Town

It's funny, you can grow up somewhere and not realize that it is brimming with architectural treasures. Charlotte Amalie, better known to us locals as Town, was founded in 1671, but most of its buildings date from the nineteenth century. I always knew that the downtown area by Main Street was old, but I hadn't realized even the streets at the edges of town were laid out in the 1760s.

This weekend I read The Royal Three Quarters of the Town of Charlotte Amalie by Edith DeJongh Woods and Historic Buildings of St. Thomas and St. John by Frederik C. Gjessing and William P. MacLean. The former is a gorgeous book - the illustrations alone make the book worth having.

We are finally seeing some appreciation for Town, a lot of outsiders are fixing up some of the old buildings. Actually, a lot of the old local families never left and still live in their townhouses. It's too easy to zip through town on the waterfront. It's very easy to avoid town altogether, but it would bear a good walking-through. It was laid out when cars were unimagined. Indeed, the only way to go on the step streets is to walk them.

It turns out that St. Thomas has been a cosmopolitan trading center right from the start. Even though I grew up in the relatively rural Northside, I suppose the kernel of urban appreciation was placed in my young mind by going to town every day after school. I feel cheated that it's not until I was an adult that I learned our history. I don't get any indication that our schools have gotten any better on this front since I left. Still, I think awareness is growing, so I'm optimistic.