SALISBURY -- Some local folks call it the "chute," and it's all most people not from around here ever see as they stare through their windshields and pray they don't have to slow too long before getting back onto the open road.
This 3-mile stretch of U.S. 50 that slices through Salisbury's midsection exposes to the passing public such dubiously eye-pleasing sights as fast-food outlets, a big building where chickens are processed and a small building where payroll checks are cashed and, on occasion, converted into booze.
The chute is hardly Salisbury's best face.
What the passing motorist cannot see is a small city that has emerged as the undisputed hub of the Eastern Shore's commerce and culture. Or, that in its 263-year history, Salisbury has never had growing pains like it has now.
When Mayor W. Paul Martin, 74, came to Salisbury in his late teens looking for work, folks for miles around here considered the Wicomico County river town to be the "big city." Its population was 13,000 -- more people than in any other Eastern Shore town -- and it bustled with commerce as fruits and vegetables moved through, headed north.
For many households here before 1952, when the first span of the Chesapeake Bay bridges opened to motorists, Salisbury was oriented not toward Baltimore and Washington, but toward Philadelphia, Wilmington, Del., and Norfolk, Va. In what some natives call that "splendid isolation" from the rest of Maryland, Salisbury evolved as the unofficial capital of the Lower Eastern Shore.
Although more than 200,000 people occupy nearby Ocean City on any summer weekend these days, Salisbury remains the Shore's biggest year-round city and has its fastest growing suburban region.
Within the city live nearly 21,000 people -- a 25 percent increase in the past decade -- and roughly another 20,000 live within three miles of the city limits. The county's population of 70,000 is expected to double by the year 2020.
Highway congestion is so common in Salisbury, particularly during summer when beach and local traffic combine, that residents are insisting that another U.S. 50 bypass be built.
Although Salisbury is only Maryland's 11th largest incorporated community, it has the state's second busiest port and airport. A million tons of fuel, aggregate stone and poultry feed are carried by barge up the Wicomico River each year. At the airport last year, 130,000 aircraft takeoffs and landings were recorded.
The town is home to Salisbury State University, which opened as two-year school with fewer than 100 students in 1925 and now has more than 6,000. The once-local hospital has become Peninsula Regional Medical Center. Salisbury has a free zoo with 400 animals. It has a civic center where Bob Dylan performed before 4,000 fans last year. And it has two television stations, a daily newspaper and a symphony.
"We've seen this city become the cultural center, the shopping center and the medical center of this part of the Shore," said Mr. Martin, who has remained a city resident and has been its mayor since 1982.
Historically the commercial crossroads of the Lower Shore's productive farmlands and chicken industry, Salisbury has been attracting manufacturing companies specializing in electronics and telecommunications.
Perdue Farms Inc., with more than 2,000 employees, continues to be the largest employer and the job base for the area's unskilled workers. But four of the last six new manufacturers to come to Salisbury were involved in technology, making high-tech companies the second biggest local employer, with more than 1,100 jobs. By Eastern Shore standards, Salisbury is growing so fast that some people are questioning whether the city is better off for it.
"The growth we've seen in the last 15 years has not made the average Salisburian's life better," said Robin R. Cockey, former City Council president. "Economic growth isn't translating into economic benefits."
Crime is increasing, he said, and police expenses have climbed in the past six years from 21 percent to 33 percent of the city's operating budget, now about $20 million.
When he ran against Mr. Martin in last year's elections, Mr. Cockey reminded voters that 60 percent -- more than desirable, in his opinion -- of the city's housing was in rental units. He said the number of city residents living within the federal government's definition of poverty had reached 17 percent in 1990 -- 2 percent higher than a decade earlier.
But Mr. Cockey lost, in part, he contends, because he questioned the wisdom of the city's traditional laissez-faire attitude toward development and the wishes of business.
"Our political leaders' philosophy was post-war hubris," Mr. Cockey said. "They believed bigger is better and still do."
'Like Ocean City'
Even without Mr. Cockey in office, Salisbury politics have changed.
