... officially a city, but in Ohio you are either a city or a village ... "town" is not a category ... and because Akron (and to a certain extent Cleveland) outer suburbia has grown up in the country around it, it still retains many of the retail center functions that small towns that do not have the same hinterland have long been losing.

And I can walk or ride my bike to the center of town, for the post office or the pastry shop or to catch the (only) interurban bus (on the rare occasion I need to get to a big box store), or walk or ride my bike toward the edge of town for the main market and bargain basement supermarkets.

But that's just good fortune and the fact that the town was already long established before the outer suburbia grew up around it. If the outer suburbia had grown up from scratch without the small town here, it would have been forced by zoning to be pure strip mall development to provide retail/professional services.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.