Tag Archives: small towns
Looking at Seneca Falls, New York, “the real Bedford Falls” in It’s a Wonderful Life
Social Explorer, a cool tool for looking at demographic data, takes a quick look at the New York community that was the inspiration for Bedford Falls in the holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life:
Producer and director Frank Capra set the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life in the fictional small town of Bedford Falls, NY. The actual town of Seneca Falls, NY, claims to be Capra’s inspiration. The town hosts the annual It’s a Wonderful Life Festival and visitors can explore the history at the museum dedicated to the legend…
Back in 1940, Seneca County had 25,732 residents, of whom 99.5 percent were white and 0.5 percent were black. Nearly a third of the county’s foreign born population (32.0 percent) hailed from Italy, more than both statewide (one fifth) and nationwide (one seventh). Many foreign born residents also came from Germany (10.2 percent) and England and Wales (9.1 percent).
Today, Seneca County has grown 37.1 percent to 35,285 residents, while the state grew 43.2 percent and the nation grew 133.0 percent. Seneca County remains predominately white (92.9 percent) with a small but growing black population (4.3 percent). According to 2006-10 ACS data, today 4.6 percent of the foreign born population comes from Italy. Larger shares of newcomers come from other countries including Canada (17.4 percent), India (11.2 percent), Laos (6.1 percent), Ukraine (5.1 percent), and Poland (3.6 percent).
The top occupations in 1940 were:
- Proprietors/Managers/Official (20.9 percent)
- Craftmen/Foremen/Kindred Workers (16.4 percent)
- Operatives/Kindred Workers (15.0 percent)
- Laborers (13.9 percent)
Of the adult residents, 18.2 percent had completed high school (or more) and 3.0 percent had graduated from college, which were both smaller percentages than in the state (22.9 percent and 5.5 percent) and nation (24.1 percent and 4.6 percent).
Sounds like small town life that may not be much different today. The movie seems to provide more information about the “feel” of the community rather than the demographics. George Bailey is trying to build suburban-type homes and is thwarted by the evil banker in the community. By the end of the film, Bailey and other average citizens in the community are shown to be decent people who rally together in times of need. Does this story necessarily line up with the ancestry of the community or the top occupations? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps demography is not narrative destiny in this case. Perhaps the best way to attack this issue would be to compare the demographics of Seneca County in 1940 to other typical small towns and counties and see how “representative” the movie demographics might have been.
$53 million was embezzled from Dixon, Illinois in part because the community had a commission form of government
Rita Crundwell is accused of embezzling $53 million from the small community of Dixon, Illinois. In this account of how this happened, an argument is made: Crundwell’s embezzlement was made easier because Dixon operates under the commission form of municipal government.
Something else—ominous in retrospect—summons a small-town feel: the unusual system of governance. Since 1911, Dixon has been run by the commission form of government, an old model used by only about 50 of the 1,300 municipalities in Illinois. Power is divided among five people: a mayor and four part-time commissioners who oversee their own fiefdoms (public property, public health and safety, streets and public improvements, and finance).
The positions pay a pittance—the mayor makes $9,600 a year; the commissioners, $2,700 each, according to the annual budget—which means that most officeholders juggle their duties with full-time jobs and spend limited time at City Hall. The owner of a carpet and flooring store served as finance commissioner for a number of years. He was succeeded by a business teacher and athletic coach down at the high school, Roy Bridgeman, who served for more than two decades. As for Mayor Burke: he runs his own real-estate firm.
The problem is that “the commissioners are just citizens,” says Jim Dixon, a retired attorney who served as mayor from 1983 to 1991 and is a descendant of the town’s founder. “Some of them may not always have been qualified for the areas they were elected to oversee.” Dixon says he pushed, unsuccessfully, to change to the far more common city manager model of government.
Still, the commissioner system made for a neighborly and easygoing approach and seemed to accomplish the goals that gave rise to its adoption in the first place: placing a check on the power of the mayor’s office and curbing the possibility of corruption. It didn’t hurt that it also saved the city money on the salaries that a professional city manager and staff would command.
