The downtown is still there, but not the people

[SoCalDem]

I occasionally google my home town, and stumbled on this ..It's MY hometown, but it could be ANYONE'S home town.

This downtown was BUSY when I was young.. It had EVERYTHING, and now all these years later, they have made improvements and tidied up, but there is one thing noticeably absent..people

The tacky Strand theater with a balcony so shaky, we were often afraid to go there..gone... The Vogue theater with mice running around..gone.. The A& G Cafe (we called it the agh & gag)..gone Key Rexall ...gone.. The fantastic Helzberg's Jewelers, now a yarn shop, even though the carved in marble name remains in the entryway. Warden's & Stieffels & even JC Penney on mainstreet..all gone.

The building this guy names as the WORST remodel ever.. well that's where my husband worked,(his first post-college real job) and he thought it was great :rofl:

What did in my town? Shopper's Fair was the first blow, then came Mid-state Mall and then an even bigger & better mall..and then the now-common strip malls everywhere a vacant piece of land on a paved road could be found.
....
a few pics:




This buildings gets the first prize for ugliest remodeling seen on my trip. Just horrible…


full gallery
http://flickr.com/photos/urbanreviewstl/sets/72157600214769456/

[EFerrari]

1. Same deal in Sunnyvale!

When I was a rugrat, there was one main street with shops and the library that ended at the train station. It was busy. Us young teens used to hike in to look in the shop windows and sometimes the family would eat at the restaurant and Mom's office was there, too.

Ever since all the "improvements" -- well, they have a mall there now that's in it's third death. There's no "there" now. :shrug:

[exboyfil]

2. Our downtown is in better shape than our local mall

which keeps losing stores. They did a lot to the downtown including a remodelling job and several restaurants/night clubs. It is actually pretty nice especially the new library (which we had to fight to get the funding/tax dollars approved - the old library was not very good).

In addition to food stores, we have a few specialty shops but most of those are pulling out over time (the paint store is now a pretty nice restaurant). The gift/card store is now vacant.

On weekends things are fairly crowded in our downtown.

Our mall is in such bad shape that they are talking about rebating a portion of the 1% local options tax to them (which I am strongly against). I can't see why the stores outside the mall should be asked to help pay for the mall stores.

Unfortunately the book store is going out of the mall now.

[1]

3. the answer is "boo fucking hoo." yeah, we all look fondly upon our past. but it is our past...

i love all of the "i remember my downtown" posts, but truthfully weren't y'all the first to abandon the downtown when that mall first opened up?

remember?

and when a lower priced alternative "big box" store appeared. didn't y'all flock there for the savings?

remember?

i get that now, when we are all smug and comfortable and making our big bucks, we can all reminisce about our past.

(a past that we ourselves helped to kill.)

yet we fail somehow to remember our part in that destruction.

ah, memories. so sweet. so failed. so self-serving...

[SoCalDem]

4. someone piss in your cranberry sauce?

:rofl:

[1]

5. nope. i'm just not buying all of the nostalgia that y'all are selling...

[EFerrari]

7. Bitter, table for one!

[1]

8. heh. you are one to talk...

[EFerrari]

9. Glad you liked it.

The fact is, malls have replaced town squares. This is actually a topic of study, how public spaces where communities used to happen are going away. "Dark Ages America" is one book that talks about this vanishing of cultural meeting places. No side walks, no loitering, no interaction.

[POAS]

12. The front porch has given way to

the glassed in, screened in three season patio enclosure that allows us the illusion of being in nature without the inconvenience of actually being in nature and also protects us from having to actually talk to our neighbors.

[EFerrari]

16. My mother is from Central America and she says Americans like to do

everything at the same time -- alone.

[SoCalDem]

18. What's sad too, is that the "preservation" process costs a LOT of taxpayer money

and often starts & stops frenetically, as new mayors come to office & scuttle what's been started by a predecessor, only to have it re-started/revived the next time around...and every turn of the screw ends up costing more taxpayer money, and by the time any project is finally "done", it;s often too late.

