This Saturday, July 18, Portsmouth will once again hear the rumble of engines moving slowly cruising through downtown.
Cars will shine under the streetlights. Drivers will wave through open windows. Friends will gather along Chillicothe Street. For a few hours, the city will remember what Friday and Saturday nights once felt like for an entire generation.
That raises a fair question: Should Portsmouth bring cruising back every weekend?
My opinion is no.
That does not come from someone who dislikes cruising. It comes from someone who remembers what cruising meant.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, teenagers from across Scioto County gathered on Chillicothe Street. We listened to music, met friends and bought pizza from a man who kept stacks of Domino’s boxes warm in his car at the municipal parking lot.
It was not simply a line of cars.
It was our social network before social media.
Long before people stared at phones or tried to make connections through apps, we had the street. We knew where everyone would be. We knew what time they would arrive. We knew which parking lots would fill first.
For about $10, a teenager could spend an entire night out. Five dollars might buy enough gas to keep moving. The other five bought pizza or tacos. By Friday afternoon, cruising was already the subject of conversation in high school hallways from Wheelersburg to West Portsmouth.
Parents understood the ritual.
When a teenager started washing the car after school on Friday, the family knew what was coming. That car would soon spend hours traveling at five miles per hour, circling downtown and stopping in parking lots to talk with friends and meet new people.
It sounds simple because it was simple.
That was part of the beauty.
There was no complicated event schedule. Nobody needed a ticket. There was no algorithm deciding whom we should meet. We went downtown because everyone else was going downtown.
We were not trying to recreate the past.
We were living it.
That distinction matters.
Today’s cruising events are largely acts of nostalgia. The teenagers who once cruised in worn-out first cars are now adults arriving in Jeeps, restored classics, sports cars and vehicles they could only dream about owning when they were young.
There is nothing wrong with that.
A community should make room for memories. Portsmouth has lost enough buildings, businesses and traditions that we should appreciate the ones we can still touch.
But nostalgia works because it is temporary.
We cannot make every Saturday night in 2026 feel like a Saturday night in 1989. The city has changed. The people have changed. The culture has changed. The younger generations did not spend all week waiting to cruise Chillicothe Street, so they cannot be expected to experience it with the same attachment.
That is not an insult to them.
Their memories will be different.
Every generation creates its own gathering places, music, habits and traditions. Our children and grandchildren should not be required to reenact our youth in order to prove they appreciate it.
Cruising every weekend would not bring the original era back. It would create a new weekly activity using the appearance of the old one.
There is also a danger in making something special too common.
A tradition held once or twice a year becomes an event. People clean their cars, make plans, invite friends and travel back home for it. The anticipation becomes part of the experience.
A tradition repeated every weekend eventually becomes routine.
Then participation begins to fall. The excitement fades. What once felt like a community reunion becomes another Saturday night traffic pattern.
The answer is not to stop cruising.
The answer is to protect what makes it meaningful.
Hold it once or twice a year. Give people time to miss it. Let former cruisers bring their children and grandchildren downtown. Let them point toward the municipal parking lot and explain where the pizza guy parked. Let them tell stories about lunchroom drama, first dates, embarrassing cars, loud music and friendships that somehow survived decades.
Let the younger crowd see it for what it is: a living piece of Portsmouth history.
Then, when the engines quiet down and the cars leave downtown, allow the memory to remain special.
Not everything from the past can be restored by repeating it. This was always a Gen-X event.
Some things are honored best by bringing them back briefly, sharing them with the next generations and knowing when to let the night end.
