Are any small towns left that haven't been strip-malled and Wal-Marted to death?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Just wondering if “small town America” is still out there.

I’ve always hated strip malls for some reason (even though I’m forced to go to them almost daily.) I can’t explain it; I’m not a communist or anything. They’re just sight pollution to me. Same with Wal-Mart and its wannabes.

I’m wondering if there are any small cities out there that are actually “urban” (meaning you can walk places, maybe even walk or ride a bike to work) yet aren’t commercialized to death with McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, supermarkets, etc.

There have to be a few left.

2

There are a ton of them in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine (especially Vermont).
Woodstock, Vermont is one well known example but there are hundreds of others. The town where I used to live in Vermont had an honest to goodness general store where you could buy a rifle, a pair of boots, and get a sandwich all at the same time. These aren’t living museums, they are just the way that people chose to keep their towns through zoning and other ordinances. My town of Holliston, MA is basically this way also. Gorgeous, very New Englandy, and no fast food.

3

Yes, my hometown, Bristol, VT.

Population: ~6,000, I think.

Fast Food Joints: None.

“Box” Stores: None.

There are, IIRC, five stores that are affiliated either nationally or regionally. A Brooks drug store, a Shaws supermarket, a Mobil, a Texaco, and a True Value hardware store (though it is actually owned by a local man, it just has the True Value name attached because that’s his supplier/distributor.) We don’t even have any national banks, we have a local bank (nation Bank if Middlebury) and a state-wide bank (Merchant’s.)

There are NO other non-locally owned businesses in my town. No Wal-mart, no K-Mart, no McD’s, no Applebees, Outback, or T.G.I.Friday’s. We have two local pizza places, four other local restaurants, a ‘cremee’ stand (soft serve ice cream), and an actual, factual corner store, on an actual, factual corner. We have a couple local thrift shops, a local sewing/kniting/craft store, and another craft/local products store. A couple movie rental joints, and a damn fine bakery.

The nearest fast food place is almost twenty minutes away, and it’s a single McD’s in Middlebury (yes, where the college is.) There also used to be an Ames there, but that company went bankrupt. The nearest box store is over half an hour away. Unfortunately, the nearest box store is ALL of them. There is this place called Williston Farms that has, IIRC, a Wal-Mart, a Home Depot, a Circuit City, a Toys R Us, a Bed Bath, and Beyond, a best Buy, a Staples, a Petsmart, and several of those chain restaurants.

My hometown is just one of many many smalltowns in VT that are still smalltowns. I love my homestate, and I gladly accepted the boredom and peacefullness that it offered.

4

Shag: what town in VT did you live in? There’s a good chance I’ve beem there, and and even better chance I’ve heard or it/know where it is.

5

It was Hartland, VT. I think they called the area where I lived Hartland Four Corners. It was about 15 miles from Woodstock. I had just moved from Louisiana to go to grad school at Dartmouth (just across the border in New Hampshire) and I thought it was the greatest place in the world.

6

My mom grew up in a town of about 600, and I still visit it a few times a year. There are three small, locally owned restaraunts - one is also a gas station and a convenience store. There’s one grocery store, owned by the same family for the last hundred years or so. There’s one stop sign. It used to be a stop light, but they took it out when they realized no one was paying any attention to it.

I love it there. It hasn’t changed appreciably in the twenty some-odd years I’ve been visiting.

7
      • There are lots of places like you describe, and they are cheap to live in as well. But they are a long drive from any major city, and there’s no selection of local amenities such as entertainment, schools, hospitals, and -umm, jobs. But if you are in the US and want to live in the middle of nowhere, trust me–there’s still lots of “middle of nowhere” still out there, with a cheap price tag hanging on it.
        ~
8

Yes, you just cant get there by a freeway. The further away from a freeway you are, the less likely youll see strip malls and box stores.

9

Since the OP is taking a poll of sorts, let’s take it over in IMHO.

Moved from GQ.

samclem GQ moderator

10

There are plenty of small towns in Mississippi, but as one poster noted, there are no jobs there. Most of the people who work here commute a long way. The small towns usually have a greasy spoon type diner, a fire department, and a town square, where there are no stores of any type. The people who live there shop at wal-mart like everyone else, they just have to drive farther. Most of these small towns don’t even have a grocery store.

11

I live in a small town in Tennessee where there are:
no Wal-Mart/Target type stores
no fast food places
no strip malls at all
no industry
no jobs.

All businesses are locally owned. Not one national chain. It’s a tourist/retirement community. I drive 42 miles to work 1 way.

12

Most of the Adirondacks meet your criteria: Lake Placid and Saranac Lake, for instance, have few chain retail stores and a lively downtown. Schroon Lake would also seem to qualify.

13

In upstate NY, there are plenty of such towns. However, if a town is small enough not to have strip malls and walmarts, it is likely also to be small enough not to have a corner/general store.

However, and this is probably true of a lot of medium to small cities across the US, in upstate NY the tendency for small cities is to segragate the strip/box stores on a separate road, several miles from the center of town, for aesthetic and traffic purposes.

The cities for which this is true that I can come up with off the top of my head are: Watertown, Ithaca, Canandaigua, Dunkirk/Fredonia.

14

Fredonia has an ugly commercial strip near the New York Thruway.

