When the city of San Francisco granted historic landmark status to City Lights Bookstore in July, owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti was tickled “in a wry sort of way.

“Getting landmark status assures us we will always be a rock in the tide,” he said, “a dam against the flood of dot-communism, a bulwark against the dumbing down of America and the waves of illiteracy induced by the electronic media.”

Ferlinghetti, a renowned Beat poet, opened City Lights in 1953, and it became for a while the electric epicenter of the Beats’ literary movement. Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso spent time there, and it was the place where Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl.”

The store was awarded its status not because of its architectural history, but for the role the bookstore has played in the life of the city.

As Preservation News pointed out, sometimes the idea of a place is more important than the physical nature of the place itself. And as City Lights shows, a carefully-tended business nurtured through the passions of its owner can boost the integrity and texture of a community in amazing ways.

Here in Sylva, a second City Lights bookstore, owned by Joyce and Allen Moore, is celebrating its 15th anniversary.

The Moores don’t share Ferlinghetti’s bent for hyperbole, but the effect of their enterprise on Sylva’s revitalization differs only in scale. City Lights bookstore was in many ways in on the ground level of Sylva’s budding resurgence.

City Lights is a model small business: big on personal service, responsive to business trends, and absolutely unique. It competes against the omnipresent chain retailers on those terms and succeeds. Moreover, the store, through local ownership, benefits the local economic community rather than harming it.

The Moores, Jackson County residents for 30 years, made a conscious decision to invest in their community when they opened the store, though Joyce admits selflessness wasn’t at the top of the list.
“It’s difficult to separate selfish motivations from altruistic ones,” she says. “Anything that feels good, after all, is selfish to some extent.”

Moore has served in various capacities with Sylva’s downtown organization, Sylva Partners in Renewal (SPIR).

“It’s good that we’re making a difference in our community,” adds Moore, “but it’s not why I’m here. I do what I do because I love it. For the most part, everybody who walks in the door is someone I’m glad to see.”

Downstairs from City Lights is a café that moves pints of beer, mugs of coffee and hearty food — much of it grown locally. While musicians practice their licks, friends sit outside and have smokes with their conversation. College students gather around a professor to float ideas — a learning tool as effective as any lab session.

When the owner locks up, she goes to the house she owns, just up the road.

Down the hill, a furniture store celebrates an anniversary; for nearly seven decades, it has pumped untold piles of money into the local economy.

Within a few blocks are 11 eateries, all locally owned, all lending to Sylva’s growing reputation for dining.

Each morning, scores of other businesses open along Main Street. The owners send their kids to local schools, pay local taxes, support other local businesses and buy homes.

One office belongs to Sylva Partners in Renewal, which saw its Main Street streetscape plan came to pass a couple of years ago, providing infrastructure, consistency and attractiveness to the public space in downtown Sylva. Local businesses are taking the advantage provided by SPIR, and they’re running with it.

“SPIR has created a climate so that people want to open businesses here,” says Moore, “and more to the point that it makes good economic sense to do so. It didn’t just happen, it happened because people chose to make economic investments. The town made an economic commitment, and that helped create a climate so that others were willing to make investments as well.”

It’s an important distinction: SPIR nurtures the business community by improving the public realm — the connective tissue between private spaces. The businesses themselves are utterly unique reflections of their owners.

It’s what separates Sylva’s downtown — and thousands of other downtowns — from the cartoonish strip development lurking on their outskirts.

Nothing about Main Street is bland, homogenous or abstract. The money produced by local businesses goes back into the community, and the business owners are anything but absentee — they have a very personal stake in the livability of their town.

It’s the difference between businesses run for money alone and businesses run as a way of life, and it makes a huge difference in any community. Locally-owned businesses create strength and sustainability.

“This is a country of individuals,” says Moore. “You can’t make people do things, you can only make them want to do things. The only hope that any of us have is the possibility of shaping change.”

Incidentally, both City Lights bookstores were named for the classic Charlie Chaplin film of the same name — a wonderful movie that celebrated the value and texture of day-to-day life.

What would Chaplin think of the silly commercial environment we’ve created for ourselves? What would he think of our landscape of schemes and sound bites?

We all know, on some level, that good texture can’t be found in a drive-thru, and that value doesn’t ride in on a truck from Arkansas, but old, bad habits are hard to break.

(Bill Graham lives in Sylva.)

 

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The Smoky Mountain News