Small Town, USA
This entry was originally posted on 18 January 2005 at 12:40 p.m.
On Sunday, in a fit of needing to get out of the house, B and i went for a drive.
We followed Route 5 from Albany north through Colonie and Niskayuna and Schenectady and Scotia and out toward the old small towns that you never really hear about on the news.
We drove past a place called Hoffmans and another place where the sign said Crane's Hollow, which doesn't appear on the map, though they show Cranesville in that location. We saw the abandoned Adirondack Power and Light building with its shattered windows and silent smokestacks. We saw the longest freight train i've ever seen, two powerful engines pulling a string of cars that must have stretched over a mile in length.
We noticed something. The smaller the town, the more run down and hopeless the town, the more churches dotted the streets--churches whose well kept façades stood in odd contrast to the boarded up windows and peeling exteriors of the houses.
I had to wonder, driving past and through these places, is this the heart of America? Is this what's become of Small Town, USA? There's a sense of community that people talk about when they think back on the days around World War II--small town sensibility, church on Sunday and a trip to the soda fountain, the corner five 'n' dime and the drug store across the street--has this life, so clean and sweet in memory, truly become as dingy and remote as the small towns of Route 5?
Isn't this what was supposed to be great about our country?
Where did it go?
People fled to the cities, then to the suburbs, then to the shopping malls and strip malls and all-in-one megastores. Will they eventually return to the small towns, or have the big box corporations won? Have we so willfully given up the histories and dreams of these places, sacrificed them to the corporations?
I don't think, in the era of the big box chain retailers, that our country can ever go back to this. If we attempt it, the big boxes will follow until every vestige of individuality and community has been drained in the name of the almighty dollar. And besides, life has become too fast-paced to tolerate small town life.
Our towns no longer support themselves. Maybe they never did, at least not fully. But it seems that there was a time when most business was local, when mom and pop shops were the rule rather than the exception, when people didn't talk about company headquarters being in cities hundreds or even thousands of miles away. In a sense, now, most business is national, or at least regional.
Is this the culprit?
There's part of me that hopes that small town America isn't dead. It's the idealist in me, the part of me that thinks about these places as discrete and relatively self-sufficient and bound by community.
There's another part of me, the realist, that has seen bits and pieces of small town America, and wonders whether it should be euthanized.
Hopefully the truth lies somewhere in between.
On Sunday, in a fit of needing to get out of the house, B and i went for a drive.
We followed Route 5 from Albany north through Colonie and Niskayuna and Schenectady and Scotia and out toward the old small towns that you never really hear about on the news.
We drove past a place called Hoffmans and another place where the sign said Crane's Hollow, which doesn't appear on the map, though they show Cranesville in that location. We saw the abandoned Adirondack Power and Light building with its shattered windows and silent smokestacks. We saw the longest freight train i've ever seen, two powerful engines pulling a string of cars that must have stretched over a mile in length.
We noticed something. The smaller the town, the more run down and hopeless the town, the more churches dotted the streets--churches whose well kept façades stood in odd contrast to the boarded up windows and peeling exteriors of the houses.
I had to wonder, driving past and through these places, is this the heart of America? Is this what's become of Small Town, USA? There's a sense of community that people talk about when they think back on the days around World War II--small town sensibility, church on Sunday and a trip to the soda fountain, the corner five 'n' dime and the drug store across the street--has this life, so clean and sweet in memory, truly become as dingy and remote as the small towns of Route 5?
Isn't this what was supposed to be great about our country?
Where did it go?
People fled to the cities, then to the suburbs, then to the shopping malls and strip malls and all-in-one megastores. Will they eventually return to the small towns, or have the big box corporations won? Have we so willfully given up the histories and dreams of these places, sacrificed them to the corporations?
I don't think, in the era of the big box chain retailers, that our country can ever go back to this. If we attempt it, the big boxes will follow until every vestige of individuality and community has been drained in the name of the almighty dollar. And besides, life has become too fast-paced to tolerate small town life.
Our towns no longer support themselves. Maybe they never did, at least not fully. But it seems that there was a time when most business was local, when mom and pop shops were the rule rather than the exception, when people didn't talk about company headquarters being in cities hundreds or even thousands of miles away. In a sense, now, most business is national, or at least regional.
Is this the culprit?
There's part of me that hopes that small town America isn't dead. It's the idealist in me, the part of me that thinks about these places as discrete and relatively self-sufficient and bound by community.
There's another part of me, the realist, that has seen bits and pieces of small town America, and wonders whether it should be euthanized.
Hopefully the truth lies somewhere in between.
posted by Circus at 10:58 AM
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