Maybe it's my education or perhaps just my personality but I have a tendency to mourn the loss of things we can never get back...certain people, species and places. Today I missed a place that for much of the last decade, I did not. I spent my high school years to the present being disgusted by the rate at which development was changing the town I grew up in. My friends and I spoke out against building subdivisions consisting of hundreds of homes and rampant commercial developement.
Alas, over the past 10-15 years so much of my life was paved over. Office buildings and strip shopping centers were built in anticipation of a future need, while available space for lease sat empty. The recent financial crisis slowed ground breaking but now more than ever structures are sitting empty and beginning to fall in disrepair. Some construction continues...
Parks are being surrounded by homes, roads are now much wider, the human population has grown (for lack of a better word) exponentially. Schools are over-crowded and services are strained. Traffic on the widened Rt. 10 is insane!
Chester, VA has changed quite a bit over the last decade or so. It has gone from an area where most people knew each other to hardly knowing anyone at all. "Old families" still persist but the culture is being swamped by people that recently moved to the area. My own family is somewhere between the old and new residents of Chesterfield County, having relocated there in the 1980's. Even so, Route 10 at that time was a 2-lane road and a drastic amount of the current development was absent. For more information about the demographics of the area, check out the following link: http://www.city-data.com/city/Chester-Virginia.html
Every time I returned to visit on breaks from school, it seemed that the number of restaurants or stores or houses doubled. An abbreviated list (off the top of my head) of businesses that sprang up since high school include:
Uno's
Home Depot
The Chester Village (how many shops are in there anyway?)
New Lowe's
Kohl's (In the 2nd Lowe's building...anyone remember the old Lowe's farther east on Rt. 10?)
Starbuck's
All that stuff by Wal-Mart (Wal-Mart isn't THAT old either)
*There is much more. What is truly disturbing is the number of housing developments now.
Recent map of Chester ---> Click here
Farther west, another free-standing drug store was built literally in the back yard of Castlewood and the rest of the Chesterfield Meadows area around it and Magnolia Grange (http://www.chesterfieldtourism.org/castlewood.shtml) is hardly recognizable. What happened to our reverance of history? I remember when the intersection of Beach Road and Rt. 10 had a bean field on the southwest corner (everything in the proximity of Ledo's Pizza) and the northwest corner was a lumberyard.
I hate to say it, but Chester may be lost. The place I missed today is long gone...I now remember my way around based on where things USED to be rather than what is there now. Does anyone remember; Grundy's General Store (now Sibley's Barbeque), Ward's/Miss Swiss (now the Village Grill), Safe Way/Chuck's Market (now CVS), Ukrop's (now Martin's), Feed & Seed (now boarded up), Litchfield Cinema (another drug store)? More recently, how about Chester Middle School (now 9th grade of Thomas Dale High School)?
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