This New England

There is a delightful chapter ("You're Tied up at Home'') in Harper's Magazine publisher John R. MacArthur's new book, You Can't Be President, about the effort of a bunch of citizens in Portsmouth, R.I., to stop Target from building an ugly big-box store in that generally pretty community near Newport.

Such battles have been played out frequently in small towns and large as locals divide up between those who want the convenience (and often the lower prices of stuff shipped from China) of such establishments and those who want a town with a minimum of windswept parking lots and a lot of little stores where the owners and clerks know you.
In short -- those who want a town and not just shopping, roads and public schools.

The Portsmouth battle, which Mr. MacArthur did a lot of reporting on, has a particularly vivid case of local characters, some delightfully menacing, with a Rhode Island texture to a controversy probably not all that different from what would happen in a suburb of Chicago. The heroine is a mother of six called Conni Harding, and, as Mr. MacArthur notes, the whole thing is out of a Frank Capra movie.

The credit crunch will reduce the development pressure from the big-box retailers for the next several years. Who knows how alluring they'll be after that? That will depend in part on how much the financial meltdown changes international trade, and what the big cohort of Baby Boomers, many of whom then will be elderly, thinks about big stores.

 Tags  "You Can't Be President John R. MacArthur Newport R.I. Target

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