The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
By W. David Burns
Franklin Township residents and folks all across central New Jersey are paying increased attention to the impact that the proliferation of enormous warehouses and the armada of out-sized tractor-trailer trucks that service them are having on our daily lives. Paying close attention is essential. Why? Because it is no exaggeration to claim that the very character of our community and the quality of life here are both hostages to this hostile takeover of our environment.
In support of citizen awareness and action to mitigate the harm these developments cause, I thought readers would want to know about a remarkable exhibition at the Sigal Museum in Easton, Pennsylvania, “Warehouse Valley.”
“Warehouse Valley” is the exhibit’s new name for what heretofore has been called the “Lehigh Valley.” The exhibit’s organizers have curated a modest collection of mostly 19th century landscape paintings and watercolors of sites and towns in the vicinity of the museum (Northampton County) and presented them alongside contemporary photographic images of the “same” sites. The results are striking.
This warehouse proliferation and changes to the landscape are not random occurrences. Indeed, as the exhibition makes clear, the changes are the products of several factors: zoning decisions, profit-making opportunities and consumer trends, the decline of farming and with it, the consequent “availability” of open land to be exploited for other purposes, to name just a few.
Among other bits of data presented in the exhibition’s accompanying wall-text and charts is the claim that 30% of all USA consumers are located within a single day’s drive (unspecified as to miles) of the Lehigh Valley. I would expect the same or very similar statement could be made about our location. This amazing statistic makes our neighborhood into a kind of “ground zero” for this development and its attendant struggles.
The Sigal exhibition does not highlight the particular aspect of the warehouse “crisis” I am about to mention. But it seems important to point out that a major driver of this phenomenon is our practice of financing public schools mostly with local property taxes. (Other countries do this differently with significantly different and, I would say, better overall outcomes.)
One direct result of our taxing policy is the powerful impetus to increase taxable assets (aka, “ratables”) that do not bring with them new clients for the public and “charter” schools: namely children.
Here in Franklin, the great irony is that a local flashpoint of the warehouse crisis emerges from a conflict between two forms of “great-ables” (childless ratables). We were told that warehouses would be marvelous tax-receipt generators because they didn’t come with children. The same promise (increased tax revenues without increased school enrollment) was used to promote so-called “adult communities” that restrict habitation to those 55 and older.
Our original zoning classification somehow didn’t seem to anticipate that these two permissible uses might not be compatible with one another! (I digress, surely, but, in my opinion, tax policy and tax politics are keys to de-coding the dilemma in which we find ourselves.)
Returning to the Sigal exhibition, it is worth noting that museums are delicate operations, politically and financially speaking. One doesn’t want to bite the hand that feeds one. Possibly offending a corporate giant, even though a place like Sigal is a peanut to, let’s say, Amazon’s pumpkin, is not without risk.
But Warehouse Valley is subtle. It is not a crude accusation of villainy. Rather, it makes pretty clear that we are all—most of us anyway—implicated in these transformations.
Our role in this crisis as consumers is made absurdly manifest at Sigal. We are confronted with a towering wall covered with 163 cardboard boxes, accumulated by members of the museum staff. That number, 163, represents the average number of packages delivered to an individual US household per year!
Warehouse Valley does not wallow in nostalgia. The curators don’t pine for some idyllic or better time in years gone by. They make clear that landscapes do change over time, as land use changes and resources are extracted, harvested, or added. (To this point there is a terrific painting of a raft of logs being floated down the Delaware River. Somehow, the thought of log flow commerce down the Delaware had heretofore escaped me!)
What makes this exhibit so worthwhile, I think, is its thoughtful combination of imagery and its generous provision of facts.
We get to experience perspectives that, for the most part, are not available to us ordinarily. We can’t see the Lehigh Valley (or Franklin) as residents experienced it many years ago. But with this exhibition, we get to glimpse it as a few artists depicted it in the 19th Century.
Nor can we (easily anyway) get the contemporary “bird’s eye” big-picture view of our neighborhoods that the aerial photographs afford.
The Sigal makes both opportunities available to us. Thus, we get to gauge—however imperfectly—what we have lost and what we are losing. And we are helped to think about what we are exchanging for the “benefits” of buying things at (allegedly) cheaper prices and with greater convenience.
However one comes down on whether all this is a good or bad thing, what the Sigal show makes so abundantly clear and what our daily experience most surely tells us, is that the scale of this transformation brings these new developments into everyone’s back yard!
Warehouse Valley is thought-provoking and underscores the need for us to engage more deeply with the (intended and unintended) consequences of our policies on taxation, land use, the environment, and our personal commercial and consumer practices, as well.
The Sigal and this exhibition are well worth visiting and, I respectfully suggest, of special significance to Franklin readers at this time. “Warehouse Valley: A Changing Landscape” opened on September 26, 2024 and runs until July 6, 2025.
The Sigal Museum, located at 342 Northampton St. in Easton, Pennsylvania is just one asset in the set of elements that make up the Northampton County Genealogical and Historical Society.
The museum mounts temporary exhibitions, of which “Warehouse Valley” is a notable one. It also houses a very appealing permanent collection of artifacts, art works, objects, and items of historical significance (an original copy of the “Treaty of Easton” that has what is the earliest map of what we call New Jersey, among other things).
For more information, see: https://sigalmuseum.org/
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