Some background to this story: the commission form of government was particularly popular over 100 years ago. However, many communities have long shifted to newer forms of government that feature a city manager. One reason for this was to avoid the outsized influence commissioners could have if they had more control over one area. In suburbs, this shift to hiring a city manager often happened in the decades after World War II when both established and new suburbs faced new issues and complexity associated with growth. For example, a suburb like Naperville was swamped with requests for development and moved through the 1950s and 1960s toward more professional city government and urban planning. The post-World War II also featured a movement toward professionalization of tasks in communities that were once simply enough to hand over to trusted local officials. Today, city managers are well-trained officials who often move up the ranks to larger and larger communities as they demonstrate their abilities. Of course, as this article mentions, hiring a city manager and more professionally-trained city employees does cost money. (See this Wikipedia article on the council-manager form of government for more information.)
So will Dixon now move to having more professionals in local government? Part of the appeal of living in a small town is the trust residents and officials have in each other but it will be interesting to see if there are major responses to this breach of trust.
Finding the most extroverted town in America in Iowa
A “marketing research firm” recently named Keota, Iowa as the most extroverted town in America. How exactly does a researcher determine the most extroverted town?
Pyco, which claims to specialize in “psychological profiling,” ranked 61.639 percent of adults in Keota (pop. 1,009, according to the 2010 census) as extroverts — just beating Manchester, N.Y.’s 60.570 percent for the title of most outgoing. Yet despite this designation, locals are reportedly confused as to how they ranked so high…
In fact, nobody outside Pyco quite understands the methodology for the rankings. According to the Register, the firm collected data in part from other research firms, and processed the numbers with a proprietary 2,000 page algorithm. Keith Streckenbach, the company’s chief operating officer, could not specify which factors most affected whether a person was deemed extroverted.
Keota’s designation has led to a series of stories in Iowa media examining the honor. One piece on the blog Eastern Iowa News Now interviewed Kevin Leicht, the chairman of the University of Iowa’s Sociology Department, and found that extroversion may be a trait inherent to small towns…
Pyco’s algorithm found that only about 57 percent of New York City adults are extroverts.
Several questions follow:
1. I would be really curious to know how this proprietary data was collected. Is it culled from the Internet? Could it be partially determined by the number of local businesses or “third places” (found in the Yellow Pages or some other kind of community listings)?
2. The differences between Keota and New York City are not huge: 61.6% to 57%. If you factor in the margin of error from these estimates (possibly fairly large since how many data points could there be in each town of more than 1,00 people across the US?), these figures may be close to the same. It would be worthwhile to see how broad the range of data for communities really is: are there towns in the US where less than 40% of people are extroverts?
3. Would we expect an extroverted community to know they are more extroverted than another community? Put another way, are extroverts more self-aware of their extroversion or are introverts the ones that are more likely to be aware of these things?
4. Since this data was collected by a marketing firm, I assume they would want to sell this information to companies and other organizations. So if Keota is the most extroverted town, will residents now see different kinds of promotional campaigns in the near future?
Part of the appeal of “It’s a Wonderful Life”: geographic stability
In a number of ways, It’s a Wonderful Life is a classic American holiday tale: George Bailey fights the big banker, the importance of family is stressed, and people pursue single-family homes in new subdivisions. But one scholar suggests another dimension is appealing to people today: the geographic stability of characters in the movie.
Part of the appeal today of the “It’s A Wonderful Life” story may be the geographic stability that the film depicts.
Sparks pointed to research reported in 1943 in the Journal of Sociology that 75 percent of the couples to be married in New Haven, Conn., and Philadelphia lived within 20 blocks of each other while growing up.
He said that’s essentially the lifestyle reflected in the movie’s setting, Bedford Falls — a fictionalized town where people were born, grew up, raised families and lived out their lives.
“The relationships you formed in Bedford Falls were for life,” Sparks said. “This is in stark contrast to the way we live today, and I think that most of us sense that as we have become more mobile, we’ve lost something.”
