Replaced by Shopping Malls
Dec. 30th, 2007 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saavedra77My niece April put me up during Christmas week at her townhouse in Mt. Laurel, which happens to be the town where I lived as a kid in the 'seventies.
Except that it's not.
The Mt. Laurel I knew was a farming community, mainly devoted to orchards, criss-crossed by a few lonely country roads. Back then, you had to drive to a neighboring municipality to find so much as a supermarket. The residents were mainly white, aging.
Today's Mt. Laurel is a collection of (to me) practically indistinguishable developments and strip malls with a drastically larger, younger, and somewhat more diverse population. It's relatively affluent, there are national chain stores, even--for some obscure reason--hotels.
Adjust the lyrics of The Pretenders "My City Was Gone" to refer to South Jersey, and you have a pretty good idea of how I feel, taking all of this in: "my pretty countryside/had been paved down the middle .../The farms ... had been replaced by shopping malls ..."
Don't get me wrong (sorry, I seem to have The Pretenders on the brain): I'm a pretty urban person, at this point. I can't imagine living in the suburbs, let alone in the country, any more. And on the whole, today's Mt. Laurel seems like a more interesting place to live than the old one was. The transformation is just kind of bewildering: "I was stunned and amazed, my childhood memories/ slowly swirled past like the wind through the trees."
On Thursday, April and I drove by the little seven-acre dirt farm where I grew up, on an obscure dead-end street not far from Rancocas Woods. Incredibly, the house and property are still there--unkempt, neglected, but there. I can't imagine why the property hasn't yet been swept up in the decades-long wave of subdivision and gentrification that's engulfed the area since the 'eighties. But there it was: the white stucco house fronted by its circular driveway, the adjoining yards and fields divided by rows of the pine, cedar, holly, and oak trees, the cinderblock barn with its sagging black shingle roof looking like the ruins of a forgotten civilization.
Which it sort of is.
Except that it's not.
The Mt. Laurel I knew was a farming community, mainly devoted to orchards, criss-crossed by a few lonely country roads. Back then, you had to drive to a neighboring municipality to find so much as a supermarket. The residents were mainly white, aging.
Today's Mt. Laurel is a collection of (to me) practically indistinguishable developments and strip malls with a drastically larger, younger, and somewhat more diverse population. It's relatively affluent, there are national chain stores, even--for some obscure reason--hotels.
Adjust the lyrics of The Pretenders "My City Was Gone" to refer to South Jersey, and you have a pretty good idea of how I feel, taking all of this in: "my pretty countryside/had been paved down the middle .../The farms ... had been replaced by shopping malls ..."
Don't get me wrong (sorry, I seem to have The Pretenders on the brain): I'm a pretty urban person, at this point. I can't imagine living in the suburbs, let alone in the country, any more. And on the whole, today's Mt. Laurel seems like a more interesting place to live than the old one was. The transformation is just kind of bewildering: "I was stunned and amazed, my childhood memories/ slowly swirled past like the wind through the trees."
On Thursday, April and I drove by the little seven-acre dirt farm where I grew up, on an obscure dead-end street not far from Rancocas Woods. Incredibly, the house and property are still there--unkempt, neglected, but there. I can't imagine why the property hasn't yet been swept up in the decades-long wave of subdivision and gentrification that's engulfed the area since the 'eighties. But there it was: the white stucco house fronted by its circular driveway, the adjoining yards and fields divided by rows of the pine, cedar, holly, and oak trees, the cinderblock barn with its sagging black shingle roof looking like the ruins of a forgotten civilization.
Which it sort of is.
