I agree this collective misunderstanding / memory hole is one of the biggest problems in our cities and towns. It’s a big part of why we named the organization Strong *Towns*, not Strong Cities or something similar.
The closest word that I think almost works is “historical.” I think everyone kind of realizes that we used to build differently and that they like the old stuff that’s still around. The hard part is, as you point out, so many places self-destructed in the mid century that most examples we have are kind of compromised or scarred versions of the “real thing,” or are a small part of a much bigger city.
But the even more important point you make is our lost dynamism. The idea that most towns in 1900 saw themselves as naturally growing into the next Chicago — and that was a good thing — is really hard to relate to today. But of course this is the problem with the suburban pattern. In the historic pattern more people made everything better — it scaled up continuously and gracefully. In the suburban pattern more people means more traffic and less remaining nature but almost no additional amenities.
Thanks for the comment. Yeah, there are a lot of historic urban forms, but very few that actually retain their original function. It's kind of chicken and egg to explain or more importantly demonstrate. I'm hoping that my hometown will actually become a good example: an old building downtown that used to be a supermarket is going to be a small grocery store again, and the old historic hotel is being rebuilt with a modern apartment building behind the historic hotel. It's a decent chance to model what growth in the middle of an existing small town looks like. This isn't too common.
When my friends from Iowa ask me to describe what DC is like, I say: "It's like Main Street but copy-pasted ten thousand times." If you took the main street of any Iowan town and copy-pasted it ten thousand times, you'd get a big city.
I also think that people living in big metro areas have a different idea of what "small town" means versus people who live in the "hinterland". Here in DC, it seems people's imagery of a small town is more like a vacation town, like Shepherdstown, WV; in Iowa, a small town is a working-class settlement far from large metro areas. Your article actually seemed to touch on the former perception when you wrote:
"[I]t once had a glass factory; it even once had a foundry, just a couple of blocks off its downtown, staffed in part by European immigrant workers who lived in inexpensive homes nearby and walked to work. These are simply not things that happen in “small towns,” as we conceive of them today."
These are *precisely* the things that happen *today* in small towns in Iowa, like Marshalltown and Storm Lake. Immigrants from Latin America and Southeast Asia live in inexpensive homes near meatpacking plants and walk to work. One of my friends lives with his parents in a town of 1,500 people and walks to work at *his* local meatpacking plant.
Wow. Yeah, in the east that is largely no longer the case, most small towns are either vacation/long weekend/day trip type places, or just kind of *there* as old core areas between the modern suburbs but not really economically important in and of themselves. But many of them began life that way. Some of the places that get called "small towns" today were also probably more like early rail towns or streetcar suburbs that were more like bedroom communities in an urban form.
The small towns in Pennsylvania's agricultural heartland might be like the Iowan ones! When I went to York (not a small town, though) and Chambersburg there were lots of Haitian and Puerto Rican immigrants.
Every urbanist should start their reading with Louis Wirth's, "Urbanism As a Way of Life" for the same reason that anyone interested in western philosophy should start with the pre-Socratics. "Urbanism As a Way of Life" is clumsy and diffuse, but he is using much of our present-day urbanist language. By seeing the struggles in Wirth, we should recognize our own struggles.
Speaking of philosophy, Paul Churchland claimed that psychology had not changed its basic theory much from that of Aristotle. To me, urbanism is to Wirth as Churchland's characterization of psychology is to Aristotle. Urbanism is in a theoretical rut.
One thing to appreciate about Providence and other "small cities" is that they used to be quite large for their time. Providence was the 20th largest city in America in 1900, whereas it no longer ranks in the top 100 today. I live in Spokane, WA, which was essentially a boom town, going from 0 to 100,000+ from 1880-1910 (and putting it in the top 50). The city center is full of beautiful old buildings, and it's much more urban than you'd expect of a city of 250,000, at least in parts. Some towns still have the bones of a concentrated, pre-car design.
I think you've put it exactly right in prior posts that the terms "town" and "city" in a vacuum are kind of meaningless. It's really about the DNA and a "small town" (in the traditional sense) is basically a very immature "city". After the ST gathering I did a bike trip through Massachusetts (where I grew up) and was reminded that there are many "towns" (the state is very "township" based Iike NJ) that basically have the DNA of a suburban census designated place, which in no way represent an immature city. But there are some older "towns" that are. The DNA is really a function of the age and history as we all know; pre/post WWII to generalize.
