sometimes sources. Customers were mostly middle-aged or older, Black and white, and families with kids.

If you ordered before 9 a.m., there was a discounted senior menu.  Breakfast with coffee was mostly in the $10-15 range.  Coffee refills were unobtrusive and automatic.  It wasn’t fancy, but it was genuine. No lattes, avocado toast, or other exotic dishes more attuned to the current zeitgeist.  Conversation was uninterrupted by some corporate factotum asking repeatedly if everything was okay.

Where will the geezers go? I have no idea….I eagerly awaited the opening of the Black Lion Cafe, and I am pleased to find it full of people — mostly young people, Gen Zers and millennials, multicultural and multiracial, earnestly engaging with their laptops and cell phones while sipping lattes or eating some of the excellent pastries prepared on site.

But a place for scrambled eggs, corned beef hash, bacon, grits and home fries it is not.  Nor for leisurely conversation.  The other day, I listened in to a young man being interviewed for a job by another young man.

Sadly, I conclude, the future of Silver Spring is not in its past.

If I had to summarize it in five words, it would be “I’m not a NIMBY, but….”

Dan Reed, a Maryland urbanist who lives (or lived recently) in Silver Spring, wrote a response at Greater Greater Washington. He talks about the caution that a lot of African-American families learned to exercise towards small, independent establishments, and how the detached, bland character of chains like McDonald’s made them consistent, safe bets. Apart from any racial element, my dad says the same about McDonald’s: it isn’t good, but you know what you’re getting. For many people, that’s worth something. Reed writes:

When my brother and I were growing up, my parents were often wary of locally owned places like Tastee Diner. I went there exactly twice as a child. I know I’m not the only child of immigrant parents who has had this experience, but my parents love fast food chains. They’re cheap, familiar, and consistent. When you don’t have a lot of money to spend and/or are in an unfamiliar place, it’s important that you do it in a place where you know what you’re going to get and you won’t get any trouble….Fast food restaurants feel like home to me.

He goes on to argue that conflating the diner with Silver Spring itself is to say that Gene Meyer’s subjective feeling of home is more important or even more real than Reed’s. Which, in one of the most diverse communities in the nation, is a stretch.

I can see how the friendly, down-home feel of a local diner could in fact be off-putting or even hostile to some folks. This reminds me of my time in college, in a small, affluent, very white town in New Jersey. Non-white students sometimes felt uncomfortable in town, and looked forward to returning to Newark or South Orange. They noticed the alertness of town cops who had nothing much to do, and seemed to notice them. They felt the quietness, the lack of vitality as an absence of something.

But for me, it was normal. I would probably have felt equally uncomfortable in one of the bustling, often working-class urban neighborhoods that many of my college’s non-white students called home. (At the time, anyway—much less so today.) Heck, even Gene Meyer’s halcyon Silver Spring would have probably triggered some “be careful, this feels like a city” instinct that a white suburbanite absorbs by osmosis and can only later identify.

And yet, Silver Spring is fine. To the extent that crime is a problem, it’s a problem, like inflation, that the whole country seems to be experiencing. It will still be Silver Spring. There’s a subtle point I want to make here: it is fine, and good, to mourn the closure of a landmark business in your town. This diner has operated since 1935. Time has a way of hallowing things, and this is as close to real history as most American communities will ever get. It’s a shame to lose it.

But the fact that it is sad to lose it does not mean that it was possible not to lose it, any more than the pain of death implies resurrection. I am a Catholic, but my belief in the resurrection is a belief in a miracle. It would, indeed, take a miracle for a tiny one-story diner to survive indefinitely in an exploding suburb of a major city. When we see urban places changing like this, we are not seeing a scheme or a plot or a conspiracy; we are seeing a process as natural, as inevitable, as aching and painful and beautiful as life itself.

And, briefly mentioned by Meyer himself, is a turn of events as close to a miracle as we ever see in redevelopment news: the proposal to replace the diner with an apartment building will retain the original diner car in some form. This use of a landmark as an element of something new allows both change and continuity. That’s enough for me.

There is such a presumption against change and urban growth these days that any departure from what exists now is viewed as radical—as some purposeful action meant to change what a place is. But the truth is the opposite. The notion that a place is what it looks like now is really a sort of metaphysical claim. It’s a claim that somewhere in the ether, there is a Platonic form of Silver Spring, different from, and more real than, the actual Silver Spring that exists in the physical world. This, at bottom, is what NIMBYism is: a metaphysical, quasi-religious error.

It reminds me of something I read—I think—in my world religions textbook in college. It was something to the effect of, every cell in our bodies dies and is replaced, yet we’re the same person. (Well, not most of our brain, which is probably most of our person.) But the point is that a person both is and is not the exact thing that we are at a given moment in time. A snapshot is a reproduction or representation of the real thing. The real thing is dynamic and alive. NIMBYism mistakes the snapshot for the thing it represents. “If you think he looks good in real life,” goes an old joke, “wait till you see him on Kodak film.”

I wrote about this same sort of thing last year, thinking about a few big projects going on in my hometown, and how for the first time in my life my hometown actually looked and felt a little different than it did during my childhood:

I feel hopeful about the upcoming changes in part because of what I’ve learned in the last couple of years about the town’s history. As long as I’ve been alive, Flemington’s Main Street has been pretty much the same, granting normal economic ups and downs. (Its prospects were high in the early 2000s, down in the 2010s, heading back up now.) But it hasn’t always looked and felt that way. For example, I’ve learned about the small supermarkets that used to be right on Main Street; the history of some of the buildings, many of which are from the late nineteenth century, and which replaced earlier buildings; the local industries—peach growing, glass, ceramics—and the rail lines and once-active train station (now a bank) that put this little town on the map.

The realization brought on by all this is that Flemington has “belonged” to many different people, and does not “belong” to any single person or property owner or developer. Its history is granular, incremental, and distributed—by growing up in a place like this, I was lucky to wade into a stream that has run long before and will run long after.

This perspective helps me step outside of the narrow point in time during which I knew this place most intimately, and to avoid mistaking my nostalgic memories for the place itself.

This is not, and was not, intuitive to me. It takes an effort to understand it when you grow up thinking that turning human settlements into embalmed museum exhibits is normal and desirable.

To this day, there are people who seek to “preserve Historic Flemington,” by which they mean to let our buildings crumble into the ground before letting anybody touch them. It reminds me of the collectors on that show American Pickers—the people with junkyards or barns full of rusting, decaying stuff they profess to love too much to sell. They “love” it so much that they hoard it, cling to it, and guarantee that when they die it will all be carted away. They turn the thing they love into garbage.

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I know Dan Reed, and I saw him at a Greater Greater Washington event recently. We were chatting about his article, and he told me a little story, about a visit to a pupuseria, full of Hispanic customers. It wasn’t his language or cuisine. It wouldn’t be home for him the way it could for those customers. But there, in a different embodiment, was what McDonald’s once meant to him, or what Tastee Diner meant to Gene Meyer.

That feeling—home, comfort, familiarity—is embodied in this or that particular place or establishment. But it is separable from the things which create it in particular times and places. The embodiments are fleeting, but the feelings are universal. They will always find their vessel.

To believe otherwise is to believe that a diner car mass-produced on an assembly line 80 years ago is more than what it is. It is a belief as mystical and incongruent with the real world as transubstantiation.

As for me, I reserve my belief in miracles to my faith. And I believe that if you love something, you have to let it grow.

Social card image credit Flickr/Kate Mereand, CC BY 2.0

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Related Reading:

15 Minutes to Midnight?

What’s a City To You?

Ugly Buildings and Open Space

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