Roadside City Center

June 30, 2007

Today I went looking for downtown Snellville, Georgia. The common roadside vistas of Snellville are familiar enough.. strip malls and restaurants galore.. but I wanted to know if there were any remnants from an earlier pattern of town growth. The place to look would be in the area around the newly constructed (2005) city center of Snellville.

The picture above shows the city center as it appears from Georgia 78, the main road running from Stone Mountain to Athens. It is obviously a new building.. lacking any elements that could be called ostentatious.

Externally the building resembles town halls and county courthouses throughout the south (both in its brick construction and classicizing motifs). But it is different in its placement just off two major thoroughfares (Georgia 78 and Scenic Highway). Traveling through the south on older roads one is inevitably taken right past the central building, surrounded by a square. Traffic is forced to slow down as it moves through the central section of the town. In the case of Snellville, the city center just stands to the side and demands no slowing down. It has a manicured lawn surrounding it, but this hardly counts as a square. The roads at no point frame a view of the center; it is always seen obliquely.

This is the back parking lot for the city center of Snellville. A thin line of trees separates it from other properties located behind it. This view clarifies the model along which the city center was constructed. What we have is the city center as strip mall. The goal is to be accessible, to be convenient, and to look like a city center should look. Sacrificed, however, is centrality and the sense that this is a structure with cultural authority. In other words, the city center is simply an addition to the road-lining strip malls and not in any way a monument to civic pride and identity.

As I mentioned, there is nothing like a public square around the city center. But that does not mean there is a complete absence of symbolic markers. In an older town there would be the usual statue dedicated to the Confederate dead.. an important marker of regional identity. Snellville has no such central memorial for the Civil War, but it does have two dedications on the grounds of the city center: one for those who died in the Vietnam War and a second for those who died in the attacks of 9/11. It is no coincidence that both of these events are central to contemporary political debate.. both manipulated symbolically on a regular basis. Absent is anything that could be thought of as regionally symbolic.

Almost across the street from the city center is the First Baptist Church of Snellville. I say "across the street" but it would be more correct to call it "across the highway".. as this is no pedestrian friendly area. I was struck by the announced subject of this coming Sunday service..

The First Baptist Church of Snellville is flanked by a humongous parking lot. From the air it would look like a black U around the central red brick church building. Outside of a few external signals about the use of this building (cross, steeple), it is hard for me to distinguish this structure from the strip malls which occupy the same position on the landscape and also feature large parking lots.

What I am heading for here is a notion that these structures (city center, church, standard strip mall) are all basically the same thing. They partake of a remarkably similar set of symbols. Shopping, 9/11, and church are related; civic values underline the commercial and religious values.