Community Charrette

On my first trip to Bamberg, somehow I missed the poorly designed downtown area. When everyone else spoke about it in class, I thought to myself that it could not possibly be as bad as they are making it out to be. I found out on my second trip that, indeed it was! Downtown Bamberg is small, encompassing only one street and a few adjacent parcels. It looked as though at one time it could have been a very vibrant place, yet on the day we went there were no people there. In the thirty to forty-five minutes we spent walking the downtown strip, we passed maybe five other people also walking. On a Saturday afternoon, all of the businesses should have been open and the street and sidewalks should have been full of vibrant activity. The downtown has several positive features. Although a few of the buildings need work, overall they seem to be structurally fairly sound, and some are even quite pretty with great store fronts and unique architectural features. Although many of the businesses in downtown were already closed for the day and some closed permanently, they seem to be relevant to the needs of the Bamberg community. There are even a few antique/craft stores that attempt to bring in what little visitor traffic there is. The most disheartening feature of Bamberg’s downtown, however, is the way in which the sidewalks have recently been “improved”. Railings have been placed on both sides of the road, with only one break on either side, making it impossible to cross the street except for in one place. There has been no provision for on street parking, which is a key element in attracting people to visit the shops. The sidewalks are uneven and, in some places, slope dramatically into business entrances, making it difficult for people with limited mobility to access the businesses there. As bad as it is, I can understand why this was done. Large tractor-trailer trucks drive straight through downtown on their route from Orangeburg to Ehrhardt and Allendale. I assume these railings were put up to protect people, especially children, from the trucks on this narrow passage through town. However, they did not foresee the detrimental effects this action would have on the economic vitality and social aspects of the small downtown. In the community charrette, the citizens in my group said that there was a tremendous lack of communication among the city officials and local leaders, which is most likely what led to such poor decision-making. In fact, lack of communication was the key local issue to which my group felt there needed to be the most attention placed. They also impressed upon me the need for some form of local government or grant assistance for the business owners downtown, but realized that it might be an intricate and lengthy process.
Other issues highlighted by my group as being in need of attention included education and recreation activities for all age groups, but specifically children and teens. A mother of two said that her youngest son likes to bowl, but she has to drive to Columbia (a one and one half hour drive from Bamberg) for the nearest bowling alley. Another member of my group, an older woman, made the point that although Bamberg is a quite place to retire, even she has a hard time finding things to do; “I shop, eat, go to church, all in Orangeburg. I only sleep in Bamberg”. They also said that Bamberg needed more stores (especially a grocery store, as Piggly Wiggly currently runs a monopoly of sorts), and more businesses and industries that would supply jobs for the members of the community.

Corridor of Shame

Bamberg is located off of the I-95 corridor, which has recently been coined as the ‘Corridor of Shame’ by a group of whistle-blowing advocates of equal education in this region of the state. Bamberg, and other small, rural towns like it, suffers not only from a lack of government funding for schools and educational programs, but also from a limited amount of property tax revenues, as a large proportion of the housing in these areas is lower-income. In addition, this region of the state is prime for the location of industry, thus attracting lower paying jobs. What has been created in areas such as these is a cycle that takes children, primarily minorities who may already be disadvantaged, and provides them with less than adequate educational circumstances (i.e. out of date books, facilities in disrepair, insufficient supplies), leading to test scores that are far below the average for the rest of the state. The cycle is not easily broken, and many children remain under the same circumstances until adulthood. Those that escape the system do so at their own volition.
This seems to be a general characteristic of the south: an ever-widening gap between the urban haves and the rural have-nots. For any public service (not specifically education), more of the state’s tax dollars are allocated to the larger cities and the more affluent suburbs, often leaving the rural communities with the meager leftovers. Especially now, when funding for education for all communities across the state is being cut, rural schools have felt the crunch more then ever before. I am not saying that there is no affluence in rural communities. Clearly, some of Bamberg’s residents are well to do, however they do not endure the lack of funding in the same ways as those who cannot afford to go elsewhere for services or seek education for their children at private institutions.
This dichotomy between the haves and have-nots is deeply embedded in our society today; however, it did not always exist in the same manner. According to Cash in A Mind of the South the distinction between the haves (those who owned the property) and the have-nots (those who worked for the property owners) was at one time not that great at all, and in fact, those who where the first to venture to the States from their respective countries were not the wealthy gentlemen, but rather the laborers and the debtors. Even at the time of the Civil War, those who considered themselves gentlemen were little more than ‘superior farmers’, and many still fairly illiterate. An educated and eloquent gentry with their laidback lifestyle and hospitable nature paints a distinctive, yet decisively inaccurate vision of the Old South. When, then, did this dichotomy appear? I suspect it was when the original landowners began to die off and their progeny became heir to the ‘old money’ that began to accrue. Embedded dichotomy or not, the provision of public services can and should be offered equally to all members of a community. The gap does not have to be so apparent.