Roanoke, Gateway, Workshop, and What Comes Next
Near Roanoke, Virginia
Stand downtown on a clear evening and you can see most of what Roanoke has been, all at once. The Hotel Roanoke's Tudor silhouette on its rise above the tracks. The Mill Mountain Star already glowing above the southern bluffs.
The Norfolk Southern rail yards still present at the valley floor. The market district a few blocks east, still open, still selling local produce in the same location where farmers have been selling it since eighteen eighty-two. Roanoke is not a city that had one moment of glory and then declined, though it has had its difficult decades.
The railroad that made it also tied its fortunes to an industry that was transformed, rationalized, and partially automated through the twentieth century. The locomotive shops shed thousands of jobs over time. The neighborhoods that housed the shop workers changed.
Downtown went through the same hollowing-out that affected virtually every mid-sized American industrial city after the interstate highway era began. What Roanoke has managed to preserve is harder to quantify than a jobs number. The walkable downtown anchored by the market.
The mountain trails accessible from within city limits. The O. Winston Link Museum and the Virginia Museum of Transportation as genuine rather than merely nominal cultural institutions.
A civic culture, still recognizable, shaped by the railroad era's particular mix of labor-union solidarity and company-town paternalism. The Blue Ridge sits at the city's edge in every direction. The Appalachian Trail passes just north of the city.
The parkway threads the southern ridges. For a city built to move coal and passengers through the mountains, Roanoke has found a second identity as a place that draws people who want to be near the mountains without being far from everything else. That is not a bad second act for a town that started as a railroad junction in eighteen eighty-two.
