Of all the town planning theories floating about today, one of the most appealing is the scheme advanced by a bunch of thinkers and designers who call themselves the “New Urbanists.” Starting from different points, this group began to come together in the 1980s and since then they have influenced such widely divergent developments as Florida’s famous Seaside and suburban Birmingham’s soon-to-be-opened Tatter-sall Park. These and other similar inspired creations are designed to, in the words of one of the promoters, “restore everything we love, and have lost, about timeless old-fashioned small towns.” New Urbanists feel that much of our urban anguish today can be traced to our addiction to the automobile. To overcome this and rid ourselves of most of the ills of city living, New Urbanists propose to reconfigure the townscape to create small villages or compact neighborhoods where people live and love and have their being within a space where, as one of them put it, “parents can walk wherever they want to go pushing a stroller.” The New Urbanist vision is one of shady streets with sidewalks, of convenient “mom & pop” stores serving local folks, of kids riding their bikes to school, and of the faithful gathering on Sunday morning to worship with people they work with during the week.
They want to take us back to an age when people’s lives and movements were not dictated by the internal combustion engine. They want to take us back to Anniston, 1900.
That was when Anniston was the “Model City,” a classic, compartmentalized town that provided residents a place to sleep, shop, labor, learn, play, and pray, all within a few hundred acres. O.K., Anniston was segregated by class and race, but given the area into which everyone was crammed, those lines of division were regularly crossed and usually on foot.
However, things began to change almost as soon as the model was set down in the valley. Industry grew. People moved in for the jobs. Neighborhoods spilled out of their boundaries. Downtown expanded.
And folks stopped walking.
It didn’t happen overnight, but looking at the old pictures you can see it. Year by year, decade by decade, more and more automobiles appeared on Anniston’s streets. We all know why. As the town became a city, people just lived too far away from where they worked, so they drove in. Moreover, cars were the rising middle class’s most conspicuous measure of prosperity, so prosperous Annistonians (there were many) bought and rode about to show folks who and what they were. The city was also the county seat, as well as a major market center, so rural folks in trucks came regularly.
City fathers, seeing this, sought ways to convenience drivers. Streets were widen-ed and paved, parking spaces were marked off, and some stores began to offer “curb service” to folks in a hurry. World War II speeded the process, and to get traffic from Highway 78 to Fort McClelland quiet, quaint Quintard Avenue was transformed into a major thoroughfare.
Quintard was the city’s first bypass — a way to get around downtown. But the change did more than reroute drivers. It divided Anniston. Pretty soon people who might walk to city shopping from east side neighborhoods began to reconsider. So they cranked up the car and drove. It was easier and safer.
Still, Anniston at mid-century had not lost that feel of the Model City envisioned by its founders. There were the shady streets and sidewalks, along which people moved at a measured pace. Kids rode bikes to schools that served the neighborhoods. And a few folks still walked to downtown stores to “trade.”
And trade was brisk. There was, so old-time residents recall, commerce by community consensus, an unwritten agreement that though you might find a toaster or a TV or even a car cheaper in Birmingham, local loyalty demanded that you buy from someone locally. You knew them and knew they would be there for you if the car broke down or the TV went on the blink. They were your friends and neighbors and that counted for something.
Anniston, c. 1950, could have been the poster-child for the New Urbanism. A little larger than the ideal, but still a collection of neighborhoods anchored to each other by schools, stores, and churches. A place where, a former resident told me, “Beaver Cleaver” might have lived.
Then the automobile took over.
In-town streets and through-town highways were engineered and re-engineered to tell us where to go and what to avoid. Neighborhoods gave way to impersonal suburbs designed for easy entry and exit, where sidewalks were history and walking discouraged. Not that there was anything within walking distance. Shopping was confined to remote malls and strip malls, all surrounded by parking lots. Every car, it is said, demands 2.5 spaces — the slot at home, the slot at work, and the slot shared with others at the places we visit . Anniston did all it could to meet that demand.
Of course the Model City was not alone. It was happening everywhere. In what might be the greatest example of social engineering in our nation’s history Republicans, Democrats, Detroit, and the oil industry redesigned our landscape and our lives to accommodate cars. It is just that Anniston is such a good example of what it all accomplished.
But while the automobile made it possible, other forces played a role.
Baby boomers, coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s loved Anniston, wanted to live here when they were ready to settle down, but there was no space. Their parents still occupied the houses where they were raised and land for new housing was at a premium. Just ride (or walk if you want an adventure) within the city’s 1965 boundaries and look for houses built that year or later. There aren’t many. Anniston was full.
So boomers moved to Saks, Weaver, Welborn, and the like, got jobs at the Depot or the Fort, and even though they had ties to Anniston, they came to the city less and less. Finally, when their parents moved to something smaller or passed away, the children, set comfortably in the suburbs, put the old home on the market. Then Anniston got a new generation of residents, a generation without traditional connections to the city or to each other.
Meanwhile, Anniston became isolated from the communities around it. New and better roads made it easier for citizens to the north and west to drive to Gadsden to shop, even if Anniston was closer. At the same time Oxford (a town made by highway engineering if ever there was one) became the destination of choice for southside residents.
