The Glory of an American City
Ryan Miller
It’s a question I don’t like to ask myself. Yet, it lingers, suppressed but never forgotten. It is always there and I try not to think about it.
I imagine that I hear it, though, on the lips of others, but what I’m really hearing is my own voice, my own lonely interior voice.
***
I live in my car now, my once gleaming car, a 1964 Lincoln Continental, the kind with suicide doors. I always wanted a convertible, but this one’s a hardtop. Actually, it’s better this way. It would be easier for someone to break into a convertible.
The car itself is a symbol, at least to me.
It was built in my childhood, well before I could ever dream of driving, in an era when American products, and American automobiles in particular, enjoyed an unrivalled dominance of the domestic market. It was built in the time right before everything started to unravel, prior to Vietnam and Watergate and inflation and oil shortages. Long before the rampant corporate downsizing of the 1980’s, and the unrestrained mergers and leveraged buyouts that occurred simultaneously. Before anyone had heard of a distinction between the old and the new economy. And before corporatization and globalization.
I live in my car with everything that I still own. It’s not much. I lead a chaste and ascetic life.
***
At night I park the Lincoln on a street in what was, not a generation ago, a vital, thriving part of town. In many American cities a place like this can be found.
It’s the district on the edge of downtown, once dedicated to light industrial and manufacturing uses and to commercial warehouse zoning. It’s the place where things used to be made before things stopped being made here, before all the manufacturing jobs went somewhere else. To Mexico or Thailand or to the People’s Republic of China.
The buildings are abandoned.
***
Large red brick structures that were built in the first half of the twentieth century, perhaps earlier, housed the dreams and aspirations of their owners. They now stand empty and unused, their windows long boarded up with graying, delaminating plywood. Where still exposed, not a single pane of glass remains intact in one of these vacant shells.
These were sturdy, well-made buildings with generous steel-framed windows that pivoted on a horizontal axis to provide ventilation in a period before widespread air conditioning usage was common.
There was a clothing manufacturer here, several actually, and a work boot maker and the electric motor factory, an air conditioning plant and a place where screws and fasteners were made. The area was home to a number of furniture makers. There were three candy factories, one occupying an enormous and baroque five-story building with ornate stone moldings at the corners and at the windows and doors. A wire rope company utilized several buildings on a single block across the street from the compound were the brick factory was located. A toolmaker and a paint manufacturer were nearby, as were a hundred other places where things were made.
I remember the supply houses catering to the building trades, electrical and plumbing, many competing firms within sight of each other. Lumber yards and construction materials suppliers. They are all gone.
Most of their products today are available in identical and ugly prefabricated buildings, located alongside highways in the suburbs, from the immense depot-sized stores of national chains, where the employees know nothing, not even the aisle location of a particular product category.
There was an iron foundry with its gaping furnaces that blazed all day and through the night. One could sense their tremendous heat from the street when passing by, and could feel, up through the sidewalk, the shuddering thunder of the mammoth drop forges.
Machine and milling and sheet metal shops. Steel fabricators where slender structural members in a variety of shapes were hot-rolled, emerging from their dies incandescent and orange-white and emitting a hot, metallic odor.
An oil well equipment manufacturer, one of the very last to leave, held out until 1990. It somehow managed to keep from closing its doors when the price of oil collapsed at the end of 1985 and domestic exploration so soon thereafter came to a halt.
Scores of companies supplied the aviation industry, but they too disappeared in the large-scale defense spending cutbacks that occurred in Bush the Elder’s administration.
The area was crisscrossed with railroad tracks with numerous underpasses built in stout reinforced concrete with the date of construction proudly cast in relief above the roadway. Many of the buildings were designed to facilitate the movement of freight by rail. They were provided with a long line of tall, wide doors behind a deep and raised loading apron, the top of which aligned perfectly with the floor of a boxcar.
The rusted tracks are overgrown with weeds, with rotting timbers at the crossings. The no longer busy streets that intersect them are pot-holed and crumbling.
The tracks have been removed in some places, either by the railroads themselves -- those that are still in business -- or by those seeking to sell the steel rail as scrap. Vandals have shattered the red lenses in the signals. Silver-painted aluminum panel covers have been stolen and colored wires hang limply from the voids.
The X-shaped signs that mark the crossings are often missing or broken. Some are defaced with a scrawling, illegible script. Surprisingly, the buildings themselves are remarkably free from graffiti. Even the gangs find this neighborhood unworthy of their markings.
Some marooned rolling stock, their trucks removed, list sadly in an empty parking lot, the blacktop cracked and bleached to a pale gray by the glaring light of the sun. Tall dry grasses sprout from the cracks; broken glass and litter abound.
