Suburbia: We Can’t Work It Out

 That the business owners are angry is understandable. After all, their lives are being turned upside down, and they aren’t shy about letting you know it.

But for Sharon Eckstein, the stakes weren’t quite as tangible. “We’re a resident-generated group,” says Eckstein, when asked about her connection to the business owners themselves. “We have some members who are business owners; we are doing outreach to them.” No, for her and the other members of what would come to be known as the Save Ardmore Coalition — a 600-household “loose” coalition of Lower Merion residents, with a lawyer, an architect and a preservationist at its core — it was the principle of what the township was doing that had them mad. So what if they rarely had reason to patronize many of the stores? The township’s plan to knock them down was like emptying their driveways of Subarus and Volvos and replacing them with unwanted SUVs. It threatened something essential and authentic about their upscale-but-unfussy adopted town.

For starters, the township would, in essence, be handing over what had been private property to a developer of its choosing, who wouldn’t build a railroad, or a hospital, or any of the usual stuff we imagine as justification for the “public use” required for eminent domain, but a bunch of other stores, and parking, and really nice apartments.

And the selection of these buildings in particular, the Save Ardmore group says, is especially absurd. “Here you have the only blocks where there have never been vacancies, where there are family-owned businesses that have a combined 300 years on the block,” Eckstein points out. “You reward them for holding on by tearing them down?”

Finally, there was the township’s arrogance in the whole matter — the way it seemed to be ramming its plan down everyone’s throat. SAC member Hugh Gordon says the letter the township sent to businesses notifying them they were on the hit list reminds him of 1994, when he says the township called a vote about some new parking meters. According to Gordon, the new meters had been paid for and were sitting in a nearby garage as the vote was being taken.

To fight back, the Save Ardmore Coalition rallied the troops. They set up a website, saveardmorecoalition.org. They planted neon yellow “Ardmore Deserves Better” signs all over town. They held a rally. They collected 6,000 signatures.  They ultimately filed a lawsuit.

For Eckstein, the suit was their only choice  once the township’s plan was approved last March. Of course, moving to the courts meant the official death of communications. This is when things started to get petty. The township fired back with its own website, saveardmore.org. It put up its own yellow signs, reading “Ardmore Deserves It.”

The one thing neither side did was attempt to sit down and talk about a solution. The SAC says Manko, unlike a couple of other commissioners, refused to meet with them.  Manko says that’s not the case. “We’ve been meeting with them for two years,” he says, referring to the public meetings and not the private sit-down the group wanted.  “And we agreed to meet with them again — but they sued us.”

In the end, so much of the battle seems to be about two sides unable, or unwilling, to hear each other. Asked why she thinks the township is so determined to uproot those nine merchants in particular, Sharon Eckstein says, with exasperation tinged with annoyance, that she really doesn’t know. Meanwhile, Joe Manko doesn’t get why people are reacting the way they are, or acting like he’s trying to squeeze them out of the process or sneak something by them. “This is the most public-participation thing I’ve been involved in in 26 years on the board,” he says. He calls Eckstein and her group a bunch of people used to getting their way. “There’s a difference between listening, understanding and agreeing,” he says. “You can understand and you can disagree.  But it’s presented as, ‘If you don’t agree with us, you aren’t listening.’”