Fort Ritchie Army Garrison in Cascade, Maryland, slated for closure as part of the 1995 base realignment and closure (BRAC) round, officially ceased military operations on September 30, 1998. More than eight years later, a confluence of circumstances had prevented its reuse, and the community had yet to benefit from reuse efforts. To understand how such base closings affect the local community and the character of a place, an ethnographic case study and a post hoc social impact assessment were conducted. Told in this article is the story of how one community has responded and adjusted to the loss of the military, which provides lessons for other communities facing base closings and for federal entities tasked with overseeing and facilitating the process.
Louis Hicks and Curt Raney, "The Social Impact of Military Growth in St. Mary's County, Maryland, 1940-1995," Armed Forces & Society 293 (2003): 353-71; and Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century (Boston: Beacon, 2001).
2.
Mark A. Hooker and Michael M. Keeter, "Measuring the Economic Effects of Military Base Closures," Economic Inquiry39, 4 (2001): 583-98; and C.J. Krizan, Localized Effects of California's Military Base Realignments: Evidence from Multi-Sector Longitudinal Microdata (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Center for Economic Studies, 1999).
3.
Scott D. Camp, Worker Response to Plant Closings: Steelworkers in Johnstown and Youngstown (New York: Garland, 1995); W.F. Cottrell, "Death by Dieselization: A Case Study in the Reaction to Technological Change," American Sociological Review16, 3 (1951): 358-65; Jeanne Prial Gordus, Paul Jarley, and Louis A. Ferman, Plant Closings and Economic Dislocation (Kalamazoo, MI: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1981); Lee V. Hamilton, Clifford L. Broman, William S. Hoffman, and Deborah S. Renner, "Hard Times and Vulnerable People: Initial Effects of Plant Closing on Autoworkers' Mental Health," Journal of Health and Social Behavior31 (June 1990): 123-40; John Portz, The Politics of Plant Closings (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990); and Kai Erikson, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood ( New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976).
4.
In October 2006, the majority of the base was sold to a private developer, following the resolution of several pending court cases filed by private citizens and the lifting of an injunction on the sale of the base.
5.
Kurt Finsterbusch, Understanding Social Impacts: Assessing the Effects of Public Projects (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1980).
6.
Data were gathered from the U.S. Census Bureau's Neighborhood Change Database-1970-2000 Tract Data, Short Form Release (developed by GeoLytics and the Urban Institute). This database contains nationwide tract-level data from the 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 decennial censuses, with variables and tract boundaries consistently defined across census years, thus allowing for comparisons over time for exactly the same geographical area. The information presented is based on data from the rather small census tract geographic boundary that includes Fort Ritchie, Cascade, and Highfield (the base itself and the two small communities just outside its gates). It does not, however, include the small neighborhood of Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, which lies adjacent to, and is a part of what would be defined as the community around, the base. Nevertheless, the data provide a real sense of the quantitative changes that have occurred in the community over time.
7.
Amy Giancoli , "BRAC Would Impact Schools," The Record Herald, March 6, 1995.
8.
The local redevelopment authority is the local organization, in this case the PenMar Development Corporation, tasked with reuse planning and implementation efforts.
9.
Laura Ernde , "Hit List Battle Set to Begin," Morning Herald, March 2, 1995.
10.
William W. Falk , Rooted in Place (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004 ), 196.
11.
Thomas Gieryn , "A Space for Place in Sociology," Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 471.
12.
Thomas Gieryn , "Truth-Spots: How Place Lends Legitimacy in the Arts & Sciences" (paper presented at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, March 13, 2006).
13.
Emile Durkheim , The Rules of the Sociological Method, ed. Steven Lukes, trans. W. D. Halls ( New York: Free Press, 1982).
14.
Gieryn, "A Space for Place ," 473.
15.
M.T. Fullilove , "Psychiatric Implications of Displacement: Contributions from the Psychology of Place," American Journal of Psychiatry 153 (1996): 1516-23; and Yi-Fu Tuan, "Sense of Place: Its Relationship to Self and Time," in Reanimating Places: A Geography of Rhythms, ed. Tom Mels ( Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 45-55.
16.
George Ritzer , Classical Sociological Theory ( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992).
17.
Falk, Rooted in Place; and William S. McFeely, Sapelo's People: A Long Walk into Freedom (New York: Norton, 1994).
18.
Falk, Rooted in Place.
19.
John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1987).
20.
Michael Mayerfeld Bell, "The Ghosts of Place," Theory and Society 26 (1997): 813.
21.
Ibid., 820.
22.
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859; repr., New York: International, 1970); and Ritzer, Classical Sociological Theory.
23.
Marx, A Contribution.
24.
Lutz, Homefront, 1.
25.
Camp, Worker Response; Dale A. Hathaway, Can Workers Have a Voice? The Politics of Deindustrialization in Pittsburgh (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993); and Carolyn C. Perrucci, Robert Perrucci, Dena B. Targ, and Harry R. Targ , Plant Closings: International Context and Social Costs (New York: Aldine De Gruyter , 1988).
26.
John Portz, The Politics.
27.
Albert O.Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
