Read the Menu, See Your Town

Seeing old things with new eyes

Recently I wrote about the idea of “resettling” our old small towns and suburbs—seeing them as a sort of frontier in our backyard. I was thinking about young people who didn’t grow up in towns or cities, and who see them with new or fresh eyes.

I think of myself, growing up outside the small town of Flemington, New Jersey, which we visited all the time. We knew the stores and owners, the landmark buildings. My mother pointed to the second-story apartments over the café or the pizzeria. We loved the place. But I never really grasped that people did or could live there. The idea of living right on a classic little Main Street was the stuff of daydreams and fiction. You might as well live on the moon.

When I see new apartments going up in old towns like this—as they are, now, in Flemington—I feel this indescribable curiosity and excitement. This impossible thing being realized, this fulfillment of an intriguing possibility. It tells my mind that a classic town is more than an open-air museum exhibit or a relic of a bygone age.

I wrote:

There is so much possibility in these places, if we let people act on it. It’s so dismaying to me to hear people in my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey fondly recall its glory days as a tiny working city, and yet fight tooth and nail all the projects pointing in that direction today.

I wrote awhile back about a young-ish guy in town who has a store on Main Street. He grew up in bland Fairfax County sprawl. He’s so enthusiastic about his classic store and his town. He sees it with fresh eyes, in a way that the old guard no longer can. It’s like they mistake the form for the substance. They recall what was; people like this business owner can imagine what it could be. Newcomers don’t take the place for granted.

I’ve been thinking about that idea, and I want to offer you an analogy of sorts.

The first time I brought my wife home for a holiday to meet my parents, we decided to bring pizza, as we were arriving right around lunchtime. My wife is Chinese; she had never really ordered pizza much. It was an ordinary thing for me, growing up in central Jersey. I was used to just going with one pie, half plain half pepperoni, done. She, unused to a pizza-ordering routine, suggested we look up the menu, read the full list of toppings, and decide what we wanted. She was curious about it in a way that I wasn’t.

I almost said, “Nah, just get half plain half pepperoni.” But I didn’t say that. And suddenly it was exciting to read the list. I was surprised by minced garlic as a topping; sure! How about mushrooms on top too! Olives? Maybe banana peppers next time! We added some garlic knots and fried calamari to the order. And some minestrone for my mom, who occasionally got a cup of soup when we went out for pizza.

I remember, when I was a kid, we might briefly discuss those add-ons. Maybe this time I’ll get a hot sub instead. Maybe we’ll order a couple of slices and a couple of other things! But what came to the table or got picked up was always the same thing. One pie, half plain half pepperoni.

Okay, sometimes half sausage.

I had inherited a boring, rote ordering routine; I had never even really looked at a pizzeria menu before. What’s there to look at? I never thought about there being a long list of possible toppings. It just wasn’t something we did. It really stuck with me how what seemed like the basic boringness of ordering the pizza was really just my own way of doing it, which I mistook for the thing itself. It’s not missing the forest for the trees; it’s sort of like mistaking the garden path for the whole garden.

All of that “new” stuff we ordered was there all along; I just didn’t perceive it. We weren’t doing something different than what I did; we were doing the same thing more completely.

I think the young people resettling our legacy towns and cities are like my wife looking at that pizza menu and thinking about the toppings. Coming to these places without familiarity, it is possible to see more of them.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” That’s what urbanism at heart is about, for me: seeing our everyday places with wonder and enchantment; imbuing them with potential and opportunity. I don’t see this as being at odds with what these places are; I see it as making them more of—more completely—what they are.

---

Related Reading:

Funerals for Buildings

Exploring Home

Take Nothing But Pictures (Or Not Even)

---

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 700 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!