A rejoinder: I don’t think that size and maturity are more than loosely related. Red Lodge, which I discuss in my reply to Addison, performed all the functions it was expected to, including a once fabulous opera house. The same is true of other small cities when the industrial base was widely distributed. Millville, NJ, could have been called the hub of the glass industry without too much of a stretch. Tiny towns along the Connecticut River were on the Soviet’s list to bomb because they were where precision instruments were made. Keene, NH was a power in making toys. New England towns are a somewhat different pattern, but most of them had one or more mills and were more tied into the larger economy than one might imagine.
I think you're right that its the number one thing, but there are a lot of variations on the theme. And as was pointed out above re small towns in IA, the evolution of small towns continues, just as it does in the 'burbs and the largest cities..
Lawrence started in 1855, and was a free-standing city until the 1980s when the high-tech side of the KC metro area started to include Lawrence. For some reason it just never *tried* to be urban. Enid started in 1893.
I have definitely had this same thought. I remember coming back to my small East Tennessee home town (<60k) after a high school trip to NYC and I was struck by the thought that outside of Manhattan NYC was just like the 4 or 5 blocks of Mainstreet over 40 square miles or so. If there was a subway station that teleported you from New York to Tennessee, the only difference you'd notice is how many protestant churches there were
I was in center city Philadelphia last week for the first time in years. I almost hate to say it, but the stench was just terrible. It smelled like an open sewer running through a landfill. Manhattan and New Orleans are the same: Las Vegas is not. I just cannot abide being in a place that careless about the face it presents to the public.
My friend, John Clayton (you should all be reading his Natural Stories on Substack) and I have had a number of conversations about the urbanity of Red Lodge, MT, which is half the slze of Flemington. RL was a mining town with substantial buildings and a diverse ethnic population from the time of its founding until the mining began to tail off, then was ended by a disaster in the 1940s. It has had to reinvent itself to match the popular image of a Western town. Small just cannot be part of the definition of urban.
Instant comparison: Enid was a city, with three skyscrapers, a well-developed streetcar, four factories, headquarters of two nationally known companies, and interurbans to nearby towns. Lawrence, around the same size, was not a city. No tall buildings, not even a dense downtown. It was just a residential area for the university.
I agree this collective misunderstanding / memory hole is one of the biggest problems in our cities and towns. It’s a big part of why we named the organization Strong *Towns*, not Strong Cities or something similar.
The closest word that I think almost works is “historical.” I think everyone kind of realizes that we used to build differently and that they like the old stuff that’s still around. The hard part is, as you point out, so many places self-destructed in the mid century that most examples we have are kind of compromised or scarred versions of the “real thing,” or are a small part of a much bigger city.
But the even more important point you make is our lost dynamism. The idea that most towns in 1900 saw themselves as naturally growing into the next Chicago — and that was a good thing — is really hard to relate to today. But of course this is the problem with the suburban pattern. In the historic pattern more people made everything better — it scaled up continuously and gracefully. In the suburban pattern more people means more traffic and less remaining nature but almost no additional amenities.
Thanks for the comment. Yeah, there are a lot of historic urban forms, but very few that actually retain their original function. It's kind of chicken and egg to explain or more importantly demonstrate. I'm hoping that my hometown will actually become a good example: an old building downtown that used to be a supermarket is going to be a small grocery store again, and the old historic hotel is being rebuilt with a modern apartment building behind the historic hotel. It's a decent chance to model what growth in the middle of an existing small town looks like. This isn't too common.
When my friends from Iowa ask me to describe what DC is like, I say: "It's like Main Street but copy-pasted ten thousand times." If you took the main street of any Iowan town and copy-pasted it ten thousand times, you'd get a big city.
I also think that people living in big metro areas have a different idea of what "small town" means versus people who live in the "hinterland". Here in DC, it seems people's imagery of a small town is more like a vacation town, like Shepherdstown, WV; in Iowa, a small town is a working-class settlement far from large metro areas. Your article actually seemed to touch on the former perception when you wrote:
"[I]t once had a glass factory; it even once had a foundry, just a couple of blocks off its downtown, staffed in part by European immigrant workers who lived in inexpensive homes nearby and walked to work. These are simply not things that happen in “small towns,” as we conceive of them today."
These are *precisely* the things that happen *today* in small towns in Iowa, like Marshalltown and Storm Lake. Immigrants from Latin America and Southeast Asia live in inexpensive homes near meatpacking plants and walk to work. One of my friends lives with his parents in a town of 1,500 people and walks to work at *his* local meatpacking plant.
Wow. Yeah, in the east that is largely no longer the case, most small towns are either vacation/long weekend/day trip type places, or just kind of *there* as old core areas between the modern suburbs but not really economically important in and of themselves. But many of them began life that way. Some of the places that get called "small towns" today were also probably more like early rail towns or streetcar suburbs that were more like bedroom communities in an urban form.