There is an intimacy among the characters of the film that is appealing to some viewers, and George Bailey is even brought back from the pit of despair after seeing how his absence would negatively affect both his family and his friends. The interesting suggestion here is that these relationships are embedded in a particular geographic context that matters. George is known around the town and he fights for a better community, not just for the people he knows. This is most tangibly demonstrated by the conflict George has with Mr. Potter, the banker. George simply wants to offer residents of Bedford Falls a taste of the American Dream (which looks much like the post-war suburbs) with cheap rent. To state it in a slightly different way, it’s not just the relationships that are important but the space they help make and are shaped by.
Another way to think about this would be to imagine trying to make a movie with these themes today. Movies about relationships are not unusual. However, is it plausible to put George Bailey within a 2011 community that has such tight relationships? Without focusing on some small group or subculture, how many movies present truly interconnected relationships within communities? Most movies about the suburbs or small towns tend to focus on dysfunction. I have little doubt that academics have contributed to this image by decrying the blandness, striving, and hidden lives of suburbanites.
While It’s a Wonderful Life may seem like it is from a very different era, Americans have expressed a desire to live in small towns. A 2009 Pew survey found that while suburban Americans were most satisfied with their communities, 30% said they would prefer to live in small towns versus 25% in suburbs, 21% in cities, and 21% in rural areas. Of course, the boundaries between these different types may be very different in the minds of Americans, and within the Census boundaries, one might be able to find all four types within a metropolitan region.
Asking “why aren’t Americans moving to the city”
Even as the percentage of Americans who live in the suburbs has increased over the decades, one writer asks “why aren’t Americans moving to the city?”
Polling by the real estate advising firm RCLCO finds that 88 percent of Millenials want to live in cities. Their parents, the Baby Boomers, also express a burning desire to live in denser, less car-dependent settings. But in the past decade, many major cities saw population declines, and the overwhelming majority of population growth was in the suburbs…
Methinks we may have jumped the gun on the whole collapse of the suburbs bit…
For the Millenials, the showstopper was jobs, or lack thereof. They managed to survive the last few years of college, but lacking paying work in the city, they’ve moved back in with mom and dad. So now they’re all kicking it in the TV room back on Deerhaven Drive, watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia reruns and dreaming of big city living.
There are other factors that have slowed down the great urban migration that predate our recent economic woes: Crime rates are down nationwide, but that has done little to diminish the perception that cities are dark, violent places. Poverty, addiction, and blight still haunt many urban centers. Then there are the kids. The Millenials aren’t the first generation of young people to get all stoked about the city. The ones before them continue to pick up and leave as soon as Junior hits school age.
Of course, much of this is the result of ill-advised investment: We’ve poured money into unsustainable suburban development while starving the urban centers. (One writer on this website recently argued convincingly that subsidized sprawl is a giant Ponzi scheme.)
But I think there is a deeper force at work here. Here’s another headline that reads like it could have come out of the Onion: “Almost half of Americans want to live somewhere else.”
It’s actually from USA Today, and the accompanying story looks at a 2009 PEW Research Center poll that found that 46 percent of the public “would rather live in a different type of community from the one they’re living in now — a sentiment that is most prevalent among city dwellers.”…
Listen, I don’t mean to belabor this point. This is all just to say that the urban renaissance is not fait accompli.
This seems like a reasonable argument to me: there is no guarantee, as some critics have suggested, that Americans will see the error of the suburbs and flock back to the city. For many Americans, the suburbs seem to offer the best alternative to other living options: it combines some of more rural living (a bit of land) and more urban living (amenities nearby). Attacks on the suburbs won’t necessarily change their minds though higher costs of living (gas prices, less valuable houses) might.
The cited survey is also interesting. The Pew website about the survey is titled “For Nearly Half of America, Grass Is Greener Somewhere Else.” Are Americans simply afflicted with an itch to be somewhere else? Is this manifest destiny in action? Also in this survey:
Americans are all over the map in their views about their ideal community type: 30% say they would most like to live in a small town, 25% in a suburb, 23% in a city and 21% in a rural area.
