My first memories of cityspace as such
were of Kansas City. Not exactly an iconic American city, I know, but
perhaps like its denuded sister city, Saint Louis, it deserves to be.
Neither fully Midwestern nor fully Southern, industrial but
distinctly agro-industrial, it perhaps embodies American urbanity, in
its essentially sprawling, at times near Sunbeltish character, in its
transition between McMansion'd Trumpiste suburbia and poor, black
inner city, in its attempts at “revitalization” of the urban
core.
It was where a lot of my family were,
some in suburbia, some in the high-security white holdout zones along
Ward Parkway and Wornall Road, akin to Park Slope in Brooklyn around the same
time, or to those other areas of DC, Atlanta, Cleveland that remained
steadfast in their thin-lipped whiteness in the face of mid-century
“urban crisis.”
We crossed into Kansas City each time
over the Paseo Bridge, named for the road that it connected to, some
Babbittian idea of a Catalan rambla in a Middle American
factory town, now the artery of Tech N9ne territory. The exit signs
flickered past, “Oak – Grand – Walnut – Downtown,” the
image of the city at sunset, which, for a kid from rural America, was
an Oz of golden light.
Although what struck me as a child was
not so much the normal signifiers of the American city – the
skyscrapers, the wide expressways, the cultural institutions of the
zoo and the museum – but the other figureheads of urbanity as sheer
decay.
But before we reached it, we had to
cross the marginal zone. The smell of grain milling permeated the
air, and the whole area seemed broken, with its railyard, its smoke,
the greasy, flat Missouri River, and the gaudy “riverboat” casino
that had more in common with the outfit of a Brazilian transsexual at
Carnival than anything Mark Twain ever sailed.
This was a mysterious landscape, which
held a simultaneous terror at the brokenness of it all and a
thrill of the unknown. I somehow came to love the antique brick
warehouses, the glimmer of prairie light through broken orange panes
of industrial glass, the old hand-painted signs on the side
advertising long-dead shipping and storage concerns, manufactures of
bakelite radios, manual typewriters, men's haberdashery, cars with
names like Hupmobile and Pierce-Arrow. And dug deep into the chalky
limestone bluffs, mines and quarries had been turend into storage
units, or else left to collapse underneath fall foliage, barely
visible from the car window.
On one trip – just me and my father,
as I remember, when I was about seven or eight – we took the wrong
exit, Bonfire of the Vanities-style. I saw the name of the exit,
“Prospect Avenue,” which seemed innocuous enough. “Lock your
doors,” he muttered between his teeth.
I hadn't really seen anything like it
before, the billboards covered in obscure graffiti, the old men with
bottles in paper bags, the check-cashing joints. And the people on
the street were all black, a concept I could barely imagine coming
from a lily-white Iowa town. Black women in suits, black men in
leather jackets, black kids walking in groups, people who were doing
the exact sorts of things people did back in my hometown, except with
added melanin, which, embarrassingly, was something that I'd really only encountered
before on Family Matters and The Cosby Show. I suppose I was old
enough to know about Martin Luther King and slavery, but the
narrative being told at Roosevelt Elementary School was that things
were all better now, because life in America is good and just keeps
getting better. And I couldn't for the life of me figure out why
these people were living in this place. Which looking back, might be
the most fucking naively white thought one could imagine.
But that memory was 20 years ago, and I
wonder whether the city of my memory exists anymore.
I click on Google Street View, slowly
go into town. There it is, on a highway sign, the gnomic little poem
of my vacation days, “Oak – Grand – Walnut – Downtown.”
But the warehouses are all gone, the
art-deco bridge replaced with something colorless and characterless,
the setbacks from the highway wider, greener, planted with dwarfish
Austrian pines.
I suppose that this was city council's
half-baked attempt at “beautification.” Replace the aesthetics of
a previous era with something that only looks good in an artist's
rendering. Never mind that the broad, suburban-style lawns are
completely incongruous with dense urban space, or with the lonely
wood-frame houses and brick commercial buildings pushed to the
fringe, their neighbors long since knocked down to make way. Never
mind that the cheap, isolated conifers they've planted are ugly even
in an exurban office park, let alone in an inner city. And never mind
that this space is completely unusable, a park for nobody, a vista
for primarily non-local passengers that only lasts in their eyes for
a few seconds, if they bother to even glance up.
And those warehouses that have survived
on the fringe, a great many have been turned into lofts, the sort you
imagine with exposed brick walls and fittings one step up from Ikea,
or bar-and-grills that seem suspiciously of the sort that serve
“Kobe” burgers that have little connection to Japan, and “truffle
fries” made with oil from the New Jersey perfumery plants.
I recognize that I view my beloved
abandoned older forms as objects, entities separate from the economic
processes that brought them into being. Like an oxbow lake cut off
from a river, they become placid, isolated end results of the torrent
of capital. And furthermore, it's all too easy to imagine one's own
memories to be the most “natural” forms of things.
Yet I truly believe the empty space has
become symbolic of the new urban decay. Unlike the old ruins, which
left a nasty, corporeal reminder of failure and iteration, the new
decay is conversely characterized by emptiness, lack of density,
osteoporosis. Sometimes it is insignificant, a vacant lot. Sometimes
it is intentional “greening,” the eight-laner that tries to
emulate something more verdant, rather than a gray barrier akin to
New York's infamous Cross-Bronx Expressway. In an era of demolished
public housing, of the repurposing and re-whitening of the urban
center, the phony parkland is the new signature of neoliberal
displacement.
Consider the blank spots of Detroit.
You've seen them all on the news – vast, unused green lawns and
tracts of scrub separating houses like farmsteads, both inhabited and
not, empty auto plants, smokestacks. Repeat for St. Louis, Buffalo,
Youngstown, New Orleans.
And so the zones that are not deemed
worthy of growth and replenishment are simply erased, until all that is
left are cracked foundations and crabgrass.
