"They left us a good place."
The Strong America Tour continues this week with stops in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. Today we offer a reflection from Oren Helbok, one of the tour event organizers in Bloombsurg, Pennsylvania. Helbok writes about how residents are using the arts to make their town stronger, and why they are bringing Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn to Bloomsburg on November 7.
— The Editors
Downtown Bloomsburg. Photo by the author.
Back in 1985, the great New York Times columnist Russell Baker wrote a piece about taking his children for a trip by car across America with the goal of seeing the country “before every place became the same place.” Even as a teenager, born and raised in the Bronx, I knew what Baker meant: My own father and I had taken car trips up and down the East Coast, and we had seen the proliferation of strip malls and franchise restaurants on the way into and out of seemingly every town. In that innocent age, New York City seemed immune. Its lively diversity built a wall against the invasion of the national chains…right? We didn’t even realize the contradiction of reality with our thinking when we went to the Burger King on Broadway to buy lunch, or when a Barnes & Noble opened in Lower Manhattan.
Now I live in a town of 14,000 people in north-central Pennsylvania, on the north bank of the Susquehanna River and three hours by car from New York City. The Route 11 strip has a McDonald’s, a Burger King, an Arby’s, a Pizza Hut, and a Wendy’s. Another Wendy’s and another Burger King stand at the I-80 interchange two miles from downtown, along with a KFC and a Starbucks, with a Ruby Tuesday and a Cracker Barrel across Route 42, and a Panera and an Olive Garden on the other side of the Interstate, not to mention the Walmart and Lowe’s and Home Depot and Holiday Inn Express and Comfort Suites and Quality Inn and and and.
Until the late 1980s—shortly after Russell Baker showed his kids the old America—Main Street in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania had five department stores, including a Sears, a Montgomery Ward, a J. C. Penney, a Woolworth’s, and an independent, Racusin’s. Perhaps as those national chains had moved in, in the early 20th-century, locals worried about the invaders. But Main Street in that era also had numerous other independent, locally-owned businesses: two drug stores, shoe stores, women’s and men’s clothing stores, toy stores, two movie theaters, a candy store, ice cream shops, and every other sort of retail establishment one can think of in a county seat town.
Fountain and the Caldwell Consistory. Photo by the author.
Looked at by someone simply pulling off I-80 to get gas and a bite to eat, our place has become the same as every other place; looked at by a longtime resident (and as a 27-year Pennsylvanian, I do not yet qualify), our Main Street looks sad, with almost no retail businesses left, and Dollar General and the Salvation Army as our anchor stores.
And yet.
Dollar General chose to come to Main Street, where the company knew they would find an underserved market, and the store occupies half of the space where Woolworth’s once collected nickels and dimes and that then sat empty for a decade. Everyone in the downtown—business owner and apartment dweller alike—now shops in that space again. A couple of small businesses and the local Democratic Party headquarters occupy the rest of the former department store. The two stories above have apartments rented to just a few of the 9,000 students at Bloomsburg University, one of the fourteen State System schools and the largest employer in the county. Another three or four thousand of those students live in off-campus housing throughout the town, making student rentals a $40 million annual business. Although we have empty storefronts on Main Street, the two- and three-story buildings, most dating from the 1890s into the 1910s, remain viable because of those renters.
I run an arts organization, The Exchange, out of a storefront just up the block from Dollar General. Our art gallery specializes in open-call shows: We tell the community the theme of the show, and the work pours in, with the interpretation of the theme and the medium entirely up to each artist. As long as a piece fits through the front door, it goes into the show. We opened in this space in the early spring of 2014. Since then more than 500 people have shown artwork here—everyone from Bloom U. art professors to preschool children, and in fact their pieces often hang right next to each other. As part of our outreach, we send facilitators to more than fifty venues in a four-county area with our “Art Cart” (actually usually a couple of grocery bags) and we do simple art activities—not teaching people how to draw or how to paint, but through the use of simple, often recycled, materials, helping all of our participants to bring out the beauty inside themselves.
Wherever we can, we encourage people to look at the beauty all around them. This can mean organizing a plein air painting event at a local park. It can also mean a Facebook post about the clock in our county courthouse or a spectacular sunset at “Bloom-henge” (when the sun sets exactly down Main Street; this happens twice a year on our west-southwest-running street, in mid-December and early January). Even if the signs on the buildings may represent mega-businesses with headquarters in faraway cities, the buildings remain ours. Of the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S., only one has Bloomsburg’s courthouse. Yes, our fountain and even our Civil War monument came out of catalogs, but no other town square looks quite like ours—and certainly no other square has an identical building to our Caldwell Consistory, the Masonic cathedral, a brick and stone masterpiece with a cornerstone laid in 1906.
Bloomsburg at sunset. Photo by the author.
Within that building, the proscenium-arched Auditorium stage has 65 hand-painted backdrops in the flyspace, all of them dating from 1912. Until 2010 or so, only Masons ever saw them, in the course of their degree ceremonies, but the enlightened 21st-century Masonic leaders realized that in order to keep their building viable—and perhaps attract new members—they should open it to the community. Among the dozens of events that have subsequently taken place within, The Exchange has produced five blues festivals that used the Auditorium and other spaces in the Consistory, and thousands of people have walked in and stared in wonder at the backdrops and at the multi-colored cast-iron balcony railing and at the odd wire contraption under every wooden folding seat—the rack on which to hang your top hat.
Across our region, individuals and businesses and municipalities have recognized the importance of the arts to making a sense of place. We have lively outdoor summer concert series in Bloomsburg and neighboring communities, and more and more murals have appeared in the downtowns. Although the punk music concerts of the 1980s have faded into history, Bloomsburg and the surrounding region have a livelier live music scene than anyone can remember, with bluegrass and blues and open mics most nights of every week. And Bloomsburg University has finally begun seriously promoting all of the music and dance and theater and fine arts that its students and faculty provide all year long.
Nothing to do here? Nothing to look at? Ahem, just look around!
In short, we have not come to Strong Towns with any sense of despair, and we do not look for magical solutions: We have downtowns and a region full of opportunities and potential and a great framework on which to build a better future. Those of us interested in going deliberately into that future, making the right decisions, look for some guidance and some good ideas that we can build on to help bring our fellow citizens along. No one needs to remember our names, but we hope in twenty or fifty years someone looks back at this era and says, “Those people made good choices and left us a good place.”
About the Author
Oren B. Helbok has worked as a carpenter, furniture-maker, zoning officer, and independent school administrator. He now directs The Exchange, a nonprofit arts organization in Bloomsburg. A passionate amateur photographer, Oren exhibits his photos in galleries across Pennsylvania. His writing and photos have appeared in local, regional and national magazines, and at his own site, WhereSteamLives.net. Now with an aggregate of more than forty years of service on numerous nonprofit boards, Oren lives with his family in Bloomsburg, Pa., biking to work in warm weather, walking the rest of the year.
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