I’m back in Media, Pa., my hometown, promoted without irony as “Everybody’s Hometown.”
Media has a picturesque main street lined with storefronts, featuring a trolley car and a grand theater and few stone buildings any one of which, placed in Haines, Alaska, would be crowned as an architectural wonder.
Miniaturized in plastic, it’s the kind of place assembled alongside toy train sets each year at the base of Christmas trees. If it’s not everyone’s hometown, it’s Norman Rockwell’s version.
Media is a success, the inevitable result of architecture and charm, pretty nearby parks, and its status as the seat of government of surrounding Delaware County (population 563,000), with its attendant population of lawyers and bureaucrats.
Starting about 40 years ago, Media transitioned from a workaday place to a magnet for winners in the new economy. Anyone watching closely saw it happen. My folks sold our childhood home – a three-bedroom, one-bath, brick place – to an attorney. We couldn’t fathom why a lawyer would want to live on Roberts Road.
Roberts Road wasn’t upscale. The guys who lived there were middle class or lower middle-class school teachers, mechanics, teamsters, roofers, and house-painters. The man at the end of the street owned Smitty’s bar on Media’s main drag. Smitty’s was around the corner from our barber shop, and a newsstand where my dad would buy us sticks of Bazooka Joe gum when he stopped in after Sunday mass to pick up a newspaper.
Media, in the late 1970s, was becoming a destination for successful baby boomers looking to nest. Homes like the brick house I grew up in weren’t being built any more, and were gaining in value. People with more money and fewer kids were moving in, and people with less money and more kids – including much of Media’s black population – were moving out.
Gentrification and changing demographics rearranged Media’s main street. Its old, stone-walled armory became a Trader Joe’s. The A&P grocery store became a brew pub. Green’s Hobby Shop, where I once pawed through a shoebox for old postage stamps to add to my collection, is now a tony bistro of some variety, or perhaps a day spa.
The trolley and the old theater and other landmarks too regal to raze remain. But Hess Field, a little-league baseball park complete with a home-run fence, lit scoreboard and announcer’s booth, was plowed under to make way for an office complex, and the open fields at the town’s outskirts became subdivisions.
It’s all good for Media. Despite a maddening increase in car traffic, it’s a hot spot, with new stores and condos going in. A cousin of mine, a Californian who has lived on both coasts and the Midwest, remarked on what a cool place it was following an evening romp through downtown.
Old-timers lament what’s been lost. My brother, a restaurant cook who lived in a less expensive town in the county, frequented John’s Bar, a Media drinking hole he described as the last vestige of old Media. Smitty’s bar is gone and the new joints he called “brass-rail Yuppie places.”
It’s tough to be nostalgic for the Media we grew up in, a town poorer and grittier than it is today. In America, there is no arguing with success. Money talks and everyone else walks. Still, to my thinking, something has been lost, something that was more inclusive and more egalitarian about the place, something that really made Media “everybody’s hometown.”
Back then, to walk down Media’s main street, it was possible to think that everybody, in fact, lived there.