From VOICES: Upstate by Varick Chittenden

Volume 27
Fall-Winter
2001

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... I worry that our towns are losing their centers of activity, their gathering places, their opportunities for intimate human contacts. Our ability, even our willingness, to communicate, to be part of the lives of our neighbors, or to have them be a part of ours, seems to be declining.

Photo: Martha Cooper

Varick A. Chittenden is professor emeritus of English, SUNY Canton College of Technology, and executive director of Traditional Arts in Upstate New York (TAUNY).

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When I came to Canton as a St. Lawrence University freshman in fall 1959, I was impressed. Here was everything a fellow could need. That was especially true if, like me, home was a tiny North Country hamlet with one gas station-barbershop, one Protestant church, one Catholic church, an elementary school with three classrooms, and my dad’s general store. There was also the old town hall—for voting, dances, and meetings—and the new fire station in the former schoolhouse, where men would gather far more frequently to play a few hands of poker than to fight fires. We had a few neighbors. We knew each other well, sometimes too well, and we saw each other almost every day, in one or another of the places I’ve mentioned.

Business section of Canton, New York in 1950s

Main Street, Canton, New York, in the 1950s. Unidentified photographer. Courtesy of Town and Village of Canton Historian’s Collection.

Forty years ago, Canton’s Main Street had all the services I was used to, plus a lot more. It was busy day and night, especially during the school year. We students would walk the few blocks from campus at least three or four times a week, day or night, to buy essentials, to see a movie, to get a haircut, or to supplement our questionable dorm food with a cheeseburger and fries. Students from the SUNY ag and tech college would do the same. "Downtown," we might see familiar faculty faces in Kaplan’s Department Store, the college president’s wife in Merrill’s Hardware, farmers gathered at Wight & Patterson’s Feed Store, or county employees—Canton is the county seat—on a morning break in The Sugar Bowl, on the corner next to the only traffic light in town. There was plenty of activity.

Downtown Canton is a different place today. It still has its four blocks of late-Victorian commercial buildings that nestle up to the original New England-type village green. You could even say it’s more attractive now, since the local Rotarians recently helped business owners renovate and paint their storefronts in period style and the garden club puts out hanging baskets of flowers or holiday wreaths, in season. And there are very few empty storefronts.

But it’s not the appearance so much as the activity—or the lack of it—that gives me pause. In my student days, in those four blocks and on nearby side streets, there were three grocery stores, two department stores, a five-and-dime, a classy shoe store, a three-generation family-operated clothing store that drew customers from miles around, two old-fashioned hardware stores where they actually fabricated eaves troughs and downspouts, and nine bars, among them Buck & Red’s, The Tick-Tock, Moose’s (my fraternity’s clubhouse), and Connie Barr’s (for locals). There was Bill Lytle’s barbershop and pool hall, Herbie Haven’s shoe repair shop, and the Miss Canton Diner, which was busiest after 2 a.m., when those bars closed.

Kaplan’s Department Store is now a regional substance abuse counseling center, Pearl’s houses offices for a cerebral palsy organization. All the grocers—Kelly’s, Rycrofts, and the Proulx family’s IGA—are gone. Except for a gas station-convenience store, you can’t even buy bread on this street today. The old office supply and bookstore that everyone depended on is an attorney’s office. You can go to the former Canton Hardware for takeout Chinese, and to Merrill’s to buy an upscale bicycle. For better or worse, since the drinking age changed to 21, most of the college bars of my day have become offices. And almost worst of all, some years ago, the funky diner of my youth was hauled off to a farmer’s field to make room for a McDonald’s! Vehicle traffic is heavy throughout the day, but there are not many pedestrians. Most evenings, someone passing through would hardly know that Canton is home to 10,000 people, much less a college town.

Canton’s story is not unique. I guess you could see changes like these over four decades in a lot of upstate’s small towns, perhaps in small towns throughout America. I know that change is inevitable, often desirable. But I worry that our towns are losing their centers of activity, their gathering places, their opportunities for intimate human contacts. Our ability, even our willingness, to communicate, to be a part of the lives of our neighbors, or to have them be a part of ours, seems to be declining.

I may seem nostalgic, but I know that many of my generation (and older) say they feel the same way. Most likely we blame it all on "young people" or "society" or "progress." Then we go home from work, slip a movie into the VCR, let the kids go to their rooms to play games with their computers, get a beer from the refrigerator, and wait for the pizza to be delivered to our door.

Varick Chittenden’s UPSTATE column was published in Voices Vol. 27, Fall-Winter, 2001. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a charter subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.