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.”
Showing posts with label West Chester bars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label West Chester bars. Show all posts
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Monday, November 12, 2007
Bar Light, Bar Bright, First Bar That I See Tonight
This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 11, 2007
We gathered together Friday evening, a lively group of friends and me, in a beautiful, historic home on the west side of High Street in West Chester, for a flavorful meal of spicy soup, crisp salad, leg of lamb and lightly fluffed potatoes.
Naturally the talk turned to old bars. Old West Chester bars to be exact.
I will state for the record here and now that it was not my decision to bring up the subject. I understand I have a reputation for enjoying a memory or two about saloons I have inhabited in the past. I am well aware that I have, on occasion, mentioned my fondness for certain old West Chester bars that no longer exist. I am fully cognizant that I have been accused of bringing the subject up whenever it struck my fancy, even if the conversation into which I inserted myself dealt with the root causes of the Civil War, or current monetary policy in Trinidad and Tobago.
But I’m pleading innocent on this one. I did not start the conversation this time, although I merrily went along with it. I believe it was Paul, a former borough resident now exiled to the rural pastures outside Marshallton, who broached the subject. I could be wrong.
Paul and his wife lived in the borough for a decade or so, and he became fond of the myriad pleasures the borough had to offer, pleasures I have described on these pages in the past: the historic architecture, the cozy neighborhoods, the alleys that open up newly discovered treasures almost daily.
But what he missed most, it seemed, were the bars.
He told of days spent exercising, finishing up a bicycle ride or a long run and finding himself quenching his thirst at the Square Bar, the best bar in town without a sign on the front door. Or ending a night of fine, upscale urban dining with his bride at a pub where the bartender had no teeth.
We compared notes on those taverns we missed, either because their ambiance was friendly and warm or because their ambiance was slightly threatening and edgy. I’ll let you be the judge which was which.
There was Carlini’s on North Church Street, The Shingle on East Gay Street, Donohue’s at the corner of High and Gay, and the bar they called Joe’s Sportsman’s Lounge on the west side of town. They all echoed a time and place when the borough was something different; an earlier version of its current self, like a teenager just growing into an adult skin.
Most of those places are gone now, replaced by other tap rooms of slightly pricier menus. West Chester endures with or without Carlini’s and Donohue’s, and constantly reinvents itself.
Mosteller’s Department Store becomes the annex to the Chester County Courthouse. The Mansion House Hotel becomes a bank and office building. Mr. Sandwich’s Coffee Shop becomes home to first stockbrokers, then politicians. W.E. Gilbert’s appliance store, where I once bought a VCR, is now Carlino’s Foods, where I recently bought chicken parmesan.
The beer may cost more now at the new spots that have replaced the old, but it doesn’t taste any better.
Just ask Paul.
We gathered together Friday evening, a lively group of friends and me, in a beautiful, historic home on the west side of High Street in West Chester, for a flavorful meal of spicy soup, crisp salad, leg of lamb and lightly fluffed potatoes.
Naturally the talk turned to old bars. Old West Chester bars to be exact.
I will state for the record here and now that it was not my decision to bring up the subject. I understand I have a reputation for enjoying a memory or two about saloons I have inhabited in the past. I am well aware that I have, on occasion, mentioned my fondness for certain old West Chester bars that no longer exist. I am fully cognizant that I have been accused of bringing the subject up whenever it struck my fancy, even if the conversation into which I inserted myself dealt with the root causes of the Civil War, or current monetary policy in Trinidad and Tobago.
But I’m pleading innocent on this one. I did not start the conversation this time, although I merrily went along with it. I believe it was Paul, a former borough resident now exiled to the rural pastures outside Marshallton, who broached the subject. I could be wrong.
Paul and his wife lived in the borough for a decade or so, and he became fond of the myriad pleasures the borough had to offer, pleasures I have described on these pages in the past: the historic architecture, the cozy neighborhoods, the alleys that open up newly discovered treasures almost daily.
But what he missed most, it seemed, were the bars.
He told of days spent exercising, finishing up a bicycle ride or a long run and finding himself quenching his thirst at the Square Bar, the best bar in town without a sign on the front door. Or ending a night of fine, upscale urban dining with his bride at a pub where the bartender had no teeth.
We compared notes on those taverns we missed, either because their ambiance was friendly and warm or because their ambiance was slightly threatening and edgy. I’ll let you be the judge which was which.
There was Carlini’s on North Church Street, The Shingle on East Gay Street, Donohue’s at the corner of High and Gay, and the bar they called Joe’s Sportsman’s Lounge on the west side of town. They all echoed a time and place when the borough was something different; an earlier version of its current self, like a teenager just growing into an adult skin.
Most of those places are gone now, replaced by other tap rooms of slightly pricier menus. West Chester endures with or without Carlini’s and Donohue’s, and constantly reinvents itself.
Mosteller’s Department Store becomes the annex to the Chester County Courthouse. The Mansion House Hotel becomes a bank and office building. Mr. Sandwich’s Coffee Shop becomes home to first stockbrokers, then politicians. W.E. Gilbert’s appliance store, where I once bought a VCR, is now Carlino’s Foods, where I recently bought chicken parmesan.
The beer may cost more now at the new spots that have replaced the old, but it doesn’t taste any better.
Just ask Paul.
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