Take a look at this historic building in my hometown, down a little side street:

I had to use a Google Maps screenshot, because it never occurred to me to take a picture of this building when I was in town. I knew nothing about it—I wouldn’t even have remembered what street it was on—until I saw a post on Facebook.

There is one obvious thing about the building—the second floor was added later. That was in the early 1950s.

Recently, up until a few years ago, this building was the sheriff’s headquarters. Now it sits empty.

But it wasn’t the sheriff who added the second floor.

It was the Hunterdon County Democrat: the old (and still existing!) county paper, which was once headquartered right in the little downtown of Flemington, which is the county seat. The Democrat, like so many other old Flemington enterprises, is now located in a much larger facility in the neighboring township, rather than in the town itself. (I wrote about this pheneonon in regard to the town’s erstwhile supermarkets.) By 1976, it already had its new building, as the cover of this commemorative paper shows.

Here it was in the old days. Look at the sign hanging on it, too. It looks like it might even have been neon; I would have loved to see that.

Now the funny thing is, this story from the paper itself is about the addition of the second floor, and the issue is dated 1959. Yet a bunch of commenters on the Facebook post distinctly remember the addition being there earlier, as early as 1954 (one recalls a pre-1959 meeting with an editor there that took place on a second floor.) Newspapers may lie, but not about something so obviously checkable as that!

The blurb also notes, “The addition will extend across the front and to half the depth of the building, which was originally designed in 1926 so that a second story could be added when required.” (My emphasis.)

So the building went up in 1926 (though the paper itself pre-exists that), was expanded in the ’50s, and was then vacated for a much larger facility outside the city limits within another 25 years—just as grocery stores consolidated, got bigger, and moved out to the suburbs. These little individual stories are America’s postwar development trends in miniature.

And the fact that the building was designed to be expanded! That’s exactly the sort of flexibility we’ve squeezed out. Semi-relatedly, it turns out one of the reasons Flemington’s downtown storefronts struggled was because the town used to have an off-street parking requirement, which was effectively impossible to obey.

There are so many ways in which small enterprises find it difficult to do business in today’s corporate and land-use environment. And those two things are very much intertwined.

But there doesn’t always have to be a morose conclusion. Just enjoy the little bits of embodied history that places like this still contain.

Related Reading:

It’s the Scale (Is It?)

Workhorse Buildings

What Else is Walkable and Mixed-Use?

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