STRIP MALLS
I am an unpatriotic grouch. I guess since getting back from Greece three weeks ago I haven‘t paid much attention to Asheville architecture. But now that I think about it, Swannanoa highway architecture has really bothered me in the last three weeks. It is so blah, so dispiriting, so junky. This post is probably a repeat of posts I wrote when returning from Greece and Germany in December 2021. But this time I am returning straight from Greece and the contrast yesterday as we were driving past strip mall after strip mall on the way to Virginia Beach was intense, the same bland emptiness, again and again and again.
Susie and I drove all over the island of Paros, stopping to walk and to photograph in one little town after another. And what struck us was that there seemed to be only one paved road around the island, except in towns, which were often paved with cobblestone, so that almost all of the rural houses were on dirt roads. And yet every house on a paved road or a dirt road was beautiful and well tended.
In America I tend to equate unpaved roads with poverty and dilapidated housing. Here we seem to pave anything that can be paved with cars everywhere, dominating the layout of towns and leading to stores being scattered indiscriminately. Instead of a town shopping center stores are jumbled along the highway with each bland store with its large neon sign requiring a parking lot in front. The result is every big box or little box store being built as cheaply as possible with a flat roof and then a triangle or raised parapet giving the fake impression of design.
To any U.S. citizen this bland row of store fronts along roads (or in indoor malls) is so prevalent that we don‘t even notice it. Stores in Nousa, Greece, are in beautiful masonary buildings of rounded white plastered walls and blue accents with discreet signs in good taste on streets where the paving stones are all outlined with white paint, Greece, which is country that is struggling financially is much, much more beautiful than the USA with its vaunted standard of living. The Greeks insist on beauty which is probably subtly enforced by zoning, but results in streets being swept every day and everything being kept bright and clean. And apparently US citizens don‘t give a damn.
But I think the difference is deeper than that. For me, in the USA Christmas, a sacred holiday, is an orgy of crass commercialism and bad taste, blown up plastic Santa Clauses and reindeer and indiscriminate colored lighted decorations. It is a difference in culture and what people think is attractive and worth doing.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 