Help! My Main Street is a Highway

by Robert Strauss   
Posted December 20, 2007

Jaywalking is only for the suicidal, likewise window shopping at 50 mph. But if you have nerves of steel, there’s a big-box store with everything you need at the end of the off-ramp.

Some main streets raise a question: Not the age-old, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” but “Who is nuts enough to play a game of chicken crossing the road?”

When highways replace main streets, everything changes. Big-box stores need the traffic volume that multi-lane arteries bring, as well as the acres of parking spaces and giant footprints unavailable in an old-fashioned downtown.

Window-shopping a cute boutique requires strolling on foot or at least creeping along in a car at low speed. At 50 miles an hour, window shopping is replaced by simple logo recognition, with giant illuminated signs lassoing your attention and wide, well-spaced entrances giving you time to pull in without causing a multi-car pileup.

“The approach for many New Jersey towns has been to get the big stores in and people will congregate there,” says Carol Kaufman-Scarborough, a professor of marketing at the School of Business at Rutgers-Camden. “But that’s not a downtown. You need different dynamics for that.”

Two of the seminal drive-by downtowns are at opposite ends of the state—Paramus in the north and Cherry Hill in the south. In 1961 Cherry Hill became the site of the first enclosed mall east of the Mississippi; within a few years Paramus had four malls or mall-like centers, the largest concentration of suburban shopping anywhere.

The attraction each place trumpeted was total automobile friendliness. “No one walks—it’s just the way it is up here,” says Fred Rohdieck, president of the Greater Paramus Chamber of Commerce. According to Rohdieck, 325,000 cars pass through Paramus every day, a lot of them headed to the Westfield Garden State Plaza at the junction of Route 17 and Route 4, the Bergen Town Center on Route 4, or the Paramus Park Mall or the Fashion Center, both on Route 17.

Shoppers are loath to walk even from box to box. “You go to Home Depot and then you get in the car to go two stores over to Wegmans,” says Kaufman-Scarborough. “It defeats the whole idea that they were built as a place that might be a town center.”

Paramus and Cherry Hill have been getting a few nips and tucks as they age. All four malls in Paramus are either being renovated or have been renovated in the past few years. In Cherry Hill, the 225-acre site of the old Garden State Park racetrack is being redeveloped. Some housing is going up, but for the most part, what’s coming is more big boxes—a Cheesecake Factory next to Wegmans next to Best Buy next to Dick’s Sporting Goods next to Home Depot.

Ari Messinger, who as business advocate for Cherry Hill helps oversee development in the township, defends the Garden State Park project, saying that when the several hundred townhouses and apartments are fully occupied (by 2009), more people will walk to and between the stores. Still, he admits, greater business potential lies in the 500,000 vehicles a day that traverse Cherry Hill’s highways.

While Cherry Hill doesn’t have a classic downtown, each of the many neighborhoods “has its own distinct shopping area,” Messinger says. “That is what makes Cherry Hill unique. They’re all part of Cherry Hill.”

The idea of Garden State Park as a downtown became rather farfetched when Cherry Hill widened Haddonfield Road, cutting down all the 50- to 100-year-old trees on the side facing the development, and then super-widened Route 70, making it eight lanes across near the development’s main entrance. Instead of encouraging walking, this makes it virtually impossible to cross Route 70 on foot before the light changes. Not even Tiki Barber on one of his best days could make it across.

“Downtowns have to have reasons for people to go other than merely for shopping,” says Kaufman-Scarborough. “They need municipal buildings and post offices and mass transit stops and places to have events. People go to Haddonfield for the car show or the band concert or to buy some stamps. You don’t do that in Cherry Hill or Paramus.”

Still, people flock to live in Cherry Hill and Paramus and other New Jersey towns like them. Schools are good. Housing is fine. And everything is accessible. Like they say, location, location, location. Not everyone laments the drive-by downtown.

“It is the way people live today, and they like it,” says Rohdieck. “I grew up in Queens and people walked, so it seemed strange when I moved to New Jersey and didn’t, but there are a lot of happy people here just the same.”