Just beyond a stand of mature sugar maples on the corner of Lawton Road and Albany Turnpike (U.S. Route 44) at the crossroads of Canton, Connecticut’s commercial district, bulldozers have been moving soil behind a chain link fence. A sign proclaims the future location of a CVS Pharmacy while the trees 
mark the site where a large 1796 Georgian colonial house once stood. It was the home of Dr. Solomon Everest who treated wounded soldiers during the Revolutionary War, served as a Connecticut legislator and member of the 1818 state constitutional convention, and is considered the father of the Town of Canton. When retail development beckoned at this busy corner a decade ago, rather than integrate the ancient farmhouse into the plan, it was dismantled and trucked away. More than two centuries of town heritage went with it.
Not every old building can or should be saved. The problem is that chain pharmacies, here in Connecticut and around the country, have a record of constructing on sites occupied by locally distinctive structures, refusing to reuse them as part of the development, and then insisting on a standardized architecture that makes residents and visitors feel as if place doesn’t matter. The designs are largely like what you might find in Baltimore, Pittsburgh or any other location within the company’s reach “until every place becomes more like every other place, adding up to No Place,” as urbanist Jane Jacobs once put it.
Within the last year and no more than a half hour ride from the Canton site, Farmington’s Silo
Restaurant with its singular shingled namesake tower, Bristol’s 1748 Fletcher-Terry House which sheltered the nation’s most famous early clock making family, and a substantial 1915 brick and concrete office building at the corner of Washington and Park Streets in Hartford have been demolished or slated for demolition. They’ll be replaced with cookie-cutter pharmacy buildings that will look remarkably similar to the one being built in Canton.
I have nothing against chain drug stores. I shop in them and will continue to do so. They serve a
valuable community function and are sometimes generous to local causes. They offer a wide variety of useful products at competitive prices. In fact, unlike the corner drug stores common years ago, which were largely limited to medicines, greeting cards, cosmetics, and newspapers and magazines with an occasional soda fountain, today’s larger scale descendants sell everything from clothing to groceries, toys to hand tools.
Chain pharmacies have become the general stores of the twenty-first century and perhaps
they should start acting like those old-timey retailers who not only made a buck, but felt invested in their communities. They could begin by constructing buildings that are modestly sensitive to natural site conditions and neighborhood architecture. Using modern materials and techniques, their stores shouldn’t look like some Disneyland colonial or have crossbuck barn doors and a fake cupola, but they need to be cognizant of existing development in the areas where they build even as they push the envelope of time and design with fresh looks. That may take the form of setbacks, parking locations, small design elements, window placement, signs, entrance arrangements, lighting, relationship to the street, and a wide range of details.
But we are fools if we expect large retail companies to experience sudden revelations about local needs and conditions. Imaginative designs sensitive to community context will require municipal commissions that are not only business friendly and act expeditiously, but have the regulatory muscle
and intestinal fortitude to make the necessary decisions. Most of all, it will take active citizens to support those commissions and make retailers aware of customer preferences. Failure to act will lead us to Jacobs’ “No Place,” and that is exactly what we will deserve if we sit on our hands.
Sensitivity to local conditions would result in quality buildings that not only improve the local tax base and provide convenience to shoppers, but make the areas where they locate more desirable places to live leading to even more customers and taxes. Places will and should change. But they don’t always have to lose their distinctiveness and disappear. Modern pharmacies dispense medications for the health of individuals. They need to find the right prescription for the health of communities where they do business.
Adapted from the Hartford Courant, 6/28/12
