Walking no longer a good idea, we get in Hayden’s car and drive down Route 1, to the land where no one walks, the land that looks like everywhere, the mood changing. We drive into another strip mall, to see the expanding supermarket alongside a Dunkin’ Donuts and various chains. Hayden surveys, sadness creeping into her voice, into her professorial tone. Her car’s blinker is blinking and her head is shaking as she opines about the year the federal government changed the tax code in order to encourage edge-of-town development and the year that the edge-of-town-development-feeding interstate program was begun, 1954 and 1956, respectively—arcane-seeming dates which made monumental changes to the American landscape. “It [was a] direct response to feeling that the pro‑ duction of suburban housing might be slowing a little bit,” she says. “And instead of saying, Okay, let’s do more public housing, or let’s do more innercity preservation, they pumped money straight into the greenfield construction of supermarkets, fast-food places, chain hotels. So that’s the worst possible choice in terms of obsolescence, and in terms of moving economic activity out to beyond where the tract houses are and letting everything else go, and the roads just enhance it. That’s what was subsidized. I mean, out of all the money that could have been spent on community planning and decent architecture—it went to bogus, banal, and cheap architecture instead.”
[a street is a public space]
FEBRUARY 2011
Here at Route 1 and Fair Street, Fair Street is no “Yes,” she says, using the words that fill her Field longer so fair. On the side marked “historic” is Guide, “the big-box, category-killer, strip-mall stuff the 17th-century home of Thomas Cooke, still used, just bears down on everything. Once a community the plaque by the door noting that he arrived in that has been around for 300 years has literally 1639 by ship. Kitty-corner is a Sunoco and a Deli been ripped apart, it’s pretty fragile,” she continues. Unlimited, then an old school being condoized, “It’s gone. You see other towns that are gone, and then Tommy’s Tanning in the strip mall. “You you see how fragile they can really be. A few more see, it’s not like everything is going to disappear in gas stations and big-box stores, the scale is gone one night,” Hayden says. “It tends to just wear and there’s nothing left to hold onto, no sense of away at old neighborhoods. The cars and trucks place—and you can see towns like that all over.” invade serenity and change its scale. It’s relentless Continued on next page pressure. This is not an edge to be treated lightly,” she says. “I-95, once you come off of it, it bleeds into the town.” BLUEPRINT.
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