Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a series to commemorate Boalsburg’s bicentennial. This piece looks to other small towns in Centre County and their struggle to remain viable in a changing economy.

Turning onto Front Street of Philipsburg from Presqueisle Street, first-time visitors may first notice the bright maroon banners welcoming them to historic downtown Philipsburg. The signs, hanging from the streetlamps lining the flawless sidewalks, inform visitors that the town was established in 1797, but they probably do not need these signs to tell them the town is old; the buildings tell all. Many of these buildings are three stories high, and they are made of yellowish, dark red, white or even tan stone and brick. It is evident they have been around a while by the chipping paint and fading colors.

Walking along the street, visitors see the numerous businesses occupying these old buildings. Forever After, a bridal and prom shop, has a “now open” sign hanging above its windows, apparently a new addition to the street. Other businesses, such as Steiner’s Vacuum Service, Bordas TV Electronics, Gardner’s Candies and The Little Restaurant have been there longer.

But mixed in with these established businesses are many vacant storefronts, some with planks of wood strewn about the floor with buckets, tools and window frames, others with large poster boards hanging on the window that reads: “Philipsburg Revitaliza-tion Corporation Main Street Program, This storefront is filled with opportunity.”

What visitors may not know, and these signs allude to, is that Philipsburg is undergoing a facelift with a revitalization project brought about by the Philipsburg Revitalization Corporation. The Main Street Program is trying to “bring back” the downtown and give it new life.

Emily Gette-Doyle, Main Street manager of the Main Street Program, said that during the 1980s, the downtown suffered many losses and business closures, and the Main Street Program, put into place here in 1999, is aiming to revitalize the community.

“What we’re hoping is that it’ll be a lively place for people to be, to enjoy not only shopping and dining and service options, but that people can live and work in downtown Philipsburg,” Gette-Doyle said.

The losses and experiences of Philipsburg are not a problem unique to this region. Downtowns across Pennsylvania have been dying for some time now. The cause of death: Wal-Mart, Best Buy and other shopping centers built on the fringes of communities that draw crowds away from the downtown. Local businesses seem to have been forgotten in the bustle of mark-downs and low prices at these big-box chains, but revitalization programs such as Philipsburg’s hope to change that.

“It’s not just Philipsburg, everyone needs to rethink what downtown is,” Gette-Doyle said. “That’s not to say that downtown can’t have a purpose and can’t still serve certain needs in a community.”

Through the movement to save small towns across Pennsylvania, places like Philipsburg and Bellefonte are creating roles for themselves and bringing purpose back to their downtowns. By instituting revitalization programs, investing in new infrastructure, preserving their history and investing in their assets, towns are able to create a niche for themselves that is unique and able to draw people in.

Al Luloff, professor of agricultural economics and rural sociology at Penn State, cited development on the fringes of communities as a core cause of drawing people away from downtowns.

When these storefronts are vacated, both car and foot traffic decreases, along with the vitality of the communities.

“All of the center of gravity for the community shifts from the downtown area to the fringes, to the highways that connect one town to the next,” he said.

Bill Fontana, executive director of the Pennsylvania Downtown Center, a nonprofit dedicated to the revitalization of communities in Pennsylvania, said that over the last 60 years, policies such as extending the interstate highway system have moved people away from core communities.

“We make it easier for people to be much more mobile and for economies to exist on a regional basis,” he said. Thus, with people commuting larger distances to work, they do not associate themselves with a “downtown” and are also more likely to drive somewhere to buy their goods rather than support local businesses.

This situation, combined with certain other incentives, has led towns to institute revitalization projects to put life back into their downtowns.

One incentive is rising gas prices.

“As gas prices get higher, and they’ll probably inch back up over time, more and more people are not going to be able to afford to live way out in the suburbs and commute into the downtowns and the core communities where their jobs may be located,” Fontana said.

In addition, Fontana cited two other major incentives he identified as negative and positive. The negative incentives are a closure of a prominent business, major layoffs in an area and the continuation of chain development outside of town.

Positive incentives bring jobs to an area, such as a new plant. Fontana gave the example of Clearfield, where an ethanol plant is being constructed and interest in revitalizing downtown has been sparked.

“Any kind of positive growth either in or near a downtown area is the kind of activity that would inspire revitalization,” he said.

Furthermore, Fontana said, suburbanization has increased the want of something different and unique, which small towns offer.

“You always say, if you plopped yourself down in front of a Wal-Mart anywhere, would you really know where you are? Could you distinguish one Wal-Mart from another? But, if you put yourself in downtown Bellefonte or downtown State College, there are physical icons within those communities to help you know you are someplace different and unique and special, and people want that,” Fontana said.

As a result of these incentives, towns are now investing in revitalization efforts.

“There’s a lot of money being put into revitalization, both by state government and federal government and in many cases foundations,” Luloff said. “There’s all kinds of examples throughout what is now known as the Pennsylvania Wilds of tired, old industrial towns that have suffered through the deindustrialization period that occurred over the last 30 years and have made an effort to come back.”

One way towns have been able to “come back” is with the help of the Main Street Program. The Main Street Program was developed by the National Trust of Historic Preservation in 1980 with the realization that there is more to revitalization than physical appearance.

“The towns weren’t being promoted properly, they were not really worrying about the economy of the town. They were all doing streetscape improvements and physical fix-ups and thinking that that was going to be sufficient,” Fontana said.

Instead, the four-point approach, which is being used by Philipsburg through its own Main Street Program, was developed. It consists of promotion, organization, design and economic restructuring. Operating them together, Gette-Doyle said, is what makes the program successful.

“Some people do just promotions and they just do events in their downtown, and that’s great, but without doing the other stuff … and doing it as a whole, you might add a little bit of value to your community, but you’re not really focusing on a whole-hearted revitalization effort,” she said.