If you combined the small town and suburban percentages, you would get almost the exact percentage of Americans who live in the suburbs. So when people responded that they would prefer a small town, do they really mean a suburban small town or a more rural small town and living in a rural area is more of living on a farm or five acre plot of land far from a big city?
American politicians push small town values in a suburban country
America is a suburban nation: more than 50% live in the suburbs, roughly 30% live in cities, and about 20% live in small towns or rural communities. Despite these demographics, this article suggests that politicians still frequently draw on the idea of small town values:
American politics may live in the cities and suburbs — but it dreams in small towns.
More than a century after the American people migrated from the farms to the cities and then to the suburbs, the image of small-town America endures as the birthplace of solid character and sound values. In the gauzy image of politics, as in popular culture dating back more than a century, small-town America is a place where the people go to church, work hard and help one another in ways unknown in the cities and suburbs of America…
Still, politicians love to wrap themselves in the sentimental image.
“The people still have the same spirit in Waterloo that Iowans have always come to exemplify. We work hard. We don’t spend more money than what we take in,” Bachmann said in Waterloo, where she was born.
Perry wears his childhood in Paint Creek, Texas, as a badge of honor. “Doesn’t have a zip code. It’s too small to be called a town,” he said during a recent visit to Waterloo. “What I learned growing up on the farm was a way of life that was centered on hard work, and on faith and on thrift.”
Obama can’t claim a childhood in a small town — he was born in Honolulu. But he, too, reveled in small-town values during his recent Midwest bus tour.
So while Americans may no longer live in small towns, they want to hold on to particular characteristics such as hard work, community, and religious values. These are symbolic values, perhaps even more so than actual actions that people carry out. (There is often a disconnect between what people say they believe and what they actually do.) And, of course, people may want to hold on to these values but they don’t necessarily want to live in the places where these values arose.
This reminds me of a theory I have had about the popularity of American suburbs: they are a uniquely American adaptation that combines some of city and rural life. This is about perceptions. On the rural side, suburbs still offer lawns, single-family homes, good schools, safety, and community life. On the city side, suburbs have easier access to the city, more cultural amenities, more jobs, are more open-minded, and more opportunities over all. Suburbs don’t really offer the best of either of these worlds but offer some of both, allowing Americans to straddle these two worlds.
A question: how difficult is it for Americans to elect urban politicians to higher office (particularly compared to more rural candidates), candidates who would portray themselves solely as a city dweller and act like city dwellers? Perhaps Barack Obama is the closest we have come to this but because of political realities has primarily tried to appeal to working and middle-class suburbanites who may just swing the election.
Many rural counties experiencing population declines
The rural population has been dropping in many places over the last few decades. The newest data from the 2009 American Community Survey shows the continuation of this trend, particularly in rural counties in the Heartland:
But the [Los Angeles] Times analysis of the numbers shows unequivocally that a thick swath of the country, from north Texas to the Dakotas, has lost population…
Data show that many counties in the Great Plains are also experiencing a loss of young people. Johnson said that trend was probably creating a “downward spiral” of population loss in these areas since the young weren’t sticking around to bear children.
“The only thing that might break them out of it,” he said, “is an influx of young Hispanics.”
There is also mention of a few areas, such as Spencer County, Kentucky, or Teton County, Idaho, where generally wealthier residents have actually increased the population.
This data doesn’t really come as a surprise. Small town America has been gone for quite a while now as multiple generations have left rural areas for cities and suburbs. America is a suburban nation today as these places offer jobs, decent schools, single-family homes, and everything else that is part of the suburban “good life.”
(A side note: I’m really enjoying all these news stories based on the American Community Survey data. This relatively recent survey from the Census will be doing more and more in the future as the decennial census is relied on less and less. Maybe news organizations think these sorts of stories are easy to put together or perhaps lots of readers really are interested in a deeper understanding of the complex United States.)
