. (The mill is just north of the highway.) Jacobs prescribed short blocks,
a convenience to pedestrians offering more corners, many of which would
be attractive to small businesses. West Point’s lettered cross streets were
(and are) many, and a half-century ago, its corners were often home to small
businesses among residences. Motor traffic there was, but the town was
principally designed for pedestrians, whether residents or country people
come to shop, socialize, or do business. During the s there was no
house-to-house mail delivery, so everyone walked to the U.S. post office,
which was a grand meeting place amid others nearby. These included a
drugstore with a soda fountain. Diversity of land use—mixtures of the
residential, official, retail, and entertainment—is central to the Jacobsian
canon, and West Point compares not badly with Jacobs’s favorite late s
neighborhood in Manhattan. When I was six and seven years old, my elders
permitted me to take the mailbox key to the post office and fetch the mail
by myself. West Point (like Jacobs’s own neighborhood) was safe because
there were ‘‘eyes’’ everywhere, watching out for the unusual and the dan-
gerous as well as the unexpected social pleasure. Before I returned, I might
stop at the drugstore, where, since I had been introduced by my aunt, I
could order a soda without cash money.
This was the low age of Jim Crow and Virginia’s post-Prohibition prohi-
bition. There were black people everywhere except at ‘‘white-only’’ public
venues such as the soda counter, and there were no legal taverns or bars
for either color. Both shortcomings—and there were others, too—comple-
mented neither ambience nor diversity. Yet African Americans had been
property owners in West Point for generations. Some would be numbered
among the working poor; others were business and professional people.
The mill awarded better jobs to whites; harder semiskilled occupations
went to blacks. Still, the town was too compact to be rigidly segregated, like
sprawling Portsmouth, where I lived and where the almost evenly divided
population had little contact or interaction. In West Point, the lack of tav-
erns, bars, and clubs and the disappearance of the old Terminal resort com-
plex meant (among other things) that the town more or less shut down into
private life each sundown, not unlike the typical American suburb today.
But there are more warm months than cold ones, and before the coming of
air conditioning, folks visited neighbors, strolled around those little blocks,
and hiked down to the York waterfront. There, during the s, in place of
the grand hotel, park, and boardwalk of a generation and more before, were
simply a small greensward and a long public pier. In quiet times of day or
evening, the town’s corps of retrievers—Labradors and Chesapeake Bays,