This will be my last post for this
blog. There are two components to this decision, the reason behind it and the
timing. The reason behind it has been
growing for a while now, and a most welcome event has provided me with the
timing. But it’s not easy to let go.
I lived for thirty-six years in Port Indian, a small community along (and, frequently, in) the
lower Schuylkill River, just upriver from Norristown, in Southeastern
Pennsylvania. During my decades there, I
grew to love the Schuylkill Valley, and most of all the history of its small
towns.
Applying my professional
training to my personal environment, I undertook studies of the towns along the
lower part of the river. My first book, What Killed Downtown? Norristown,
Pennsylvania, From Main Street to the Malls, focused on the Schuylkill
Valley’s largest municipality. What Killed Downtown? related the
collapse of its Main Street commercial sector after 1950, and disproved the conventional
wisdom that the King of Prussia Mall was the cause.
I took a very different approach
for my second book, and considered the past, present and future of the eight towns
on the lower Schuylkill River as a group.
They’ve Been Down So Long…Getting
Up’s Still On Their Minds reveals both the commonalities and the
differences in their history, and the reasons for their vastly different
conditions today.
Both are available, by the way, at the Historical Society of Montgomery
County, Pennsylvania, and, of course, on Amazon.
Ironically, I did not begin this blog until my big move West. I followed my wife to San Francisco, where
she had been offered her dream job in her favorite city. Once on the West
Coast, I began this blog to keep my connection with the Schuylkill Valley
alive, and have posted at least once a month since then. I attempted to put urban history in the service
of urban revival. I believe that physical
distance gave me the perspective to establish priorities among the confusing
plethora of contenders for attention in each town, which is so difficult when
one is in the middle of the fight. I
tried to impart this broader point of view by planting it firmly in the tides
of American history. I commented on what
are national problems, but through a distinctly local prism.
It’s been quite a journey, but the passage of time makes the advantage
of perspective a diminishing asset. The
sense that it was time to end things has been growing, but always before
postponed when events in the Schuylkill Valley allowed me to make a salient
point or two.
What makes the timing now is most welcome news from a different
quarter. McFarland & Company, Inc.
has contracted to publish my next book.
I am excited about this, and will in the coming months be occupied
reading galley proofs, planning promotional events and the like. This presents a conflict, because the book
has absolutely nothing to do with either the lower Schuylkill River or the
towns along it. Thus, my timing has
become now.
That makes this last post pretty much a “GOOD BYE AND THANK YOU one, and
there are many to thank. The Internet
tells me that “Ha Det” is “goodbye”
in Norwegian, and so I include it in my final post title. I do this to thank the numerous Norwegians
who have viewed my blog. I also wish to
thank my readers from not just America and Norway, but from Israel, Russia, and
many more countries, some of them very far away. I never expected my locally-focused blog to
gain an international audience, but it did.
It’s humbling to think that I might have contributed a little something
toward the better understanding of our confusing country, the United States.
But most of all I want to thank my readers in my subject towns along the
lower Schuylkill River. I began this
blog for you, and although, judging from my page view metrics, you quickly
became a small minority of my readers, you remained foremost in my
thoughts. And among you, I would most
like to thank—believe it or not—those who disagreed with my comments, and
weren’t afraid to say so, at least on Facebook.
Real change is only possible following an informed exchange of views
among those with differing solutions for the problems being faced, and I deeply
appreciated your contributions.
So this will be my last post. But
while I shall not publish any new ones, I suspect that, on occasion, an old one
may see the light of day again, because it will again be relevant to the
changes underway not just in the Schuylkill Valley, but across the United
States. After all, the more things change…
