The Pennsylvania Town 40 Years Later: Preservation and Planning in a Changing Townscape

Taking Wilbur Zelinsky’s 1977 article “The Pennsylvania Town” as a point of departure, this article explores how preservation in three Pennsylvania towns—Lancaster, York, and Reading—has proceeded in the context of challenging socio-economic trends and changing demographics. Our assessment of the current status of Zelinsky’s urban-morphological traits identifies a townscape that exhibits both historical continuity and new paths of urban form. Overall, robust preservation regimes have been established resulting in relatively intact townscapes. Many recent redevelopment projects exhibit a significant degree of compatibility with the historic built environment. Some success has also been achieved in preserving shade trees and mixed land uses. But there are also two-tiered preservation regimes producing different urban landscapes: the colonial town (now partly gentrified and revitalized) and the industrial rowhouse town (now Latinized). Both closely resemble ideal urban design as envisioned by the contemporary planning profession (i.e., new urbanism). The latter is also affected by disinvestment in the built environment due to deindustrialization and the immigration of a low income population, resulting in Latino aesthetics grafted onto older working class residential districts. These class and ethnic aesthetics are encouraged and legally formalized, but also resisted, by preservation regulations. Other distinct traits—bricked sidewalks and alleys—exist in a grey zone with regards to ownership and are therefore harder to preserve.