The New Builders

CHAPTER TWOHow Change Really Happens

“ Come down to my store,” Steve Murray said, urgently, one day in the mid‐1990s. He'd reached Elizabeth, who at that time was a reporter with the Lancaster Sunday News, handling the cops and business beat on a small news staff.

Steve's store was about six blocks up Queen Street, one of the two main streets in the small city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, about an hour‐and‐a‐half west of Philadelphia. Once prosperous, by the 1980s and 1990s, this historic city in the middle of tobacco country was struggling, having fallen into the familiar narrative of Main Street decline.

Steve never seemed to notice that the world around him didn't match his style. He stood in the middle of his vintage shop in a historic storefront, loving the Deep Throat role he'd given himself. Zap & Co. was filled to overflowing with brooches the size of lobster claws, hats like flying saucers, and floor‐length gowns and psychedelic shirts. Inventory that brought to mind Wallis Simpson, Lena Horne, and Cher, all at once.

And to an enterprising reporter, he was about to hand over the super‐secret plan for the economic revival of Lancaster City, prepared by business owners involved in a group called the Hourglass Foundation.

The group was goodhearted but blind, Steve thought. Most of them longed for the patriarchal presence of Armstrong World Industries, a giant flooring manufacturer that produced enough linoleum in the mid‐twentieth century to pave to the moon. But Armstrong ...