The small towns in Pennsylvania's agricultural heartland might be like the Iowan ones! When I went to York (not a small town, though) and Chambersburg there were lots of Haitian and Puerto Rican immigrants.
Every urbanist should start their reading with Louis Wirth's, "Urbanism As a Way of Life" for the same reason that anyone interested in western philosophy should start with the pre-Socratics. "Urbanism As a Way of Life" is clumsy and diffuse, but he is using much of our present-day urbanist language. By seeing the struggles in Wirth, we should recognize our own struggles.
Speaking of philosophy, Paul Churchland claimed that psychology had not changed its basic theory much from that of Aristotle. To me, urbanism is to Wirth as Churchland's characterization of psychology is to Aristotle. Urbanism is in a theoretical rut.
One thing to appreciate about Providence and other "small cities" is that they used to be quite large for their time. Providence was the 20th largest city in America in 1900, whereas it no longer ranks in the top 100 today. I live in Spokane, WA, which was essentially a boom town, going from 0 to 100,000+ from 1880-1910 (and putting it in the top 50). The city center is full of beautiful old buildings, and it's much more urban than you'd expect of a city of 250,000, at least in parts. Some towns still have the bones of a concentrated, pre-car design.
I think you've put it exactly right in prior posts that the terms "town" and "city" in a vacuum are kind of meaningless. It's really about the DNA and a "small town" (in the traditional sense) is basically a very immature "city". After the ST gathering I did a bike trip through Massachusetts (where I grew up) and was reminded that there are many "towns" (the state is very "township" based Iike NJ) that basically have the DNA of a suburban census designated place, which in no way represent an immature city. But there are some older "towns" that are. The DNA is really a function of the age and history as we all know; pre/post WWII to generalize.
A rejoinder: I don’t think that size and maturity are more than loosely related. Red Lodge, which I discuss in my reply to Addison, performed all the functions it was expected to, including a once fabulous opera house. The same is true of other small cities when the industrial base was widely distributed. Millville, NJ, could have been called the hub of the glass industry without too much of a stretch. Tiny towns along the Connecticut River were on the Soviet’s list to bomb because they were where precision instruments were made. Keene, NH was a power in making toys. New England towns are a somewhat different pattern, but most of them had one or more mills and were more tied into the larger economy than one might imagine.
Yeah. It mostly comes down to whether the car was the dominant means of transportation when the place first started getting built, doesn’t it?
I think you're right that its the number one thing, but there are a lot of variations on the theme. And as was pointed out above re small towns in IA, the evolution of small towns continues, just as it does in the 'burbs and the largest cities..
I live in central Illinois, in a town/city. It’s technically a city but I’d thought of as a small town — about 30K.
But I come from a REAL small town of 200 people (now down to 170!) so to call where I am now “small” doesn’t feel right.
Lawrence started in 1855, and was a free-standing city until the 1980s when the high-tech side of the KC metro area started to include Lawrence. For some reason it just never *tried* to be urban. Enid started in 1893.
I have definitely had this same thought. I remember coming back to my small East Tennessee home town (<60k) after a high school trip to NYC and I was struck by the thought that outside of Manhattan NYC was just like the 4 or 5 blocks of Mainstreet over 40 square miles or so. If there was a subway station that teleported you from New York to Tennessee, the only difference you'd notice is how many protestant churches there were
Dublin is another famous low-rise city.
I was in center city Philadelphia last week for the first time in years. I almost hate to say it, but the stench was just terrible. It smelled like an open sewer running through a landfill. Manhattan and New Orleans are the same: Las Vegas is not. I just cannot abide being in a place that careless about the face it presents to the public.
My friend, John Clayton (you should all be reading his Natural Stories on Substack) and I have had a number of conversations about the urbanity of Red Lodge, MT, which is half the slze of Flemington. RL was a mining town with substantial buildings and a diverse ethnic population from the time of its founding until the mining began to tail off, then was ended by a disaster in the 1940s. It has had to reinvent itself to match the popular image of a Western town. Small just cannot be part of the definition of urban.
Instant comparison: Enid was a city, with three skyscrapers, a well-developed streetcar, four factories, headquarters of two nationally known companies, and interurbans to nearby towns. Lawrence, around the same size, was not a city. No tall buildings, not even a dense downtown. It was just a residential area for the university.
Were these built at the same time or was Lawrence basically a suburb? (Not familiar with it.)
Lawrence has always been squeezed in between Topeka and Kansas City and its 'burbs. Enid is out on the plains, 90 minutes, give or take, to OKC.