“But Not Forgotten” for 25% off
through April 30th.
AND, like the But Not
Today’s Excerpt:
Downtown’s Decline
“What would you like?” she asked in a subtle Southern drawl. A man of few words, he replied, “Well, I’d like a date, but if I can’t have that, I’ll just take a cherry Coke.
They were married less than a year later and, with the birth of their first son, their family quickly began to grow. Dad worked two full-time jobs to make ends meet — 3 to 11 p.m. at Colonial Rubber and midnight to 8 a.m. at the Pennsylvania Railroad roundhouse. Mom worked downtown — as a seamstress at H.W. Gossard Co. and waitress at the Fraternal Order of Eagles — between the births of their next two sons.
On the weekends, if they weren’t too exhausted from their hectic work schedule, they would head downtown, where there were department stores (Olsen’s, the Golden Rule, J.C. Penney, Sears, Woolworth’s, Kresge’s, Spiegel’s), movie theaters (the Roxy, the State, the Logan), and a plethora of quaint little restaurants, bars, drive-ins, and ice-cream parlors.
That began to change in the 1960s as the railroad declined. When large department stores left town, the smaller shops that fed off the traffic they generated also began to close. Downtown was further decimated by a series of fires that wiped out many of the old department store buildings and adjacent structures.
In 1966, a blaze — which took the assistance of 12 firefighting units (107 men) from six other cities to contain — destroyed a quarter of a block of downtown, including J.C. Penney, a billiards parlor, a drapery store, a barber shop, a drug store, and other retailers. Damages exceeded $2 million (nearly $13 million in today’s money). Four other smaller fires occurred downtown within a year, and others in 1970, ’73, ’74, ’76, ’77, and ’78 exacerbated the decline of downtown. Much of the downtown area was overbuilt as confident planners anticipated the continued boom of the city. Buildings popped up so quickly between the late 1870s and 1910s that many shared common walls — which spelled disaster when fires broke out or adjacent structures would collapse.
When Dad was laid off by Pennsy, like many of Logansport’s working men, he began commuting to Kokomo — 30 miles away — to work at a large Chrysler automobile plant. But the winter drive in an old clunker quickly forced him to look for local work. He found it at Nelson Screw Products — a small factory that produced steel tubing for the auto industry — where he worked as a janitor in 1962. A dedicated, loyal, and hard-working employee, he soon became a machinist and then shop superintendent.
Thanks to a robust American automotive industry, there were a few machine shops operating in Logansport that employed some of those who were thrown out of work when Pennsy left town. However, other cities within driving distance offered factory jobs that paid more and had better benefits, so those who could afford the necessary means of transportation began to commute — and spend their money elsewhere.
Without the massive local employment of the railroad, fewer people spent time and money downtown. Nationally, as suburbs began to sprawl, downtowns were perceived as being dirty and unsafe, and across the United States people began to flee to the outer edges of cities. In Logansport, stores that burned out were not rebuilt, and soon, parking lots and banks occupied most of downtown as attention shifted toward the forested East End.
When Dad was laid off by Pennsy, like many of Logansport’s working men, he began commuting to Kokomo — 30 miles away — to work at a large Chrysler automobile plant. But the winter drive in an old clunker quickly forced him to look for local work. He found it at Nelson Screw Products — a small factory that produced steel tubing for the auto industry — where he worked as a janitor in 1962. A dedicated, loyal, and hard-working employee, he soon became a machinist and then shop superintendent.
Thanks to a robust American automotive industry, there were a few machine shops operating in Logansport that employed some of those who were thrown out of work when Pennsy left town. However, other cities within driving distance offered factory jobs that paid more and had better benefits, so those who could afford the necessary means of transportation began to commute — and spend their money elsewhere.
Without the massive local employment of the railroad, fewer people spent time and money downtown. Nationally, as suburbs began to sprawl, downtowns were perceived as being dirty and unsafe, and across the United States people began to flee to the outer edges of cities. In Logansport, stores that burned out were not rebuilt, and soon, parking lots and banks occupied most of downtown as attention shifted toward the forested East End.
No comments:
Post a Comment