I want to show you a little European village in the countryside, from an 1882 map/painting:

It’s a shame more of America doesn’t look like this.

Oops, sorry! This is a map of Somerville, New Jersey, in 1882!

As you can see, the grid is still being built out or at least filled in. Main Street runs through the middle, where you can see a number of taller buildings, many of which, I believe, survive.

Here’s roughly the same view on Google Maps today:

The train station is in the same spot, to the right of the middle towards the bottom. Main Street is still a classic small-town corridor. The surrounding area has been filled in quite a bit and the grid is larger, with more residential-only areas now.

What you can see, then, is that a very quintessentially urban place lost its urban character over the decades. Here’s a pair of Somerville pieces I wrote awhile ago, about some new developments in town and restoring the town’s walkable, urban character (part 1, and part 2). There are some photos in there, showing you a typical but very well preserved and economically vital American small town.

I also want to show you a small English village that’s an example of what our American small towns might look like today if we had retained their urban character:

Sorry! I messed up again. This is Middleburg, Virginia. All you need to know to know that it looks like it did 100-plus years ago is that it has a grid without a sprawl ring around it. Because that’s just what an urban settlement, of any size, looked like, anywhere in the world, up until we decided to mess with success and history.

If you build up the core a little bit and horizontally expand the grid, you have what we call a city. If you keep it this size, you have what we call a village or a town. In what sense are these not all fundamentally the same kind of place? (It isn’t always a grid per se, of course—look at the winding Italian villages that are so beloved by American tourists.)

This is why I always feel a kind of fascination, even awe, when I explore an American small town. I realize that I’m standing in the middle of something left over from a previous time, something none of us alive today built or even quite understand. We still inhabit these places. We still love them. But we don’t know entirely what they are, or why we don’t build them anymore. Our common inheritance has become either a lifestyle amenity or an afterthought.

But I look at that map, and think, we built that. What’s stopping us?

Related Reading:

Old Town Alexandria

The Work Of Restoration

A Bright Future

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