Looked at by someone simply pulling off I-80 to get gas and a bite to eat, our place has become the same as every other place; looked at by a longtime resident (and as a 27-year Pennsylvanian, I do not yet qualify), our Main Street looks sad, with almost no retail businesses left, and Dollar General and the Salvation Army as our anchor stores.

And yet.

Dollar General chose to come to Main Street, where the company knew they would find an underserved market, and the store occupies half of the space where Woolworth’s once collected nickels and dimes and that then sat empty for a decade. Everyone in the downtown—business owner and apartment dweller alike—now shops in that space again. A couple of small businesses and the local Democratic Party headquarters occupy the rest of the former department store. The two stories above have apartments rented to just a few of the 9,000 students at Bloomsburg University, one of the fourteen State System schools and the largest employer in the county. Another three or four thousand of those students live in off-campus housing throughout the town, making student rentals a $40 million annual business. Although we have empty storefronts on Main Street, the two- and three-story buildings, most dating from the 1890s into the 1910s, remain viable because of those renters.

I run an arts organization, The Exchange, out of a storefront just up the block from Dollar General. Our art gallery specializes in open-call shows: We tell the community the theme of the show, and the work pours in, with the interpretation of the theme and the medium entirely up to each artist. As long as a piece fits through the front door, it goes into the show. We opened in this space in the early spring of 2014. Since then more than 500 people have shown artwork here—everyone from Bloom U. art professors to preschool children, and in fact their pieces often hang right next to each other. As part of our outreach, we send facilitators to more than fifty venues in a four-county area with our “Art Cart” (actually usually a couple of grocery bags) and we do simple art activities—not teaching people how to draw or how to paint, but through the use of simple, often recycled, materials, helping all of our participants to bring out the beauty inside themselves.

Wherever we can, we encourage people to look at the beauty all around them. This can mean organizing a plein air painting event at a local park. It can also mean a Facebook post about the clock in our county courthouse or a spectacular sunset at “Bloom-henge” (when the sun sets exactly down Main Street; this happens twice a year on our west-southwest-running street, in mid-December and early January). Even if the signs on the buildings may represent mega-businesses with headquarters in faraway cities, the buildings remain ours. Of the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S., only one has Bloomsburg’s courthouse. Yes, our fountain and even our Civil War monument came out of catalogs, but no other town square looks quite like ours—and certainly no other square has an identical building to our Caldwell Consistory, the Masonic cathedral, a brick and stone masterpiece with a cornerstone laid in 1906.