I’m riding today on a chartered bus with 35 members of a youth chorus (grades 4-9) and chaperones, on the way to Chicago for the choir to perform at a choral conference. I had been reading, (and, I admit it, napping a little), and looked up just as we passed through Gary, Indiana.
Everybody knows what a desolate place Gary, Indiana is, the city almost the euphemism for the word, but it never ceases to surprise me. There are clusters of abandoned houses, some just burned-out shells, others with siding in bent folds on the ground around the house and black tar paper hanging in strips. Piles of scrap lumber sit at the ends of muddy “roads.” Grain elevators seem abandoned, islands surrounded by marshes of dead grass and puddles of snowmelt. At one point there is a roadside park, sandwiched between a muddy dirt road and the highway, which consists merely of a roofed concrete slab sans picnic tables, and a home-plate fence at a corner of a narrow, narrow baseball field. There are no houses, no people, anywhere. Maybe it’s not fair of me to judge a city by what I see from the highway. But how does the impact of one’s approach to a city affect your perception of the city itself?
Strangely, I wasn’t aware of our approach to Gary as I usually am. You know, as you’re driving along and suddenly ask whoever is in your car with you “What’s that smell?” I always wondered who could live there — do they have a sense of smell? Do they die more frequently of cancers? Does anyone even live there any more? Is it naive to ask, What do they DO? Is it a ghost town, as it seems to be?
Since First Son is a college student in Cleveland, Ohio, we get our share of visits to the decaying rust belt of the midwest. The drive into Cleveland is also quite bleak — abandoned rail yards, decrepit factory buildings with broken and boarded-up windows and parking lots choked with weeds, rows of newly-built, fashionable, red-brick townhouses bumping up against what look like crack houses as you near the world-class chain of hospitals and medical centers.
How does one rebuild a city? is it the idea of the city which needs to be rehabilitated first? What was Detroit at its heydey? Cleveland? Is the fact that these declining cities were originally built on one particular industry the reason for their thriving and the cause of their doom?
The choir performed tonight in a “chapel,” (seating at least 3000 people), in Hyde Park, Illinois. The streets are lined with hundred-year-old genteel brownstones, a Frank Lloyd Wright house stands on the corner. The streets are clean, seem relatively safe (a perception not adversely affected by the Starbucks on the corner.)
What memories do these cities hold? What hopes? Is it a mistake when “we” abandon them? Isn’t the society created by man living as neighbor to man more likely to be one governed by peace and cooperation?
In one of the meditations read during the choral service tonight, we were asked to remember that the world and all men in it cry out for peace, that the earth requires our stewardship as much as, if not more than, it meets our needs. John F Kennedy says, ”We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.” I think this is right, and meaningful, on many levels, in many ways.
But a long day, and tomorrow, another: Shedd Aquarium, and the pool at the hotel.
And $10 every 24-hours for internet service. Whatever happened to free internet in the room being part of the selling point of the hotel?
Recent Comments