The Rest of Cary
The new and the old
I wrote recently about accidentally driving into downtown Cary, North Carolina, on an evening when they had a Christmas market set up. It was very hard to park, but once we found a spot, it was lovely to walk around the bright, decorated old town.
We had dinner in downtown Cary too, which is why we were there in the first place. And while I knew Cary was a “real town,” I had never been there. I had simply assumed our restaurant, which we found on Yelp, was somewhere in the suburbs.
But I’m glad we ended up in the old town, because this is what we saw:
And this is part of what I wrote:
There isn’t really anywhere you could do this in the suburbs. Sure, you could claim a parking lot for a farmer’s market, which is where they usually go. But the feeling of wonder as you walk down the streets, traversing the whole little town (which always feels bigger when everything is decorated and lit up), seeing a familiar place in a different way? Seeing shops alive, churches and houses asleep, like temporarily inhabiting the pages of a children’s book?
The pattern of suburban development forecloses that magic. We’ve built most of our country in a way that renders impossible so many things we love.
Now, downtown Cary looks a lot like my own hometown of Flemington, New Jersey. Cary is a little bigger, but not by that much. Flemington has a population of about 5,000 people, and its city limits are only a little larger than its old street grid. The “Flemington area” is considerably larger—about 22,000 people live in the township that surrounds the town. So the overall area that people call “Flemington” is home to close to 30,000 people.
So if you took only the downtown of Cary, you might guess that the overall “Cary area,” extrapolating from the usual pattern with old towns that have newer suburban penumbras, was home to anywhere from say 20,000 to 30,000 people, roughly, with a few thousand in the actual town and the rest in the newer surrounding area.
And if you looked at the Census data over the decades, you’d think you were pretty close. In 1930, Cary’s population was 909. (For comparison, in that year Flemington had 2,729 people.) In 1980, Cary had 21,763. Even in 1990, it was about 44,000.
Today, its about 177,000.
Cary is “the seventh largest municipality in North Carolina, and the 148th largest in the United States.”
I don’t quite know what to make of that. It’s nice that the original town is still mostly intact, and still attracts crowds. But its such a tremendous shame that all of that growth—a doubling every 10-20 years for over half a century—took place outside of any sort of traditional urban pattern. Time and time again, we see this phenomenon where people live in, and builders build, suburban sprawl, but where the handful of surviving places built in the traditional development pattern cost more and draw more people.
At one time—any time before the 1970s, probably—the “old town” of Cary was Cary. Over the years, as the region grew, the new development simply neglected the existing center of the place, until it became this leftover appendage—at best, an entertainment center, not a pattern for the new growth where most people who live in Cary actually live.
This is much more typical of Cary than the photos above:
It’s an old farmhouse being moved away, to make room for a subdivision.
As in so many other growing regions, the debate seems to end up being between people who feel development threatens the old character and feel of the place, and want as little as possible, versus developers who just want to build and will follow the path of least resistance. And typically the path of least resistance is the disconnected patchwork of low-density development and strip malls, maybe with townhomes or apartments thrown in. But it doesn’t amount to an overall place, an overall fabric. Why is it that you just know you’re somewhere on a classic Main Street, but you don’t get that feeling out in modern suburbia?
Yet few people, and even few municipal governments, seem to take seriously the idea that we could build a lot more new stuff along the old pattern. Why? I keep asking this question. Why don’t more people demand that we build more of what we all love?
The failure to do so no doubt intensifies the idea that a place is “full,” and that development is inherently opposed to whatever it is that makes the place nice right now.
This is Durham, but it’s typical of the whole region’s newer development:
Yeah, when it’s this or nothing, nothing can sound pretty good. But it doesn’t have to be. The Triangle is one of the nation’s fastest growing metro areas. Imagine if it were collectively one of America’s finest urban environments. So much opportunity to turn growth into beauty.
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I lived in Cary in the 1970s through the 1990s and saw a lot of that growth. It may not look like it now but Cary actually pioneered the idea of mixed-use development. Kildaire Farms in Cary, started in the 1970s and planned in cooperation with the town, was the first "planned unit development" community in North Carolina and possibly the south (excluding the NOVA area). At the time it was very innovative, a mixture of housing types and retail all in one development. It was still car-based, but innovative for the time. Unfortunately the original developer went bankrupt and the new developer did more "normal" suburban patterns to finish it out but in the older parts you can still see mixed housing, generous common areas and recreation amenities, and retail within walking distance (though the road the retail is on has become a stroad so not recognizable as the original vision). It's my sad observation as a fan (and former homeowner) of that community that most people seem to prefer the normal suburban pattern. Even people who live in the older mixed part live like they are in a sprawly suburb, seldom using the amenities near them and usually driving to more distant shopping, dining, parks, etc.
Cary has since hosted many subsequent planned unit developments, each successive one looking more like what we identify as sprawl today than the previous. Developers build what people want and the failure of the original Kildaire Farms developer was seen by other developers as a cautionary tale.
Now the pendulum may be swinging back as new urbanist developments are popular, however in my observation while they are attractive their commerce areas are mostly boutiques and not useful for day to day life and commerce, and their residents still have to drive other places for most of their daily needs like groceries or eating out.