EDITORIAL: Manville’s distinctive buildingsmay well be best asset downtown
Driving down Main Street after last week’s storm covered Manville with a down-filled comforter of snow (that is, a much thicker blanket) was a sight to behold.
The empty thoroughfare was brightly lit by the decorative streetlights reminiscent of a turn-of-the-century postcard from Iowa or upstate New York.
The shops lining the street, though closed and empty, seemed inviting the clothes at Dave’s, vests hanging in the windows of Kathy’s Leather Goods, chairs and sofas at Discount Mattress and Furniture, little guitar amplifiers at Manville Music Store you name it, everything a person could really want.
Even on a cold night the thought of tangy ice cream from Here’s the Scoop or On the Boardwalk tempts a visitor.
Manville’s downtown wasn’t built by colonial carpenters, hunching their structures over a street that’s just wide enough for a horse-drawn carriage or two, or by 18th-century merchants with dark stone gothic towers looming overhead.
Manville was built by 20th-century visionaries who built the street wide enough and the buildings low enough to leave a clear view of the skies. It was built by people like Fanny Blumberg, John Zwatschka, Joseph Onka, Ben Czaplicki, Marty Weiss and Romeo Paulino and many other merchants and business people who held big dreams in little shops on Manville’s Main Street.
Because of their vision, downtown Manville has an inviting quality to it unlike Somerville and Bound Brook no towering stone buildings casting shadows on the sidewalks or cookie-cutter storefronts.
Each block on Main Street is a new vista, with more shops and restaurants inviting to visitors.
We’re not fond of the trend towards uniform architectural standards, and have always enjoyed the quaint and different storefronts that line Main Street. Give us the bright yellow signs, next to cozy white clapboard offices, next to a ’50s-era storefront.
That’s why we were glad to hear the Planning Board removed the buildings that line Main Street between South Avenue and Camplain Road from consideration in the redevelopment of the Rustic Mall.
The area behind those shops needs to be redeveloped, but it must be done in such a way that it doesn’t detract from what’s best about downtown Manville.
Those buildings, built between 1930 and the 1960s, are rare and precious. Certainly no other town in the area can offer an architectural perspective of that era the way Manville does.
With North Main Street taking on the appearance of many redeveloped areas in New Jersey, it’s important to protect South Main Street’s "retro" look.
In many ways, Manville is a town of the future, thanks to its past we get a "do-over" because of the damage done by floods and Federal Creosote. But in the rush, let’s not redevelop those neighborhoods and blocks that give the borough its distinct flavor.

