Our Saturday a long time friend told me that he was closing his hardware store in Roanoke, Virginia after twenty-seven years of operation.
I actually felt a profound sense of loss for myself and for the neighborhood. It will take another ten to fifteen minutes to get to another hardware store. When I get there, they won't know me.
Their stores aren't as nice as the one where I was used to shopping. We would go out to breakfast at our favorite breakfast restaurant, and most times go next door to the hardware store for something. It was a routine that we had grown into over our nineteen years in Roanoke.
We are gradually watching our neighborhood in Roanoke County change dramatically. It seems that developers are finding all the remaining pieces of land where they can cram in a few patio homes. The world of green that attracted us here is under attack.
For years we had a favorite little farmhouse tucked up against a hillside. It was on the back way out of our neighborhood on a tiny mountain road that is so common here on the edge of the mountains.
First I was shocked to a development just up the road from the small farm. The rumor has it dozens of new homes are planned for that spot. Then as I drove down the twisting road, I saw the little farmhouse was gone along with most of the hillside behind it.
It made me wonder how the developers could get by with dumping so much traffic on what is pretty close to a single lane road.
Long ago I tried in vain to get Roanoke County to buy a 99 acre tract of mountain land which was full of hiking trails. Of course I didn't have much luck since some developers wanted it also. Fortunately only a few homes will go on it, but the trails are long gone.
I have never been one for wanting to be the last one to move into paradise, but I have always hoped that the fundamental character of my neighborhoods wouldn't completely change.
I doubt that the neighborhood hardware store leaving is the last nail in the coffin, but we are down to our last service station, and there are rumors that our neighborhood grocery store is too small to be profitable. If both of those go, it will make a difference. There will still be the churches, the schools, our drugstore and a few restaurants, but it would be another blow.
I cannot help but wonder why we decconstruct neighborhoods when so many people are searching for a feeling of neighborhood?
A lot of it comes from market forces, and much of it is that zoning and tax policies seem to be blunt tools to use when trying to preserve a neighborhood. They work better when trying to create one. I am sure much of the change comes from the pressure on small business.
In our other home on the coast, we just lost our main pizza place. Since it is still a good business opportunity, I have high hopes it will be replaced. There is a lot of worry on the coast about businesses disappearing as people buy up prime waterfront for homes.
Sometimes you have to turn a neighborhood into a tourist attraction to preserve it. My hometown of Mount Airy, NC has in effect done that. Their Main Street has become something of a return to an earlier time when small stores lined the streets of our towns. It has done well in spite of the malls.
The hardware store is part tourist attraction, part hardware store. The same thing happened in downtown Roanoke where the hardware store on their Farmers' Market is as much a museum as it is a functioning hardware store.
Maybe the life we want will end up in a museum, and we will just visit it once in a while.
I hope that is not the case, but I wonder how many of the four hardware store in our area on the coast will be around next year now that Lowe's has opened a home improvement store nearby?
Of course the other option could be to live in the museum. Maybe that's why I am so happy living among the small towns of the Carolina coast.
It could be that it is a museum, and I just don't know it. Come visit and let me know what you think.
Comments(2)