The Pennsylvania Downtown Center educates towns about the four-point approach and teaches them techniques for revitalizing their communities. Gette-Doyle said she, her board and the committee members have all been trained by the Pennsylvania Downtown Center and continue to receive administrative and training support.

Gette-Doyle said the Philipsburg program is realistic and based on how they can most reasonably revitalize the community.

“Our vision was based on what our reality is: We’re not a huge retail downtown. We can’t support a lot of retail business in downtown because of the size of our community and our trade population,” she said.

“We’re trying to build up the restaurants downtown and the offerings they have, because we have a lot of people, being that we’re an intersection of four major state roads,” she said.

Gette-Doyle said they do not do much business recruitment because they have not found it to be successful. Instead, they rely on people contacting them for business spaces, which she said is very common.

In addition to these efforts, Philipsburg is undergoing construction to fix the sewer lines. Scott Conklin, the state representative from Philipsburg, got $20.9 million in grants for this project.

“Their waterlines, their sewer lines, everything that they have today was put in 100 years ago, 70 years ago. They don’t have the type of revenue sources to be able to rejuvenate. But these communities are what made America great,” he said.

Because of initiatives by the federal government, many small towns, such as Phillipsburg, must upgrade their water systems to be in compliance of new mandates.

Gette-Doyle said that since 1999 they have had a net gain of 31 businesses and 94 jobs. In addition, with renovations on the hotel in town, more jobs will be made.

“We just have a goal to bring this town back to, I won’t say what it once was because we can’t ever be what we were, but to bring it to a state where we’re able to grow and change and still serve a purpose in our community,” she said.

Another town, Bellefonte, combines a number of factors in its effort to remain economically viable.

Stanley Goldman, mayor of Bellefonte, said the town used to be a hub of plants and industries such as limestone, but they have since lost all of them except their water industry. Instead, Bellefonte relies on its rich history, Victorian architecture, parks and status as the county seat to get by.

Another way they draw people is through their architecture, which Goldman said is some of the best examples of Victorian architecture in the area.

“A lot of people stop here on their way to someplace else and on their way to the university,” he said. “We have a lot of bed and breakfasts, and it’s surprising the amount of people that come to Penn State that want to stay in a bed and breakfast. A football weekend you can’t get a room.”

Because of all the old, historic buildings, Goldman said there are guidelines businesses have to follow to protect the integrity of the buildings.

Bellefonte’s status as the county seat is a large reason they are still surviving, Goldman said. Because so many people come to the courthouse for marriage licenses or jury duty, they then stay for lunch and to see the town.

Bellefonte is doing revitalizations projects like Philipsburg. In fact, Goldman said they were working on projects long before Philipsburg even began thinking about it.

“We’re in the midst now of doing a streetscape, which will help the community,” he said. “Another large one is the waterfront project along Spring Creek. We have some old manufacturing buildings that we’re going to turn into buildings that will bring revenue to the community.”

Just like any other small town, Goldman said Bellefonte’s businesses cannot compete with Wal-Mart and other big-box stores.

“All the big businesses have left,” he said. “I had a business in Bellefonte on Main Street, a menswear store. And there were four other stores, and those stores started closing because business was bad, they affected me because it didn’t bring traffic anymore, so eventually I closed.”

Now most of the stores downtown are specialty shops that deal with historic things and are more gift-oriented.

“The Wal-Marts are the scourge of the earth. They take everything and they don’t put anything back in your community,” Goldman said.

Luloff said one mistake many towns make when trying to decide how to remain economically viable and increase the vitality of the town is spending too much time looking at the natural resources.

“We spend a lot of money on doing natural resource inventories, but we very rarely spend any money doing human resource inventory,” he said.

Luloff said that there are two strategies to engender economic development.

The first is business recruitment from outside the community. This strategy, however, is less likely to work in his opinion because these businesses often only come for the tax breaks, and in turn have no connection with the community and will be more likely to leave.

The second strategy is retaining local businesses and helping them grow.

“An alternate strategy is to retain local industries and develop new local industries by understanding what we have as resources in our community and helping people move forward,” Luloff said. “In my opinion, that’s a much better investment of the same amount of resources that a tax break would give some non-local entity.”

So, what is the goal of small towns today? What is the role they play in today’s society of shopping malls and super highways?

Kelsey said first of all, towns need to find their “niche,” or what makes them unique.

“It’s a challenge, but there are a lot of opportunities,” he said. “One is providing services, a kind of niche market. You can’t necessarily compete on price with Wal-Mart or the other large big-box stores. But you can compete on service and on providing specialty products or providing other things that people can’t find in those big-box.”

After finding their niches, towns can define the role they will play in the community, which is not the same for every town, according to Fontana.

“Some towns are college towns. Some towns now are a county seat, and they’re kind of a service center. There are still some towns that have a strong retail base. More and more towns are kind of becoming dining, cultural art venues within the region,” he said. “So there are a growing number of diverse roles, and part of the challenge for each town that is revitalizing is to define that role.”

The final goal of all this is the sense of community that is possible only through the small town environment.

“I think when you’re in an environment where you don’t know the people that you pass everyday, you don’t feel that obligation to be nice,” Gette-Doyle said. “But when you pass people on the street that you know, you want to be nice, you want to be thoughtful, you want to be helpful to those people because you know you’re going to see them tomorrow and you might be the one needing that.”

Furthermore, Fontana said towns give something to people to connect to physically and emotionally.

“When we think about the things that we connect to physically, we don’t think about Wal-Mart,” he said. “‘Boy, we have a great Wal-Mart in town!’ or ‘We all love to go down to Target for the Fourth of July!’ It’s the downtown. Small towns are kind of the heart and soul of the community.”