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A town’s downtown is the new (old) way to live |
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Written by BILL CROKE, Writers on the Range
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Thursday, 11 September 2008 |
The sun rises over the mountains and floods my room with light. I lie in bed and
listen to the cooing of conspiring pigeons on the roof. I’ve lately moved from
Cody, Wyo., to Salmon, Idaho. Cody, like other towns surrounding Yellowstone
National Park, has become an expensive place to live, especially for a freelance
writer accustomed to the bohemian life. So I’ve moved on to continue to
cultivate the Old Urbanist in me, this time on the second floor of an old
red-brick building downtown.
I read in the Wall Street Journal that Americans are embracing a New Urbanism,
as if residing downtown in a city were a new thing. The piece gave examples of a
young couple starting out in a city loft rather than a suburban starter home,
and of retirees moving back downtown for urban amenities such as restaurants,
museums and theaters that they can walk to.
High gas prices are making
life in distant suburbs, well, a bit dear. The daily commute is inflicting
economic pain. For instance, my sister living in the New York metropolitan area
spends $600 per month to drive roundtrip to work. People have started selling
McMansions when they can and are moving to downtown condominiums and renovated
lofts in formally commercial buildings.
According to the Salt Lake
Tribune, Salt Lake City has issued 194 (and counting) condominium construction
permits in the last 12 months, compared to just 13 for the previous year.
Billings, Mont., and Boise, Idaho, have both recently revitalized their
previously moribund downtowns.
My building has an outside entrance on
Main Street that opens up to a wide carpeted staircase that reminds me of the
one that Clark Gable swept Vivien Leigh up in Gone with the Wind. I’m on the
second floor of the back of the building.
My kitchen window looks
northwest over Salmon’s rooftops to the timber-fringed Salmon River Mountains.
My bedroom window faces northeast and takes in the snowy Beaverhead Mountains, a
line of peaks that are the southern spur of the Bitterroots.
I enjoy
these vistas from an apartment that reminds me of my late grandmother’s in New
York in the 1960s. The only thing missing is an elevator. The scheming pigeons
in the morning compete with hammering-sawing construction sounds as the
apartment’s manager -- in my grandmother’s time they were called superintendents
or “supers” -- renovates another unit for the building’s owner, a businessman in
San Diego.
Living downtown, especially in summer with the windows open,
can be noisy, and not only due to traffic. Three bars line two blocks across
Main Street, and a public parking lot is next to my building. Weekend closing
times can feature drunken brawls or loud marital/lovers’ spats in the parking
lot under my bedroom window. Either the cops show up, or these disturbances pass
as quickly as a summer storm. It took me awhile to get used to them. At first,
I’d awaken with a start, thinking these obnoxious revelers were actually in my
room, but nowadays I mostly sleep through it all. Determined not to throw myself
into an already volatile mix, I refrain from shouting “Quiet!” from my window.
Thankfully, no one has been shot -- yet. And once the weather cools in the fall,
I’ll be able to shut my windows and not hear a thing.
As for the town in
the serene light of day, everything is in walking or biking distance from home.
The grocery store, the bank, the post office, City Hall, the public library and
Island Park on the Salmon River.
One of the reasons I left Cody is that
it got too big for someone without a car. Despite having a relatively low
population of10,000, Cody is 10 miles between city limits. A trip to the grocery
store or Wal-Mart was -- for me -- a journey. Salmon has one-third of Cody’s
population contained in about a mile, with most municipal and commercial
activity concentrated downtown. There are no big-box stores.
I spend as
much time outdoors as possible, and as I ride my bike out of town through the
cottonwoods, I pass emerald pastures peppered with black angus cattle. The
irrigation ditches brim gin-clear. The snow-gashed Beaverheads pierce the
sky.
It’s a warm, almost hot, summer evening, and if it doesn’t cool
off, I might even sleep out on the fire escape tonight.
Bill Croke is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
He writes in Salmon, Idaho.
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