We had a sprawling shopping center in Riverside, anchored by Harris' and Montgomery Ward.. Some genius decided to convert it into a covered (yet still open) mall.. then the enclosed it all the way..That took years and screwed up parking & traffic, Stores suffered, and started to close.. By the time they finished, the customers had become accustomed to shopping elsewhere.. Fast forward 20 more years..Most of the original stores have closed, gone belly up financially, or moved to a different location... anyway. the new pols decided to OPEN UP the mall..rip off the roof, and put it back the way it was in the beginning..

If they had just done some sprucing up in the BEGINNING, the results might have been better and a LOT cheaper..

Every new mayor has a "great idea" for the towns, and often they come with big price tags..I wonder how many every really pan out .

[Uben]

6. Downtowns have been dying for decades

The old downtown where everyone once shopped for goods has been decaying for decades. This is nothing new. Strip shopping centers, big box stores, and malls have been out-pacing them for many years now. Our downtown square was once the center of activity in town, but that disappeared by the seventies.

[ProfessorGAC]

13. The Downtown I Knew. . .

. . .evaporated into law offices and banks LONG before the big mall showed up and LONG before Wal-Mart moved out of Arkansas.

This is, as you said, a LONG term phenomenon, that is consistent with american history of migration. We moved here, then we moved south, then we moved west, then we moved to the suburbs, then to the exurbs, now to the penturbs.

Diminished downtowns are nothing new. The town i'm talking about had this occur in the early 1970's.
GAC

[Jamastiene]

10. Our local Wal-Mart made a deal with the county that the only way

they would open the new Wal-Mart Super Center was if Winn Dixie, 2 of the then 3 Food Lions, Sears, and several other stores closed.

Those buildings now sit empty and are falling down.

The old Wal-Mart shopping center (the one used before they built the Super Center) now sits empty and is rotting and decaying. That entire shopping center is in such bad shape, it should probably be condemned. Many of the old buildings that had the stores Wal-Mart wanted closed are in the same shape.

That is not even the real devastation though. The real devastation is how many stores had to close simply because they were out-priced and undercut by Wal Mart. Most of those were small businesses. Small businesses have suffered in this town horrendously since the Wal Mart Super Center opened. Now, we have a new 3 story courthouse going up to house all the shoplifters from Wal Mart and all the drug users and we have Wal Mart.

What I wouldn't give to have Roses and KMart back. Even more, what I wouldn't give to have the local music stores back and the coffee shop back.

[POAS]

11. We simply do not relish or preserve

what we have in this country.

The I don't give a crap about nostalgia or history crowd prevails in this country and it is to our everlasting shame and a disservice to our future that they have prevailed.

While it is true that not everything was rosy and grand in our history and much that has changed has improved the way we live it is also true that much that has been abandoned should have, could have, been preserved and would be enriching our lives today.

That building that you labeled the "ugliest remodeling seen on my trip" seems emblematic of our rush to the future without regard for what got us to today.

[unhappycamper]

14. Filene's in downtown Boston has been a hole in the ground for at least two years.

[zonkers]

15. Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

[Mari333]

17. I believe this is the walmart effect

Its happened here also.
there is a store here that was around for 154 yrs and closed last month for good.
oldest retail store in michigan.
and the local hardware is moving out of the downtown.
right now the downtown here is a hodgepodge of tourist crap shoppes.
in the winter, the local people ignore it.
unfortunately, now, over half the people living here as locals have left for cheaper places to live, and the bobo yuppies have taken over as part time homeowners.
cue the lattes
even the local truck stop has espresso now.

[JNelson6563]

19. We are very fortunate where I live.

Our downtown is in good health. It has withstood the first mall that arrived. That mall got old and outdated and new mall came to town. Old mall got renovated to compete. Both malls have plenty of vacancies. Our downtown has very few vacancies. The community has a great sense of pride regarding downtown.

Don't get me wrong, the Wally World, Target and the others do a bang up business here but so does downtown. Of course we have plenty who are very conditioned to want lots of crap really cheap, they don't tend to support the small local businesses that pay a decent wage and do not have big box buying power. Thankfully many from the region support downtown and, interestingly enough, the booming tourist business is great for downtown. Many visitors from far and wide shop our stores and marvel at what a great downtown we have. Anyone could have it but you have to have enough people to actually shop there. All too often that is not the case.

Julie