In western New York, there’s also Perry, Lewiston and East Aurora. East Aurora is often mentioned by planners as a historic example used as inspiration for contemporary new urbanism development. Perry is mostly intact; Lewiston and East Aurroa are gentrified to some extent. None have big box retailers. East Aurora is probably the most “full service” of the three; you can do most day-to-day errands on Main Street. All three, being in the Buffalo metropolitan area, are close to employment centers. Because Buffalo’s economy is in the doldrums compared to the nation as a whole, they are all still very affordable. Of the three, East Aurora probably comes closest to resembling the mythical Bedford Falls.

Ellicottville is probably the nation’s most affordable ski town; again because it’s in the Buffalo metropolitan area. Again, no big box retail.

I’d include Warsaw (New York, not Poland) on the list, but a Wal-Mart was built there a few years ago, and it hurt the village center quite a bit.

Taos, New Mexico has a commercial strip on one side of town, but its downtown is quite healthy.

Trinidad, Colorado, a little city in southern Colorado, has a great downtown that was left untouched in the urban renewal craze of the 1950s and 1960s. The city does have Wal-Mart, but for the most part its historic fabric is intact. Trinidad is very affordable by Colorado standards. Across the New Mexico border to the south, tough, the small town of Raton is a mess.

Durango, Colorado has a Wal-Mart south of the city, but its downtown is also very healthy and vibrant, and, unlike many resort towns, unpretentious. There are still everyday commercial uses there; appliance stores, furniture stores, and diners. Durango isn’t cheap, but real estate prices there aren’t like what you would find in Aspen, Vail or Summit County; you can find a quite liveable house for under $200,000 witha bit of effort.

I’ve heard good things about *Sandpoint, Idaho.

15

Hell yes - grew up in one (2000 people). Rural western Wisconsin. There are some “big names,” I guess, but not many. Lessee…

Big Name eating establishments:

  • there’s a Dairy Queen - it’s been there for years.
  • used to be a Hardee’s, but it’s since gone out of business.
  • one of the filling stations used to have a quickie Taco Bell, but it left. There’s some other taco/fast mexicanish thing there now.
  • another filling station has a Subway that went in when I was in high school, 10 years ago.
  • that same filling station also has a quickie pizza joint where you can get personal pizzas to go (along with bigger ones for pickup), but I forget its name. It’s not a Pizza Hut.

Big Name grocery stores:

  • our local Erickson’s is now an EconoFoods. I’ll always call it Erickson’s, however. Since I’ve moved to Minneapolis and am surrounded by Rainbows and Cubs, I’m still suprised by how small Erickson’s is every time I return. Yet it’s the grocery store I grew up with. Funny, that.
  • there used to be an IGA (was smaller than Erickson’s), but it closed some years ago.

Other assorted Big Name stores:

  • there is a hardware store, but I don’t know if it’s affiliated with Ace in any way.
  • there’s have a Napa auto parts store
  • used to be a Ben Franklin, but that closed
  • the main filling stations are Cenex, Conoco, and Handy Mart

That’s it - everything else is locally owned. It’s not far from two larger towns where you can get the Big Box stuff, but it’s a 25-30 minute drive. I don’t know about how Big Names have been kept out - likely it’s because they don’t want to come. It’s not a big crossroads or anything, and the Big Names are not too far away. There are jobs - a big supplier of tires is headquartered there, along with building, hospital, and municipal type jobs, but I’m certain a good number do commute to work in the larger towns.

It’s insanely cheap, especially when compared to Minneapolis, but the jobs do pay less and might be less desireable. Still, it’s a good town.

16

Berkeley, CA isn’t a small town by any stretch of the imagination, but there are many city ordinances prohibiting large amounts of chain stores/restaurants, and I think the closest mall-wart is several towns south. It has only been in the past 8 years that they’ve even allowed more than one of the same chain in the same area (Starbucks, Blockbuster, etc.).

17

I almost considered not putting Fredonia on my list, because if you want to get from the Thruway to Fredonia you can’t escape it. However, if you disliked modern highways as much as strip malls, you could come in from the coastal highway and never see it :slight_smile:

Also, I’m not sure if you meant the strip of fastfood stores and the recently-built Wal-mart, or the D+F Plaza. D+F Plaza is certainly an ugly strip mall, but in a different way from I think the way in which the OP complained. In fact, in the early 80s it even HAD a corner store (okay, it was a Woolworth’s, but it counted since its soda fountain was still open.) So I consider it more an example of rust belt decay than modern blandness.

18

Heh, that’s where I am right now.

Yeah, this place is a small town, there used to be an Ames here, but, again, chapter 13 and all. There’s a couple fast food joints, and chain gas stations, but that’s about it. It even has a decent sized hospital (the largest one in the area.)

19

Whitmire, SC.

No chain stores, no fast food. Everything here is local owned and operated. This is an old mill town. (Mill is closed now). If you want to eat out you had better do it before 7:30 or else you’ll only get potted meat and crackers from Wilson’s store.

20

I live in a small town that I wish would get strip-malled and Wal-Marted. I know they’re not pleasing to the eye, but the poverty, high unemployment, people living in rotting houses, overflowing housing projects, etc. bother me much more than how things look. I makes me sick every time the city council makes things as hard as possible for any new businesses, just so “their” little retirement town looks like they think it should.