"I've had people say to me, 'My God, we're getting to be like Ocean City,' " said Salisbury lawyer and County Council member Victor H. Laws Sr., referring to sometimes cantankerous public displays by the nearby resort government.
These days, Salisbury council members bicker more than in the past, when differences usually were resolved cordially.
At least they were settled that way before 1993, when Salisbury officials -- facing a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union -- changed their charter to prevent nonresidential property owners from voting in city elections. The result was that many of the city's biggest boosters and civic activists are not permitted participate in city elections because they live outside Salisbury's incorporated boundaries.
Unhappiness with the council's actions has helped breathe new life into a 20-year-old movement to merge at least parts of the governments of Salisbury and Wicomico County. At its extreme, the discussion calls for Salisbury to do away with its charter, an action that would change the city's standing of 263 years as an incorporated entity.
Merger proponents say government services could be improved reduced costs. But Robert Caldwell, the new council president, said that what's behind the movement is mostly politics and greed.
He contends that the new council better reflects the city's diversity -- with himself questioning business interests, a black member more vocally representing minorities, and an environmentally oriented member -- than previous councils had.
Corporate generosity
If Salisbury's business community has its stalwart boosters, it's probably because business leaders have a track record of giving to the city. When the local civic center burned in 1977, and when the YMCA faced bankruptcy in 1982, local businesses stepped to revive both.
"There's a corporate ethic," said Luis A. Luna, director of the Greater Salisbury Committee, an organization of the area's chief executive officers. "The business people are not here to rape and pillage the land."
But, he conceded, not everyone shares that view.
"Some people are adopting a kind of cynical, bitter attitude," he said. "They risk destroying something very fragile and rare. Is this community going to foul its own nest by becoming confrontational and by depicting business as evil? Or will it continue to understand that cooperation will lead to a better community? Salisbury is at a crossroads."
General contractor O. Palmer Gillis III, another businessman who perceives the City Council to be anti-business these days, put his feelings another way.
"I think we're at a pothole," said the Salisbury native who, with partner Tony Gilkerson, is behind some of the most ambitious building renovation in downtown Salisbury.
Preserving the past
While firms like Gillis-Gilkerson ready floor space for the future, people like Oren Perdue try to hold onto the past.
Mr. Perdue, 59, pastor of the Salisbury Baptist Temple and a distant cousin to the chicken magnate, said that as the area accommodates new industry and residents, much of the town's rural flavor disappears.
"We still want to keep it as rural and conservative as we can," said the man whose church puts on outdoor Christmas and Easter pageants each year -- "seen from your car, heard from your FM radio" -- and occasionally pickets Salisbury's and the Shore's only adult bookstore.
Talk about clinging to aspects of Salisbury's past surfaces in other circles, too.
Public schools were racially integrated in 1965 when five black students entered previously all-white Wicomico Senior High School. One, Rachel S. Polk, lived in the section of town called California, a middle-income black neighborhood on the Wicomico River's western bank.
Mrs. Polk said Salisbury's blacks, about a quarter of the city's residents, were better educated and disciplined before integration. "In the black schools," she said, "we were constantly challenged, and everyone expected the best. At the white high school, people didn't care if we were even there."
Mrs. Polk left Salisbury for college and lived in New York City and the Bahamas. She returned to Salisbury in 1981 and now owns Grassroots II, an Afro-centric bookstore on North Salisbury Boulevard.
"I would keep schools segregated, even today," Mrs. Polk said without anger. "Salisbury is still not inclusive. There is a mentality that existed when I left in 1967. Salisbury is used to hat-in-hand Negroes. Go into law offices and banks and see how many people of color you'll find, and ask yourself why that is accepted. People here of both races are tired of being agitated and just accept it."
Despite the issues vexing Salisbury, many residents say they are optimistic. The reason, said Salisbury State University administrator David B. Ganoe, is its people.
"This is a wonderful place to live," he said. "Why? You get a group of people in Salisbury together and present them with a problem, these people do something about it. With what we have, thousands of mayors across the country would be pleased to have our problems."