A Ghostly Retreat, Washington Post, Hank Stuever, September 21, 2000

This article is about U.S. Route 1 between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and in particular a water bed store in College Park, Maryland. It belongs to one of my favorite genres: long pieces of observational journalism and suburban archaeology that explore aging sections of quintessentially American highways.

It’s always interesting to me how recently these landscapes still had lots of really old stuff. 2000 feels like the modern era, yet the Route 1 that Stuever describes is already gone. I’ve read pieces like this from the ’70s and ’80s, and they describe stuff that stretches back all the way to beginning of the automobile era. In Laurel, a few miles north of College Park, there’s an abandoned Texaco garage from the ’50s, and a one-story motel with a hand-painted Western-themed sign. I love it.

How can you not marvel at the layers and layers of American history and culture in corridors like this, laid out in an open-air museum, hiding in plain sight?

Sometimes the people still want a waterbed, a sexy bed, riding low to the carpet and offering itself like a bedroom performance stage. Rose Taylor knows what they mean. She'll show them a black-lacquer canopy waterbed, with overhead mirrors, hinged and bolted together in one of the small, dimly lit rooms of her store, which is in an ancient, three-story former farmhouse in College Park--a building that predates the paving of Route 1 in 1906. The house: It was a country grocery store back in Route 1's motor lodge and conga room glory days.

The old farmhouse/waterbed store is supposedly haunted, too:

The kind of people who won't believe in a haunted waterbed store are the kind of people who wouldn't believe in the odd, junky sanctity of Route 1 to begin with.

Read the whole thing!

How the Pandemic Supercharged Sprawl, Bloomberg CityLab, Patrick Sisson, January 5, 2022

Murfreesboro’s explosion parallels hundreds of other Covid-era boom towns across the U.S. — often small satellite suburbs and outlying exurbs where low property taxes and a strong local economy have lured new arrivals, business and construction. Suburban sprawl has been a postwar American constant, but the pandemic, which pushed many people into remote work and offered families looking for more space a fresh reason to relocate, supercharged the trend.

“Covid-era boom towns.” What a strange phrase. I have no idea how long any of these trends will continue, and whether or not referring to this period as the “Covid era” will even make sense in a few years or not. But there’s no question that sprawling development has sped up during the pandemic, and that’s probably not a great thing.

I’d take issue, however, with the article’s language, just a little bit. Take this sentence: “With growth has come a familiar set of challenges, including traffic, environmental damage and city services that struggle to reach a spread-out population.” By “growth” he is referring to sprawl, but sprawl is a particular form of growth that particularly aggravates these problems. That’s a point that often gets lost in these discussions.

Logan Sausage Company Is Living High On the Hog, Washington City Paper, Jessica Sidman, October 23, 2014

I came across the article because I recently bought a package of Logan’s smoked sweet Italian sausages at my local Giant supermarket. Spoiler alert: they’re delicious. I was looking up the Alexandria-based company online, and this article popped up.

It’s a great profile of a local company, and it touches on some of the food and restaurant trends that are ascendant today: for example, the company’s local status is a selling point for restaurants, who want to serve ingredients with a name and face, that distinguish them. Logan’s also acts as a contract manufacturer, producing special recipes exclusively for certain restaurants. This is a kind of flexibility a mass national producer can’t offer.

This can all come across as a bit snobbish to some people. But it’s really just good old entrepreneurship, and it’s an example of businesses and customers forming a local economic ecosystem together. And that’s great.

Little Shrines, The Lamp, Nic Rowan, January 6, 2022

Short and sweet, this piece gets at something I write about often: how objectively meaningless things can help us form rituals, serve as little landmarks, remind us of memories, etc. I argue that a lot of what we call NIMBYism is simply the manifestation of these human tendencies in the area of land use, which, in such cases, makes it not necessarily right, but understandable and honestly come by.

But this isn’t about land use, so just give it a click!

Related Reading:

New and Old #1

New and Old #2

Take a look at that—the 40th entry in this series!

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