Cruising now in rearview mirror

Last weekend, downtown Pottstown was full of people enjoying restaurants and beer gardens on the first warm evenings of spring.

What a contrast from 30 years ago, when High Street was wall-to-wall with young revelers lined up two by two in their hot cars racing up and down High Street making as much commotion as possible.

Here's a description from a 1992 editorial in The Mercury:

On warm weekend nights, a bunch of kids who have nothing constructive to do with their lives descend on ·High Street in Pottstown to harass and torment the people who live there.

These cruisers, as they call themselves, come from throughout southeastern Pennsylvania. They drive up and down High Street all night, generally making a loop in the area of VIP Restaurant (now known as Three Cousins) to the west and McDonald's to the east.

They race, blow their horns, yell at each other, screech their tires and generally make a racket until 2 or 3 in the morning.

They also like to park their cars, open their hoods, sit on their fenders, blare their boom boxes, drink, and dump litter. A few even urinate in the gutters and sidewalks.

Pottstown has a modest tax base and a long list of needs. It really can't afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars each summer in police overtime pay to stem the plague of locusts who alight on High Street.

To the cruisers, it's a great game.

They love to talk about how much they enjoy their pastime. They selfrighteously preach about their right to waste our finite energy resources and pollute the air as they aimlessly burn gas roaring up and down main street.

Two weeks ago, a cruiser racing another cruiser crashed into three vehicles on the 800 block of High Street, destroying two of them. One cruiser was hospitalized.

Last year, a passenger in the car of a racing cruiser was killed when the car slammed into a pick-up truck turning into the Pic-Way parking lot on West High Street.

Cruisers have driven good residents from High Street. Two years ago, a young physician sold his restored house on High Street because he couldn't take the circus atmosphere anymore.

"So what is a city all about?" he wrote us. “Pizza, beer, recreation for delinquents? Weren't towns supposed to be attractive, peaceful places with families feeling secure at home?”

Another resident wrote, ''I, as a homeowner and taxpayer of Pottstown, feel my rights are being violated by· the cruisers and juvenile delinquents who feel it necessary to loiter on the curbside for most of the night creating a public disturbance and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

"I for one have had enough of the law protecting these people. I have rights also — a right to enjoy the home I have worked so hard to buy and a right to a good night's sleep so that I can go to work and function properly."

Cruising finally ended when High Street was reconfigured from two lanes

to one — in the downtown, using angle parking and bike lanes. The chaos, thankfully, is behind us.