In the distance, above the long, low roofline of the streamlined structure that for many years housed the city’s only Cadillac dealer it long ago fled to the edge of the city -- the towering skyscrapers of downtown can be seen, barely a mile distant. At night they shine brightly, arrogantly blotting out the stars.
The dealership fronted onto a wide, elegant boulevard, which originally divided opposing traffic with generous, tree-lined medians. In the late fifties, in a frenzy of what was then viewed as progress, an elevated freeway was built over the street. The median was paved over with asphalt; after all, nothing would grow there in the long shadow cast by the looming roadway above.
***
On the perimeter of this district today are seedy bars and strip joints, their windows either bricked over or painted to satisfy a local ordinance. Construction quality is very low, with little attention being paid to details. On some blocks, massage parlors and flophouses and cheap diners, mostly serving Mexican food, can be found among the vacant storefronts and the empty lots. A local mission ministering to the homeless occupies a former Safeway store. I take showers there, and I have used one of their computers to write these words.
Back in the early nineties, some enterprising Gen-X’ers opened up a few trendy clubs and restaurants in this area -- rents were cheap -- but nobody wanted to come here after the initial warm blush of the neon and its novelty had quickly faded.
The experience was perhaps too gritty, too urban, and too despairing for the children of the sterile subdivisions to handle. Theft of both automobiles and what was inside them was widespread. Muggings became commonplace. The philistines took their money elsewhere, back to indistinguishable corporate-owned restaurants and bars located on the margins of shopping malls with vast, vividly lit parking lots and security patrols cruising around in them.
This neighborhood has remained popular though as a narcotics marketplace.
***
Again, the question that nags at me, and which I don’t want to think about.
“How did this happen?”
Of course, I think about this constantly.
Sometimes at night I will be sitting in the front passenger seat of my car looking out at the intermittent pools of brownish orange light that the few remaining street lamps cast -- the city places a low priority on municipal services in this district -- and, in between sips from a warm can of beer and drags off of a cigarette, I can recall what it was like here when I was young.
***
The first summer job I had, I worked in a warehouse for a company that no longer exists, a roofing supplies manufacturer and distributor. It was hard, hot and dusty work. I was paid minimum wage to haul heavy rolls of roofing felt and unwieldy packets of composite shingles onto the beds of trucks.
I remember the activity in this area, trucks of all sizes making pick-ups and deliveries. The shiny automobiles of the owners and the office workers would arrive clean, waxed and sparkling on Monday morning, but would soon be covered with the thick reddish dust from the brickyard. Trains were always switching about, blocking streets and snarling traffic.
The next summer, when I was old enough, I got to drive one of the trucks. After high school I went to work there full time. After a few years, I moved up to warehouse manager, then I got a job in sales where I sat at a desk and talked on the phone much of the day. Eventually, I became the sales manager. I was making more than I ever dreamed I would.
Over the years I watched as neighboring business began to close; a slow trickle became a steady flow. The city economy, which had always seemed so stable, so vibrant, fluctuated through long down periods, the downs being longer and more intense than the highs. Decisions made in Washington D. C. and in foreign capitals and in the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies seemed to take on an overarching significance at the local level.
In the early eighties, despite a flourishing economy, our business began to founder. We were disgracefully undersold by the nationwide suppliers. We couldn’t compete. We could not buy on the scale that they did and our manufacturing facilities were small-scale. We were a minor regional operation. The owner decided to cut his losses and we closed in 1986.
I got a job at the brickyard, for far less pay, but they closed a year later. Then at the fencing supply, then at the plumbing wholesaler. For a while I worked in a machine shop operating a drill press, a milling machine and a lathe.
***
I work now at Hyper Mart, placing the items that customers buy into big, cheery reusable plastic bags, the colors and decorations of which vary, depending on the shopping season. Sometimes I help them out to their cars with their purchases and on occasion people proffer a tip, which I must refuse -- company policy -- though I need the money.
I work out beyond the suburbs, next to an Interstate highway and I make minimum wage.
***
I look around again and I glimpse movement, a flash of light in the deep shadows. There is a quick, sharp sound; one of the streetlamps explodes. A hail of broken glass falls to the darkened street nearby; a few fragments strike the Lincoln. I see two figures moving away, walking in the middle of the street, no longer making any attempt to conceal themselves. One appears to be carrying a handgun. The next illuminated streetlamp is about a hundred yards away. They move toward it with assurance and moments later I hear another report and the light goes out.
I crush the stub of my cigarette in the ashtray and I open the car door and pour what remains of the beer into the gutter and I remember what it used to be like around here and I say out loud, “How did this happen?”
