Author: Hank Garfield

Where Have All the Small Stores Gone?

Hank Garfield

A packet of jigsaw blades fits easily into a pocket of my autumn jacket. It so happened that I needed a blade on a recent November afternoon, and I had to think a minute on the easiest way to get one.

There used to be a hardware store in Penobscot Plaza that I could walk to. There used to be one on Broadway that was easy to reach to by bus. But they are gone. With a twinge of sadness, I realized that my best option was Home Depot, out on Stillwater Avenue, one of Bangor’s busiest car corridors. I slung my bicycle onto the Community Connector bus and headed off to the nearest corporate megastore to buy an item smaller than my hand.

We had been doing a home construction project, the lovely Lisa and I, and so far, everything too heavy or too bulky to carry home had been delivered. But sometimes you need to run out and get something. This is when owning a car can seem like a necessity – or at least an awfully handy convenience.

The store is set back from the street by a massive parking lot, sectioned off by raised asphalt islands into smaller lots. There is no designated bus stop, no sidewalk or walkway for pedestrians. Nor are any bike racks in evidence. Bus passengers must navigate the parking lot on foot, and bicyclists at their peril. I locked my bike to an outdoor display of garden tools and went in to find my blades.

As I pedaled home through the car traffic, I pondered the absurdity of operating a two thousand-pound, gas-burning, space-occupying machine to obtain one pocket-sized package of saw blades. Doesn’t anybody consider this, well, wasteful?

It’s bad enough for someone like me, who has chosen not to own a car and to live with the inconveniences. It’s worse for people who have no choice: those who can’t drive, due to medical, financial, or other reasons.

In 1999, I packed my kids, the dog, the cat, and all our worldly belongings into an Aerostar van and a U-Haul trailer and moved from California to Maine. We tried to take local roads instead of the Interstate when we could. As we went through Illinois and Indiana, we began to sense the same story in every town. The brick post office and a church or two in the old town center, and then, a mile or more away, at the junction with the highway, a cluster of the same 15 or 20 corporate businesses. The same chains in every town. I hoped it would never happen to Maine.

But it has. It just took a quarter of a century longer to happen here. You can no longer walk down to Joe’s Hardware Store and buy a rake, or a set of jigsaw blades, or anything else you might need. You have been handed another reason to own and drive a car, and another alternative has been eliminated.

It’s not just hardware stores. Downtown of small cities like Bangor seem to be replete with restaurants and bars and places to buy art or antiques, but mostly devoid of outlets for the practical items of day-to-day life. I’ve had similar problems getting ink cartridges, fresh fruit, cleaning supplies, clothing, and scotch tape. The whole idea of walkable cities and downtowns is predicated on the idea that people can live, work and shop in a small area. If you must go to an outlying box store to get what you need, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Shouldn’t city planners be considering this when they draw up zoning regulations?

Car ownership would not seem like such a necessity in an environment where Joe’s Hardware could coexist with Home Depot. But powerful forces seem to want as many of us to drive and own cars as possible. Never mind the millions of Americans excluded from such a system, or the damage our dependence on cars inflicts on the natural world. The car is encouraged and incentivized at every turn.

But we can do something about it, however small and incremental. We can patronize pedestrian-friendly businesses. We can eschew drive-throughs. As much as possible, we can avoid the big-box stores. There isn’t always a choice. That’s why we need to use the choices we still have.

Fernando Valenzuela

Hank Garfield

For most of the 1980s, and all the 1990s but the last four months, I lived in Southern California. I never made it to Disneyland or Yosemite. I didn’t get up to Edwards Air Force Base to watch the Space Shuttle land, nor visit Universal Studios or Hearst Castle.

But I did take my kids to Dodger Stadium to see Fernando Valenzuela pitch.

It was 1990, in what would turn out to be his final season with the Dodgers. My daughter and son were very young – five and two. We took the train from Oceanside, and a bus from Union Station to Chavez Ravine, where once stood a Mexican-American neighborhood that was forcibly removed in the 1940s to make way for a public housing project that never happened.

The Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958 on the promise of a sweetheart deal between the team owner and the city, in which the Dodgers acquired public land in the heart of the city for their new ballpark. The Mexican-Americans so recently evicted from that land saw no compelling reason to buy tickets.

Fernando Valenzuela gave them one. The youngest of twelve kids, from a small town in Mexico, he learned baseball at the feet of his older brothers. A Dodger scout discovered him there.

He started the first game of the 1981 season as an emergency replacement and shut out the Houston Astros. Four of his next five starts were shutouts; all were complete-game wins. He won his first eight games. Latinos in Los Angeles flocked to the stadium on the nights he pitched. He was 20 years old.

I liked him from the start. What was not to like? The way he rolled his eyes to the sky right before releasing a pitch? His chubby body that belied his athleticism? That he could hit and field as well as pitch? That his money pitch was a screwball? That he pitched complete games? That he was left-handed, like Sandy Koufax, like me?

His incredible rookie season was interrupted by baseball’s first prolonged strike, which wiped out the middle third of the season. But the Dodgers got into the World Series that year, against the Yankees.

