How Much of "Urbanism" is Just Mourning the Death of Functional Small Towns?

The movement has become entangled with exclusiveness and expensive big cities, to its political detriment. But you used to be able to find the basic things urbanists want in every small town.

Earlier this summer, my family and I went camping on an island in Lake Erie called Put-in-Bay.

Put-in-Bay is a tourist place that, this is not an exaggeration, kind of specializes in hosting drunken bachelorette and bachelor parties for people who live in Ohio. A lot of them are middle class college students. It’s kind of a shit show in some ways.

HOWEVER, all that is kind of an aside for us. Camping up there with kids is just pretty. You can get a tent spot for $25 that overlooks Lake Erie. When we visit Put-in-Bay I like to bring bikes, because the island is only a mile or two long.

One morning while everyone was still at the camp site, I decided to go for a bike ride. And I rode into the little “downtown.” There was a coffee shop there and that’s what I was looking for. I parked my bike right on the fence and walked in.

The coffee shop was moderately busy. After that I rode up to the end of the island. Along the way, I passed a lot of nice homes, vacation homes I assume. They mostly had large lots. And most were flying American flags, which was appropriate because it was actually Memorial Day. Just down the street from the coffee shop, preparations were underway for a ceremony honoring soldiers who have been killed, and a parade.

It was a great morning, and I was positively charmed (I’m a sucker for summer Americana), even though the political vibes were wildly different than where I live in Cleveland, where half the houses are flying trans flags or “resist” flags or some such.

Everything is hopelessly entangled with our grand culture war now. Nobody, who visits, would identify what they like about Put-n-Bay as urbanism. Biking and walking are suspicious and left coded, a fact that I can’t help but think has to do with how astronomically unaffordable major cities on the coasts have become in recent years, how celebrated they are by people who advocate for amenities like better bike infrastructure and walkability.

But in Put-in-Bay is a different kind of model of some of the same principles as a generic, old-school-style small town (in this case propped up by tourism). It is a setup that is hard to improve on, around which human settlement was organized for — IDK — thousands of years.

If you go back a few generations, my family is from small towns or smaller cities in Ohio. One of my grandfathers grew up in Sandusky (a small city I guess) and part of my family is from Norwalk, Ohio, not too far away from Put-in-Bay. My grandparents, on my father’s side, actually met at the Round House, a bar that is still operating in Put-n-Bay.

I recently had the opportunity to visit Norwalk. I remember it being pretty idyllic when I was young. My great aunt had a big house with a Notre Dame padded toilet seat (etched into my memory) and a tree that would produce with sour cherries, she used to make into pies. They had their own tennis court in the backyard. She raised eight kids there as a widow.

Caption: Norwalk Ohio.

Out of the dozens (probably) of direct descendants, only a small handful remain anywhere nearby. I believe just one is in Norwalk. Small towns in Ohio have really suffered in the decades since then. I remember in the 2008 recession when Norwalk Furniture, one of the big employers, closed, how sad it was. I was working for the newspaper in Toledo then, and even from that distance, the pain of that loss was registered.

It’s not just Ohio. Small towns everywhere have suffered a great deal (but ESPECIALLY in Ohio). It’s hard to even disentangle all the causes: declines in family farming? Walmart? Opioids? Malls? The loss of local manufacturing? All of the above?

Still, Norwalk, and a lot of small towns in Ohio, especially in summer, retain some of their charm, their appeal, their community spirit, the sort of things we all, regardless of political leanings, I think value and find harder to locate in this era we are living through. The things that — besides inebriation — people travel to Put-n-Bay for. The things people prize in posh neighborhoods in Brooklyn and San Francisco, or sometimes call “15-minute cities.” Functional little nodes that people can walk up to, or even drive to and find community and local flavor, places to gather.

I’m not really that invested in the culture war that pits Norwalk vs. Cleveland’s west side bougie little areas, or vs. San Francisco.

If we were ever to deliver real urbanism at the scale where it was assessable to most Americans, the small town variety, like Norwalk, would likely have to play an enormous role. Even suburbs (an important sign of progress imo) have been, in some cases, intentionally rebuilding this. The suburb I grew up in, Hilliard, Ohio, has focused a little bit on its historic downtown in recent years, closing a street to traffic and building a splash pad for kids nest to a food hall with a patio where parents can hang out and drink.

I think urbanists should embrace these examples, which offer community and walkability to people who are living more average lifestyles in the U.S., that don’t come with the baggage of exclusivity that hangs over Brooklyn or San Francisco. Instead of seeing these places as in conflict. And to be clear, some do.