What Could Noblesville Learn From Lancaster, PA?

Lancaster's war memorial, a Federal-style 

visitor's center, and Romanesque Central Market.

When I travel to dynamic towns, I keep my eye out for what makes them dynamic. What choices have these communities made that set them apart? What lessons could Noblesville learn?

For over 30 years I’ve chaired boards, sat on committees, restored homes, argued at board of zoning appeals and plan commission meetings, written hundreds of newspaper columns and blog posts agitating for a more exciting town, and along the way sold many hundreds of houses and businesses in my day job as a Realtor. Call me a “land-use nerd."

Because Lancaster, PA is so similar in population to Noblesville (at 59,000 people it’s about 5,000 less than us), and because it leans heavily on its historic past, as we do, it’s useful to see what works for them.

 

Lancaster is old–their oldest architecture a 100 years older than ours. And though slightly lesser in population today, it was a much bigger town in 1890 than Noblesville was. So their downtown commercial district is bigger, its historic buildings taller, its historic neighborhoods much bigger, it’s architecture more dramatic, and it’s urban sprawl a smaller percentage of the whole than ours. While we’re a suburban satellite town to a state capital , they’re just far enough away from Baltimore and Pittsburg they have to be a little hub of their own.

Early 1800s architecture in Lancaster, PA

My location as I write this offers an initial lesson. Lancaster has a Marriott Hotel and a modest convention center in the very heart of their downtown (out its front door is the view above) This brings convention business and tourists who feed an impressive expanse of shops and restaurants. That’s not beyond Noblesville’s ability. Gossip in development circles a couple years back said a boutique hotel was looking to locate in our downtown and there are a number of prime undeveloped locations on either side of White River to put one. The possibility of a hotel with an events center would be a game changer for the urban environment unfolding right now in Noblesville.  And with Grand Park in Westfield, Ruoff (Deer Creek) Music Center, Morse Reservoir, and White River, our own historic districts for wandering, there are plenty of reasons for regional tourists to spend a weekend in Noblesville.

For context, let’s restate reality: 18 months from now, thanks to large high-rise apartment buildings being built in downtown Noblesville, there will be at least 500 hundred more people living in our urban core, a number I believe could quadruple in the next 4 years as new projects are announced. Add to that some 60,000 square feet of office and retail space. Forget about what downtown Noblesville WAS. I’m thinking about what it WILL BE.

 

Dinner atop a 4 story historic building with a view of the city.

Lancaster is abuzz on Saturdays. They have the best produce market I’ve ever seen in a smaller city. You walk the stalls of a back-alley Victorian Romanesque warehouse choosing wares from Amish, West African, Polish, and Italian booths. Cured meats, donuts (the Long John is serious business here), gourmet coffee, butchers, cheese makers, pasta makers, pastries, breads . . . it’s all here. The surrounding alley’s have been bricked and tables and chairs abound where locals, and on the weekends, tourists relax here and also further out amid blocks of brunch spots and coffee shops. Outdoor restaurant and bar seating fills up first, so much so, some eateries who don’t have ground level room for outdoor spaces have created rooftop dining. There are 4 or 5 of these and it’s fabulous to dine overlooking the city. Think I’ve been to all but one of them.

Late Friday afternoon a corn hold game

begins on a rooftop bar as the parking 

garages start to fill up

There’s been some conflict in downtown Noblesville about creating expanded outdoor dining. The City wanted to do it by reducing street parking and widening sidewalks, but merchants pushed back. With 4 separate parking garages planned or underway within a couple blocks of the courthouse, parking in our downtown WILL change. In Lancaster folks can either parallel park on the narrow streets, pay in the hard-to-find surface lots, or park in multi-story garages–which they do. People keep telling me Noblesville folk won’t park in garages, but I can’t figure out what defect we have that prevents us from acting as reasonable people act in urban environments everywhere else I travel in American. Everywhere!

And those brick sidewalks? I’ve been told by past Noblesville city engineers that brick sidewalks just have to go, that they’re too dangerous and tend not to meet ADA mandates. Well please! Tell me why every other dynamic historic town I visit, like Lancaster, makes it work? Are they smarter or more hard working than us? Do they care less about the handicap? Of course not.

 

Our Hoosier defect might be nothing more than a curmudgeonly lack of vision. Noblesville’s Street Department has a massive stockpile of star bricks removed from sidewalks. Put ‘em back in the damn sidewalks and quit thinking up reasons why it won’t work!

Sidewalk bricks abound in Lancaster, but they 

don't have the beautiful star bricks we have.

Like Noblesville, Lancaster protects its historic resources (like those brick sidewalks). They appear to understand that it’s their trump card. Noblesville needs to double down on this and perhaps go as far as declaring a moratorium on demolition of pre-1970s buildings, (don’t quibble with my cutoff date. Mid-Century houses are all the rage), and taking action to encourage restoration of neglected older properties. There needs to be a review and protection process. Something more than homeowner whim.

Lancaster is not all rosy and clean. Walking a few blocks west of the bustling downtown, I smiled at an elderly shirtless man smoking in the doorway of an ancient, crumbling house on a street where fast food trash gathered against a stairway and weeds sprouted from cracks in the sidewalk. Here, blocks of low income housing with peeling paint and crooked gutters are found, made up of 200-year-old simple Georgian and Federal-style row houses bending this way and that along streets following colonial-era mule paths. Working your way clockwise north, surrounding streets reveal big ambitions not entirely realized. There are a couple blocks of art galleries and record stores, a couple more streets of wonderful restaurants, but here and there, empty buildings with “For Lease” signs. Further on the axis to the east you return to envious environs, tree-lined streets with stunning Victorian homes–Queen Anne, Italianate, and French Second Empire, all beautifully restored.

 

Like Noblesville, Lancaster has iconic American

streetscapes filled with shops and restaurants.

Low-income housing remains a challenge for Noblesville, too. Thankfully, we don’t have large neglected zones meant to house those struggling financially, but we do need more affordable housing and as our downtown gentrifies, the challenge will mount. Rather than ranting at Help Wanted signs, “People don’t want to work!” perhaps consider that the folks qualified to take that job can’t afford to live in our town. Lancaster and Noblesville, each in their own way struggle with low-income housing, as our entire nation does.

I am proud to be a Hoosier, but just as I can recognize my personal faults, I recognize those of the place I come from. I worry the Hoosier mind set is our biggest enemy in city building. We’re so used to the old stereotype of Indiana being a backwater, fly-over state, do we carry the cancerous germ of belief that while we’ll vacation in great places, our own towns can’t compete?

 

Noblesville is poised for greatness, but it will take hard choices and enlightened value judgments to get there, just like those made here in Lancaster, PA.