The Yankees won the first two games in New York. Fernando started the next game in Los Angeles. He gave up four runs in the first three innings. But his manager, Tommy Lasorda, stuck with him. No more Yankees crossed the plate that day. The Dodgers rallied, and at the end of the game, there was Fernando, shaking hands with his catcher after a 146-pitch, 5-4 victory. They won the next three games to take the Series in six.

Fernando died on October 22, three days before the Dodgers would face the Yankees in the Series again, and nine days short of his 64th birthday. We were contemporaries. I was a kid when he burst on the scene with his cherubic face and unhittable screwball. By 1990 I was a parent, and he was a veteran, an established major-league star. An arm injury had left him diminished, but he could still move the ball around and keep hitters off-balance. His best years behind him, he still put fans in the seats.

I wanted my kids’ first live big-league game to be memorable. Despite its dubious history, Dodger Stadium is a landmark. It’s where Koufax pitched his perfect game, and where Vin Scully spun literature out of thin air on the radio.

Valenzuela lost that Sunday afternoon, 2-0, to the Cincinnati Reds, but he pitched well. He led off the sixth with a double to break up the opposing pitcher’s no-hit bid. He could hold his own at the plate, accumulating 10 home runs, 84 runs batted in, and a career batting average of .200, which is good for a pitcher.

The Dodgers released him before the start of the 1991 season. Over the next few years, he played for several teams in the big leagues and his native Mexico. I saw him a few more times when he pitched for the Padres in the late 1990s, getting by on his smarts and not much else, but still sometimes able to find the right pitch in the right situation and remind everyone of his youthful brilliance.

Adios, Fernando. You were an artist with a baseball, an ambassador for your people, and an avatar of joy for those of us who simply loved watching you work.

An Accumulation of Small Annoyances

Hank Garfield

When you decide to give up car ownership, two things will happen. You will walk more. And you will become, almost by default, an advocate for public transportation. Neither of these is a bad thing.

It helps if you live in a walkable community with both local and out-of-town bus service. In Bangor, we have the Community Connector and the Concord Coach bus systems. I hate to say anything negative about either of them, because I use them both a lot, and they are as essential to me as a parking space is to a car owner. On many mornings, I have walked the two blocks from my house up to the bus stop, boarded the Community Connector, ridden to the Concord Coach depot, and headed out of town.

Recently the Community Connector went to a fixed-stop system, which makes the routes more efficient and improves the reliability of the whole system. But there is no fixed stop at the Concord Coach depot. Riders transferring from one bus system to the other must get off the Community Connector at a sign down the block and walk approximately 100 yards, the length of an American football field. This isn’t a problem for a healthy person, but what of an older or physically challenged passenger with luggage? It makes no sense.

Twice now, I’ve had drivers refuse to let me off at the Concord Coach depot. They insist, as per the new rules, that I get off at the sign and walk. Then the bus continues on, right past the depot.

Small annoyances like this are a big reason more people don’t use public transportation. It would not take any longer for the driver to let transferring passengers off at the depot rather than the sign. But rules are rules, and they must be followed to the letter.

Concord Coach has rules of its own. The driver won’t let you off anywhere but at the depot. The afternoon bus from the coast arrives in Bangor at 5:30. This is five minutes too late to catch the last inbound Community Connector toward downtown. Sometimes I’ll see that bus after the Concord Coach gets off the interstate on Union Street.

In Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, where I lived for a year, there is regular bus service to Sofia, the capital, about an hour and a half away. The bus goes directly from one city to the other, but once in Sofia, it makes stops at major intersections to let passengers off who don’t need to go to the central bus station. This makes eminent sense, and provides a friendlier and more convenient experience for passengers. But Concord Coach won’t do it. Rules are rules.

The Community Connector drivers will routinely ask passengers if they need to make a connection to another Community Connector bus. Similarly, the Concord Coach driver will ask passengers coming up the coast if they need to connect to the Cyr bus to Aroostook County. They will hold the buses for a few minutes if anyone answers in the affirmative.

But I’ve never heard a Community Connector driver ask if anyone needs to meet a Concord Coach bus, or vice versa. There seems to be little effort to coordinate the services. Bangor once had a downtown Greyhound bus terminal, but that has disappeared over the horizon to Hermon, where the Community Connector has no service at all.

This isn’t just a local problem. It’s representative of the American piecemeal approach to public transportation. There’s no centralized clearinghouse for ready information on how to navigate from one system to another. The result is an accumulation of minor irritations like missed connections and forced walks and strict adherence to rules that ought to be more flexible. None of these things are debilitating by themselves. But an accumulation of them will discourage people from leaving their cars at home.

I’ve talked with many people who support public transportation and want to demonstrate demand by using it more. My answer to them is that they should use it anyway, even if it’s inconvenient, because transportation planners look at current numbers. It’s the only way to get past the circular argument that public transportation is unpopular in the present and therefore a poor investment in the future.

Public transportation seems unpopular because official policy incentivizes people to drive. If you want better and more comprehensive public transportation, invest some of your time in using what’s already here, despite the accumulation of tiny annoyances that discourage people from using it.