Vermont Public
Radio Commentary
by Chester H. Liebs
© 1999 by
Chester H. Liebs, Aired 6/4/99
Made possible by: The Alma Gibbs Donchian
Foundation and the Preservation Trust of Vermont
The Nation’s
Number One Robber of Time
The other day, in a university class on the bottomless topic
of “Global Sustainability” the professor commented on the
word Sprawl. “Sprawl” he quipped “I have no idea how to
define it, It means so many different things to so many people.”
This got me thinking.
Let me begin by saying that I am an unabashed city dweller.
Yes, when I was younger I did a stint out in the country, grew a
vegetable garden and hiked in the woods in back of my house.
Like a photographer taking only pretty photos, I tended to deny
a major downside to my bucolic life-- the two hour drive to work
and back each day with even more hours spent behind the wheel
each week just to shop or visit friends. Finally I decided that
unless I had a real reason, like farming, to live on the land, I
was best off in the city
....Well at least a small city for around twenty-five years
ago I moved to Burlington where, instead of spending hours a day
in the car, I could now do almost everything by waking on a
marvelous invention called sidewalks. For a newspaper I could
walk to the corner store. The supermarket was only a few minutes
further. In fact just about anywhere I needed to go, including
work, was just a short walk away. But that was a quarter-century
ago.
Gradually, like a woodpile shrinking over winter, basic
services have disappeared from many downtowns, including
Burlington’s, to reappear in a widely-scattered jumble of
buildings and parking lots, often miles away from each other,
with little else but increasingly crowded roads in between. More
and more I am being forced to use my car again for even the most
ordinary tasks.
For example the other day I needed to buy a pocket-sized
appointment book for the year 1999. I walked to a downtown
stationary store where I had bought such books in the past but
it was no longer there. Ah I’ll go to Woolworth’s. They have
a great stationary selection. Eh, no good. They went out of
business a couple of years ago. I continued my search without
any luck.
Finally I had to got in the car, stare through my windshield
at the backside of a semi-trailer truck while waiting at
numerous traffic lights, dodge cars backing up in a parking lot,
and then wasted some more time searching a cavernous chair store
for something that I could once have purchased close to home.
And this is only the beginning. I now go miles away to see my
doctor, shop at a good supermarket, even find a decent selection
of auto parts. This is not to say that our city has not worked
hard to try keep its downtown alive. A great new book store has
opened, there are many specialty shops, restaurants, and places
for tourists to shop, and an up-scale department store is on the
way. When I want to hear a concert, go gourmet dining, or buy
trinkets decorated with black and white cows, then Burlington’s
the place to be, but except for a few hold outs, like a
wonderful north end hardware store, to acquire basic
necessities, you now need your car, lots of gasoline, and tons
of that most precious of commodities, time.
And I am not alone. During the last presidential election
there was lots of media talk about so called “soccer moms”
-- how disaffected they were, how busy with the demands of
modern life, working, caring for the kids.“There are simply
not enough hours in the day” they said. Almost no one
mentioned the fact these soccer moms, and dads, in fact more and
more Americans no matter where they live and work, spend an
increasingly amount of time bouncing around from home, to
school, to the office, to the mall, to the box store, to the
doctor, to the gym, to the post office, like so many pinballs in
a giant continental pinball machine. No Professor, I might not
be to define it in one easy sound bite, but I think this is all
about SPRAWL, and one way or another it effects us all.
Credit: Author, and observer of the everyday landscape,
Chester Liebs is Professor Emeritus of History and Founder of
the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Vermont.
