My Hometown.
I grew up in a town outside of Philadelphia. And, when I say ‘outside of Philadelphia,’ I really mean, ‘outside of Philadelphia.’ We were no more than 15 minutes outside of the city limits, so, it gave our town just enough license to sprawl out like a beleaguered factory worker without giving it too much liberty to become a giant covered in Wal-Mart-shaped postules.
Even though my hometown was founded in the late 1600s, it was very much a product of the GI era. It was covered in houses shaped like shoe boxes, pinstriped lawns, local restaurants and blanketed by the lustful gaze of chain stores. It had those bizarre, unprotected 2-lane highways that had a number assigned to it that I could never remember. For a lot of people, my hometown was a little slice of manufactured heaven that sat in the shadow of the mountain of social industrialism that the post-War era became emblematic of.
A lot of these features were considered artifacts of a bygone age – things that I never truly understood the impact of until I grew older. This wide-openness built the drive-through, factory wages, twisted mountain roads and metal piping. Even though my town was built on water wheels, wagon wheels and western winds, the spirit that truly defined it would be that unique mixture of paranoia and convenience that could only have happened during the Cold War.
Perhaps the most striking example of this is that, before the county built my elementary school, its plot housed a NIKE missile silo. These silos were placed all around the United States as an exercise in caution, in case the Russkies shot off a pea in our direction. These silos were strategically positioned to protect the nation’s industrial assets. We were surrounded by them, because the gem in our area’s crown was our aerial manufacturing and oil refineries.
When nuclear disarmament came and went, many of the NIKE missile sites were abandoned at the ready. The government disarmed the missile and left it there. They built a school on it – my school. Somehow, it managed to find itself as a nature preserve, but I had always suspected that somebody forgot to shut the door and some birds got in. We cherished the structure, but knew nothing of it.
Many moons later, the district rebuilt the school to help house the sudden surge of children that were growing up in the cookie-cutter houses sprouting out of abandoned farms. I went back there after having been through my first few years of college in Pittsburgh, and the site was demolished — entirely leveled.
I’ll never forget that it took them nearly 50 years to tear down an artifact that had taken nearly 200 years to put up.
Why? I guess that a sense of prosperity is hard to give up.
