Contrary To Ordinary

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Aug. 10, 2008

I do not mean to be a contrarian.

My aim in life is not to be contrary. When I have an idle moment, I do not plot out ways to be contrary. When I was 8 years old and I was hanging out with the guys in my second grade class and we were discussing what we wanted to be when we grew up – fireman, policeman, white collar criminal -- I did not offer up the notion that no matter what the other aspects of my eventual career – spiffy uniform, cool company car, fat pension benefits, five weeks paid vacation, etc. – I wanted to make certain I would be able to get in arguments with people at the drop of an opinion.

So please do not take what I am about to say as the ranting of someone who just wants to take the opposing position, no matter what. It just comes natural with me.

Are the people who run West Chester crazy?

Last month, West Chester Borough Council Vice President Charles A. “Chuck” Christy got together in a room with a guy dressed up like Benjamin Franklin and signed a “Declaration of Classic Towns” to launch a regional marketing campaign developed to spotlight 11 communities across the Delaware Valley as “desirable places to live, work, play and prosper.”

I have few hard and fast rules in life: Always over-tip. Always pick the Phillies to lose. Never buy a hamburger from someone dressed as a clown. And never involve yourself in an event at which there is a man dressed up as Ben Franklin. It can only lead to no good.

So with Ben in the picture, immediately I had my reservations about this “Classic Towns” effort. As I understand it, some folks in the borough are going to pay the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission good money to go out and talk up West Chester so that more people come and live and work and play and prosper here. "Every year hundreds of thousands of people relocate and choose where they will live," said Barry Seymour, executive director of the DVRPC. The “Classic Towns” program "will help the communities market themselves (and) become the communities of choice."

To which I rejoined, “And that’s a good thing?”

For the life of me, I have not noticed that West Chester faces a shortage of people choosing to live here, or work here, or – and the folks who listen fondly to the wolves howling on High Street after midnight on weekends will bear me out on this – play here. I have not noticed that there are gaping holes in the retail market here. I have not noticed that the borough’s landscape resembles that of a ghost town.

As far as I can tell, we’re fine. We really don’t need any help in letting people know that we’re on the map. If we did, we’d only have to turn to Brandon “Bam” Margera, who would gladly go on national cable television and vomit on the “Welcome to West Chester” sign, or whatever, and we’d have free marketing for a year.

Here’s what I want. I want to create a regional marketing campaign to get people to stay away from West Chester. I want to keep them from coming into the borough at all hours of the day and night, clogging up the streets, begging for parking meter quarters, jamming the lines at the Growers Market on Saturday mornings, and driving up the high cost of locally produced beer. I want the DVRPC to devise a way of cloaking West Chester so that people driving south on Route 202 looking for good places to spend the rest of their lives end up buying real estate in Modena.

Some people say this sort of attitude is close minded, chauvinistic and small. I say: “To the contrary.”