Main St. Sterling

Yesterday I spent the day driving around Northern Virginia making sales calls, which as you can imagine, was just about the most fun I've ever had in my life. Actually, it wasn't all that bad, but the absolute highlight of the day was my stop in Sterling, VA - I had never been there before, but I was taken with it.

I'm sure that there is a 'real' section of Sterling, with a main street and houses that were built before last year, but the part of Sterling that I saw was the brilliant fake city/main street that they had built as sort of a giant outdoor mall. I've seen this type of thing before, but never to this level. The 'town' has its own streets, benches, lampposts, mailboxes, the whole nine yards - but it is all fake, and built around the franchise stores that they were able to get to move in. Plus, for good measure, there were some pre-fab cookie-cutter townhouses and condos around the 'outskirts' where people could live when they aren't getting coffee from Starbucks and shopping at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Its all very surreal, and I guess I don't really have anything against it, except for the fact that they are trying to re-create a small-town, main street style atmosphere with the very corporations that destroyed the real small-town main streets.

In my hometown of Waynesboro, PA, we actually used to have a Main St. with real shops that people actually went to and purchased goods and services. There was a laundromat, a JC Penny, a McCrory's, a shoe store, a hardware store, a bakery, two banks, a candy store, a couple of kid's clothing stores, a library, town hall, a comic book/baseball card store, the whole nine yards. It has steadily been in decline since I was about 8, thanks to a Wal-Mart, Applebee's, and other corporate stores moving to the surrounding area, and now all that remains is a shitty Chinese restaurant and a pizza place that no one ever goes to.

I guess that's part of life and the ebb and flow of free market economies, but I feel sorry for kids that are growing up in Sterling, VA, whose only experience of a small-town main street is one that is populated by AT&T, Baja Fresh, Lowe's, and Pizzaria Uno.

Ah well. At least I still have 24.