An All-American Town

During Labor Day weekend this month, I went to a car show celebrating German automobiles - Volkswagens, Porsches and Audis, to be precise - in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and even though I partially grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania, I had never been to Pottstown before. 

I liked the town - it was typical of many small boroughs outside of Philadelphia, with its orderly street grids, its charming rowhouses, its grand, mansion-like homes on North Hanover Street, and the tree canopies along some of the streets.  And High Street, shown below with North Hanover Street intersects with it, is the town's main street.

But then I dug beneath the crust.  High Street certainly was buzzing and humming with activity when I was there, but that was only because of the car show.  This picture of High Street is from Google Street View, taken at a time when no special event was being held.  Back in the middle of the twentieth century, High Street would have been and was humming with trade, as people in town and in the area would go there to shop.  Nowadays, most of the stores people are more likely to go to stores in the strip malls along State Route 100 just outside the borough, and more people are likely to live in greater proximity to those same strip malls.

In other words, the car rendered downtown Pottstown obsolete.  You don't have to point out to me the irony of attending a car show  in the middle of town, although, the Germans never let their own car culture overwhelm their centuries-old living pattern. 

Many of the downtown stores in Pottstown are the sort of specialty stores designed to appeal to tourists who go to towns like this because they find them so darn quaint.  As for the residential areas around Pottstown, they leave a good deal to be desired.

This is Chestnut Street in Pottstown in the photo above.  It looks sort of worn, with little street life . . . no visible neighbors to interact with each other. There are a couple of storefronts here and there on this street and other residential streets nearby. In another time, they housed local merchants who were part of the community and in some cases likely lived in the community.  Neighbors were likely to know and look out for each other - a far cry from today's auto suburbs. 

At least there's this grocery store on the corner of Beech and Evans Streets.

Of course, it looks rather run-down and drab.  It sort of resembles the grocery store run by Art Carney's character Abe in Defiance, which, for those who have seen the film, anchors a Manhattan neighborhood Abe describes as a place that "used to be a nice place to live . . ..  All of a sudden, it's changed."  Except that this store bears the ambience of a neighborhood where the change was more gradual.   

This is the American small town or urban neighborhood in the collective minds of older generations, who are now dying off.  Pottstown was a town where people lived in proximity to the main business district, either by foot or by streetcar.  They had neighborhood stores to get things in a pinch, with the better stores selling clothes, kitchen utensils, records (remember records), and other items on High Street.  They had a library to walk to, or the park, and the town hall.  And if you wanted to go to the biggest cultural and commercial attractions in the Philadelphia area . . . you took the train to Philadelphia.  For the record, Pottstown hasn't had passenger rail service since 1981.

Residents of Pottstown and other older towns in America left to move out to the new housing developments that offered larger yards and more greenery but no public amenities to walk to or even to drive to.   Yes, they'd gained space to spread out in.  Here's what they lost - nay, what they gave up.  

This is Walnut Street just west of Franklin Street in Pottstown, with an assemblage of modest rowhouses of varying colors and unassuming front entrances that honor the streetscape.  The effect of these rowhouses is to create an outdoor room where people can congregate and talk, and get to know each other as neighbors, possibly as a second family, and it could even be or have been a place where an extended family might live, where your grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins would be at arm's length.  (If you're thinking of Barry Levinson's 1990 movie Avalon as a comparison, you're on the right track.) This is the sort of neighborhood your own grandfather might have told you about at Thanksgiving dinner once.

What amuses me is that folks affiliated with the Congress of the New Urbanism, a group of  developers and architects who aim to restore traditional neighborhood development and create places to live that are worth caring about, with all the charm that implies, have built places like Seaside in Florida and Kentlands in Maryland.  These are nice places, and it's good that they exist for people to see, but such places that follow the roles of urbanism and traditional development of human habitats already exist - like Pottstown, Pennsylvania.  Towns like this have people who already live there.   Some of the places within these towns are underserved, with some neighborhoods being blighted and unkempt, as evidenced by the first two pictures of Pottstown that I have shown here.  Perhaps the Congress of the New Urbanism should focus more on restoring existing towns like Pottstown and not just building new ones.

If people who had the means to leave Pottstown and did leave were to come back and invest in the town, you'd have a community again.  You'd have renewed life on these tired old streets.  You'd have people walking down High Street again and treating each other like neighbors rather than strangers.  And the only time you'd need a car is when you went out for a weekend day trip or week-long road trip, not for commuting to work or going to stores out on Route 100.  Pottstown could be a real community like the new places built by New Urbanists.  It would be a community once again.