Planning Our Places: the human ecology of land Use Story and illustration by Michael Griffith '09
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n the last day of winter it was already mild in Mt. Desert island's Salisbury Cove where i had come to experience village atmosphere, abandoning my car near the community's tiny post office. It didn't take long to walk the place, of course, or to understand its charms. Beyond the post office were clapboard cottages, a simple church, and a quietly repurposed one-room schoolhouse. frenchman Bay lapped around the edge of every view. Looping back to the post office, I asked an attendant — only one would fit behind the service window — about the building's age. "it must be from the sixties or seventies," she said, smiling patiently down the tunnel of another season, which doubtless held in store
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many such questions. "The post office boxes are from earlier, though — probably about a hundred years ago. originally they were in the general store." i leaned back from the formica counter to see the beautiful, cast mailboxes lodged rather ruthlessly in a wall of fake wood paneling. next door, the old general store had not fared much better. "it's two apartments now," said the attendant. "Kind of sad." Still, like all the older buildings in Salisbury Cove, it was set near the road, and no matter the material, or contemporary use, it related well to its surroundings. Built before the advent of air conditioning, electricity, and probably the automobile, how could it not?
After the Second World War, America's cities and towns sprawled and its villages all but disappeared. for a country drunk on victory, rich in land, and long enamored of progress, expansive, autoreliant suburbs were irresistible: grass, glass, and gasoline. the strange, squat houses unveiled in levittown, new York, in 1949 were an even more decisive rejection of history and urbanity. the optimistic "ranch house" offered a modern open plan and the illusion of space. every quarter-acre plot of land was to become a ranch, every yard a private realm of sloping lawns, and every horizon a frontier. By the late sixties this frontier looked like a mirage, but as early as 1961 Jane Jacobs had published The Death and College of the AtlAntiC MAgAzine