The Vanishing Village

WANDERING along an oily road — there was no walk — in an attractive New York suburb, the other day, pursued by chugging motor-cycles and madly hopping this way and that at the honk of speeding automobiles, an appalling thought struck me: is the village, still so dear to New England, becoming extinct? Will succeeding generations know only as ancient history its shady, sun-flecked ‘green’ with the old white church, its library given by a loyal son, its memorial hall, its soldiers’ monument and band-stand, the store on whose piazzas stories are swapped and trades consummated and village characters still linger? Are ‘village improvement societies’ to go the way of all grass, and is their annual housecleaning no longer to summon the townsmen to the common armed with hoe and rake, lawn-mower, and broom, and followed by their wives and daughters bearing hot coffee and doughnuts; setting the whole village agog with the spirit; every worthy householder issuing forth with a ball of knotted and variegated twine and a paring-knife to straighten the grass-grown edge of his walk, to a running accompaniment of neighborly gossip?

On the common the civic spirit did its best — and worst? The ideas of beauty might be crude, but the villagers gave the best they had; they might, like beautiful Longmeadow, ‘gothicize’ their old church, they might put up a cast-iron monstrosity in memory of the soldiers, and the green might break out in an eruption of geometrical flowerbeds of flaming geraniums and cannas; a saloon might lurk behind an innocent front of peanuts and cigars, but they lived according to their measure of light. The largest subscriber to the monument set up cast-iron deer and vases in his own yard, and his rival swung a scarlet gypsy kettle in his.

Two phases of the park are already abundant: one transitional — wherein a rudimentary ‘down town’ still lingers, but how fallen from its high estate! a veritable poor relation, a Cinderella sitting in the ashes, a thing of shabby shops, of beer-saloons and poolrooms, of picture-postal booths and peanut-stands and flamboyant bill-boards! A little circulating library lurks in a dingy dwelling-house.

Back of all this gloom lie the wellkept homes of the commuters. ‘To bed with the owl and up with the rooster’ is their motto; they have no time or thought for anything outside the limits of their suburban bedroom.

The second phase in the evolution eliminates the centre altogether; there is no more ‘up town’ or ‘down town’; neither is there anything in ‘common.’ Auto-trucks from the city deliver the necessities of life; the cement paths run down from the front door to the cartracks and end as abruptly as the squirrels’ trail at the foot of a tree; there are no neighborly cross-paths down which one might run with — I had almost said, a shawl, but I meant an automobile veil, about one’s head, to get the recipe for hot-water gingerbread from Gran’ma Brown —the universal grandmother; or to beg ‘Aunt Ellen’ — aunt to all the babies in the town — to come and see if the baby’s cough is croupy. Ah, no! The inhabitants stand aloof, as ignorant of their next-door neighbor as a Harlemite, save that they know his income also is ‘restricted.’

There results only the cold comfort of the ‘model village’ ordered en bloc by some well-meaning philanthropist:

‘Item: 1 civic centre, 1 clover green, 6 circles, golf-links, tennis-courts, 1 restaurant, 1 laundry, 1 school, 200 semi-detached two-family houses renting at $55 a month, 200 semi-detached one-family houses at $75 a month, 50 13-foot-front houses at $35 a month, 50 17-foot-front houses’; and, oh, yes —

‘ Item: 1 church, denomination to be specified later.’

And all laid out by a distinguished landscape gardener, designed by an equally distinguished architect, and managed by a ‘foundation’ down to its humblest detail — the filling of the flower-boxes, the emptying of the ash-can, the ordering of the coal, the rolling of the tennis-courts, and the making of laws.