Park and Shop
I grew up in suburbia but was always drawn to cities and their dense, large buildings and bustling streets. Occasional trips downtown were exciting enough just for the reveal of its skyline as the highway rounded a bend — even though this is Dayton, Ohio we’re talking about, a small-ish city with a handful of 1970s boxes for a skyline.
The real cities in my part of the world didn’t quite live up to that bustling ideal at their core, so perhaps I had some inborn nostalgia for an era that ended before my birth, and perhaps that nostalgia is why I so enjoyed a board game of my childhood: Park and Shop.
Park and Shop was one of the great treats for my sister and me of visiting my grandparents. We’d dig the game out of their basement and play it with our cousin. But it’s not so much a game of our childhood as that of my dad and uncle. The game is from the 1950s and transports you straight back to a town of that era.
To a geo-nerd, it’s fascinating as a relic that neatly presents the postwar concept of how a downtown works. Indeed, it’s modeled after an actual city and its initiatives: Allentown, Pennsylvania. Apparently it was even first produced as a way to promote said initiatives. As Allentown looked to kick things back into gear after the war, or maybe as people generally began to look outward from city centers for a place to live, parking lots were constructed on the peripheries of downtown, where people could park for free with tickets validated by downtown merchants. (The city also aimed to reduce congestion on downtown streets where parking was limited.)
And so it goes in the game. It’s a downtown street grid with various shops and other businesses. You have a house somewhere on the edge of the board, and draw cards dictating which shops you need to hit to complete your errands. You drive to a parking lot, proceed on foot to your shops, then back to your car and back home. (The first player to return home wins.) Along the way you might have to draw cards that impede or help you, or that add an errand to your list.
The game is what my type of suburban kid thought downtown was supposed to be. Downtown was a destination where you shopped and did business, where people strolled past eclectic storefronts and popped in on a whim. This was the version of downtown that may have existed for a short while before the bleak times when it was more parking lot than not, without enough businesses to draw suburban crowds. Perhaps that newer downtown does show here too, in the state of ruin of many of our 60 year-old game pieces, the roofless cars and footless people. As the suburbs drained life from downtown, so too did they apparently bring sunset upon this game, and it met its end in the 70s.
Besides the study in urban geography, I also enjoy the game because it’s a spatial challenge, and spatial challenges are my jam! The game’s essential task is sort of a traveling salesman problem; when you get your shopping cards at the beginning of the game you have to find all the shops on the board, figure out the most efficient path to reach all of them, and try to choose an optimal starting location. As a mapper, naturally I lay out my cards in front of me in a more-or-less correct spatial arrangement.
Then it’s off to the 50s! To the Haberdasher, the Smoke Shop, and Tot’s Toggery. But of course, also to a bit of uncomfortable racial stereotyping.
And sexism? Well yeah, you bet there’s sexism.
Luckily we had my grandmother, a speed demon in her day, who many years ago crossed out “woman” and wrote in “slow,” albeit in now-faded pencil.
Social regressions aside, if you get your hands on this game, we Woodruffs recommend it!
