Maybe time forgot the Town of Quantico, where narrow streets are lined with quaint turn-of-the century storefronts, shoes are sold for $5 and fresh-faced Marines can always be spotted getting a haircut.
It's been that way for as long as anyone can remember.
But these days, being frozen in a 1940s time warp is as much a handicap as a charming anachronism for Quantico, which is struggling to establish a new identity and find an economic booster shot.
Flanked on three sides by 60,000 acres of the giant Quantico Marine Base, the community sits in isolation, accessible by car only via one of the base's two gates, which are guarded by military police. Visitors are so scarce that virtually no one ever gets a ticket at the town's ranks of parking meters, so frightened are the locals of discouraging the few who come there.
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"The people of Quantico are facing a real challenge," said Dennis Ekberg, who for five years served as chairman of the historical commission for Prince William County, where Quantico lies. "Quantico is likely to just dry up and disappear unless the folks there can find something that makes the town economically, politically or socially attractive to tourists. Right now they just don't seem to have it."
There are no churches, no schools and no supermarkets along the streets of the 40-acre community. Instead, the downtown is marked by the picturesque but underused Potomac riverfront, rows of houses left over from its earliest days as a logging and fishing town and half a dozen old-fashioned barbershops packed daily with Marines looking for buzz cuts.
Here also are plenty of restaurants and dry cleaners and shopkeepers who stock their shelves with shoe polish and olive drab.
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The town has a "Beaver Cleaver feel" to it according to Bill Poshock, who manages the Quantico Florist and claims Quantico hasn't changed much in a half century, either in appearance or in its concerns.
The collection of 640 residents, most of them short-term renters or older people who have lived and worked there all their lives, said they're proud to be living at the "crossroads of the Marine Corps," and many have some connection with the base.
Otherwise, they appear unconcerned about the world beyond. The big controversies of recent memory have been small-town ones such as plans carried out three years ago to untangle a jumbled system of street addresses that was hampering mail delivery, and a 10 p.m. curfew imposed on local teenagers.
"People think that because this place is surrounded by Marines that it has to do well," said Albert Gasser, himself a retired leatherneck and former mayor of Quantico who owns the Command Post Pub, one of the town's most popular watering holes. But Marine bases of the 1990s have much in the way of shopping and restaurants that Marines used to have to come to town for.
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Gasser recently began a costly renovation of his business to attract new customers and compete with restaurants that have opened on the base. But what neighboring business owners say the town needs are some trendy antique and craft stores such as those in Occoquan, another riverfront Prince William town that has become a tourist mecca.
"We need to provide people with a reason to come here," said town council member Mitchell P. Raftelis, who has lived in Quantico since 1922 and runs an accounting business there. "We need investors who are willing to take a chance."
For years locals have dreamed of building a marina on the edge of town to attract tourist dollars. Property along the town's southern tip was donated to the town by the Marine Corps in 1985, but the marina project has been mired in federal and local red tape ever since.
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Hopes of revitalization were raised again in 1993, when Virginia Railway Express established a commuter rail stop in Quantico. But so far, there is no evidence of new residents or the kind of gentrification that turns old towns into Olde Townes.
Some locals have suggested that Quantico would be a good place to develop a retirement community, but investment dollars and initiative have been scarce.
Residents recently have pinned their hopes on Alan H. Golden, 46, a Prince William dentist who said he wants to expand his booming Dale City practice with a $1.6-million, 13-chair clinic in Quantico.
"Quantico is ripe to be reborn," said Golden, who characterizes himself as point man in the town's revitalization and has purchased two other pieces of property there.
"Quantico is like a diamond in the rough," Golden said. "It has enormous potential."
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Today, the otherwise quiet streets of Quantico are filled with rumbling bulldozers watched by expectant residents who frequently stop and stare at the gaping hole on Potomac Avenue that Golden playfully calls the future site of "Camp Tooth."
"It's got to help," said Quantico mayor and local landowner Howard Bolognese, busy opening boxes that had arrived in his Marine supply store. "We got a nice quiet town here," he said. "So far, so good."
Potomac Avenue, the town of Quantico's sleepy main street, above and right, is dominated by barbershops, restaurants and stores catering to Marines from the nearby base. Residents hope their town, which one resident says has a "Beaver Cleaver feel," will acquire new reason to live as a retirement community, tourist attraction or Potomac River marina.