A small town responds with a monument after the highway bypassed them
This is a common tale in American municipal development: the railroad or the road or the highway that once ran through the community has decided on a new path, now bypassing the community and leaving it without the traffic that once supported businesses in town. This recently happened to the small town of Hooper, Nebraska. Hooper residents came together to build a sign/monument along the new highway bypass (U.S. 275):
The foundation made the final pick: a tapered, 24-foot tower that would spell “Hooper” in 18-inch-high letters down two of its three sides. This way, the sign would rise above the fertile flatness.
Fund-raising letters went out in the fall of 2009. Quickly, the foundation surpassed its $18,000 goal, thanks to several thousand dollars from the old Commercial Club and to the many, many checks written out for amounts closer to $25…
Finally, right about harvest season, a brick-and-concrete base was built upon a concrete foundation. Then the three precast concrete sides were raised and secured to form the tapered tower, on top of which was placed a cap adorned with a large concrete ball.
Some finishing touches were still needed. The police chief, Matt Schott, used his excavator to dig a shallow trench for a retaining wall, after which a landscaping firm came in to plant some shrubs and make the ground look like an inviting garden, planted in a cornfield.
The project’s completion prompted no fanfare. The foundation’s members doubted that many people would gather beside a highway to celebrate a concrete tower. Besides, the sign was its own celebration.
Now, as the endless horizon along U.S. 275 surrenders to the wintry dusk, the beams of two spotlights sprout from the ground to illuminate the name of a place you might otherwise miss.
An interesting choice – not just a road sign saying Hooper is down the road if you take a turn but rather more of a monument. While it appears from this article that this was a meaningful exercise for Hooper residents, does it have any impact on the outside world? This project seems important for the community itself, an opportunity to come together, erect a symbol, and essentially suggest to the world that though the highway may not go through town, Hooper is here to stay.
This is not an isolated incident as many communities have tried to deal with this issue. A number of suburbs struggle with this: how do you get people to come into your downtown if all they want to do is drive along highways or major roads to get through your community as quickly as possible? One tactic is to try to erect markers or monuments at key intersections or along major roads that point people toward the downtown.
At the same time, how many communities today would actually want a major road, one with a 40 MPH speed limit, running right through the center of the community? For a small town, it might be the only source of traffic but for many suburbs, this would not be desirable.
h/t The Infrastructurist
Viewing Main Street at Disneyland alongside its inspiration (Marceline, Missouri)
A number of sociologists have in recent years written about spaces where there is an attempt to build in nostalgia, to recreate an atmosphere from the past but with new materials and design. One of the places to see this is in Disneyland’s Main Street, the opening part of the park where Walt Disney attempted to produce a copy (or an improvement?) of the typical small-town downtown.
The Chicago Tribune has a short photo essay where they show pictures from Disney’s Main Street alongside pictures from downtown Marceline, Missouri, the small town that Disney claimed influenced his later Main Street. While this just a limited set of pictures, seeing these images side by side does reveal some things:
1. Main Street in Marceline looks similar to the Main Streets of many small towns: brick buildings, a little bit drab (probably partially due to the fate of small towns since the era when Disney was in Marceline), some “old-time” features (such as the clock on the stand at the corner).
2. In comparison, Disneyland’s version really does seem “hyper-real”: it is much more colorful (or is that just the sun in southern California?), the buildings feature extra features (more architectural touches, more flash than just the plain brick), and there are crowds of people walking through. While the buildings of Marceline are more functional, the buildings at Disneyland are meant to entertain and invoke feelings (such as nostalgia and consumerism). Disneyland’s Main Street looks like a movie set whereas as Marceline looks like dull reality.
3. Perhaps we could make a case that Disney took his pre-teen experiences and translated them into his Disneyland Main Street. Perhaps to a pre-teen, Marceline’s downtown was the height of excitement: different goods being sold, people from around the town (and area) gathering together, new things to look at. A more cynical take would be that the Disney Main Street is a glamorous (or garish) pastiche of real downtowns where people cared less about entertainment and more about maintaining community.
Legally Sociable 