By Sofia Samatar
“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.
“I remember so many places,” she says, “that aren’t here anymore.”
I often think of her when I walk past the bus shelter on Grace Street, which doubles as a historical marker, with its large photograph of the Rockingham Cooperative Farm Bureau complex that stood here from 1932 to 2013. A parking deck now occupies the site. I think of how she must have taken this same walk, when she was a child, to go downtown, and how different it must have felt, how the noises and smells of the street have changed, and even the quality of the light. Sitting with her in a coffee shop, listening to her stories, I have a strange sensation of doubling: the feeling of contrasting time periods layered onto the same space, as the photograph at the bus stop is lined by the masonry behind it and scrawled over by scratches in the transparent wall.
Every Saturday, she tells me, she and her sister would walk downtown for their piano lesson at the Miles Music building on Mason Street. She was nine years old and her sister was seven. After their lesson, they’d go to the Peoples Drug Store on Main Street for a sandwich at the lunch counter. They always ordered the same sandwiches—one grilled cheese and one ham—and traded halves. “It was great,” she says, “because eventually the women behind the counter just knew who we were.” Then they’d walk home down Water Street, past the old jail, and stop in at Novelty News to get the latest Archie comics. She and her sister would each choose one, and then they’d sneak to the back of the place and try to glance at the Playboy magazines, and inevitably the man at the register would holler, “Okay, you kids! Come on!” Later, she says, when they were teenagers, they’d go to Novelty News for Swisher Sweets cigars, which made them sick.
On Liberty Street, they’d stop at the Ice House and stand in front of the big doors, which were always open, to feel the cold pouring out and watch the men working with the ice in the depths, wearing coats and breathing heavy plumes of fog. She remembers how the jail moved around, and how it’s grown, too, needing more and more space, until the jail and courthouse took over a whole block, pushing out all the businesses there, the fine old bars she remembers and the Ole Virginia Ham Café, an enormous place with wonderful homemade food. And oh, the amazing chicken salad and strawberry shortcake at the Downtown Café! A certain flavor, which once characterized this place, has slipped away, wafting into history with the fragrance of a particular cake, fading along with the deep glow of the carpet at the Virginia Theater.
She remembers the grandeur of that theater on Main Street, which had once been an opera house and a venue for vaudeville shows. “It was done in the old style,” she says: an elegant lobby, a beautiful theater, an orchestra pit with an organ, thick folds of red curtains on the stage. A long carpeted ramp led up from the street level to the lobby—and there was another hallway, she says, her eyes gleaming, going down to the left, which got darker and darker and ended at the Arcade. There was a bowling alley back there, she remembers, pool tables, a bar, and naughty magazines and postcards for sale. Once, as a child, she followed her older brother into the Arcade and a man immediately came up to her, took her by the shoulders, turned her around, and sent her out the door. “I’ll never forget it!” she laughs.
They tore down the Virginia Theater and put in a parking lot. But you can still see, she tells me, in the brick buildings downtown, the outlines of former architecture, the shadowy shapes of windows that will never open again.
It’s not entirely a case of mourning the past. She loves the Friendly City today, especially its diverse culture, the many languages spoken here, the varieties of music and food. And there are some places from the past she doesn’t miss, like the downtown biker bar she would always cross the street to avoid, a place seething with fights and drunken mayhem—though even here she can’t help giggling with delight over the name of the place: Eddie’s Broken Spoke. No, it’s not that one doesn’t want things to change—change is unavoidable in cities, as more generally in life, and often necessary and welcome—but who, having known it, can forget the peculiar aura of menace and attraction, of drama and dilapidation, that characterized Eddie’s Broken Spoke? How can she pass the café on the corner without thinking of the Friendly City’s first head shop, which once occupied this space with its black light posters and beaded curtains, where she could never buy anything incriminating because her friend’s mother worked there, where she purchased her first pair of jeans?
Places have an afterlife. Their images are carried in the memories of people who pass, every day, the new objects and structures that have replaced the old. And since a city is made of people as well as places, it works like a palimpsest, traces of ancient script showing through the writing of today.
As we set down our empty cups and prepare to say goodbye, we talk about the Red Front grocery store—a place I’ve lived here long enough to remember—and the sadness of its empty windows and funereal, abandoned parking lot. I dearly miss this place, which shut down four years ago. The fact that there was once an affordable independent grocery store in my neighborhood already feels legendary. As I part from my friend with a hug, it occurs to me that such losses are an inevitable consequence of belonging to a place. If you pass certain street corners with a pang, if ghosts gesture from boarded-up windows, it’s because you’ve lived in that place long enough to see it change.
Someone just told me that Red Front is going to be turned into a nightclub. Can this be true? I imagine, beneath contemporary dance beats, strains of the light Christian rock they used to play at the store; between the dancers, racks of those Amish romance novels known as bonnet rippers; and, glinting spectrally behind the bar, tubs of brilliantine and towering, church-picnic-size jars of pickled red beet eggs.
