Three Opinions Outside Anywhere, USA

Relax.  It's a lot of buildings.

               (Sometimes it doesn’t warrant 800 words.  I make a small pile of ‘em to get them out of my brain.)

             “I miss New York when it was grittier, scarier.”  I will never in a million years understand this notion.  I’ve heard this a hundred times from former residents or admirers of New York City.  They resent the cleaned-up Times Square, with tourist stores and ten-story neon signs.  What they long for is the seventies and eighties version, with widespread drug abuse, prostitution, peep shows, and garbage lining the streets.  Something about this older version feels more authentic to them.  More real and less sanitized.  I’m assuming of course that they’re not wishing they could be the victim of a crime; I just think that is somehow looked cooler back then.

             I’ve thought about this for years, especially when it’s been pointed out that I’ve lived in one version of the suburbs or another my whole life: The scary, bullet-ridden kind and the quieter kind where you get the occasional noise complaint or occurrence of mailbox baseball.  This may come as a shock, but I like the quiet one better. See, my theory is that most of these people who prefer a scary NYC lived some awesomely privileged lives. Congratulations, you’ve never been scared to go home. Whether they had money or not, they likely didn’t live where scary shit happened.  Because if you did, and you had the opportunity to escape. You’d realize that there are far worse things than a giant M & M store.  I’d take a Disney movie-turned into a stage play over busted crack vials on the street any day.  You resent that your childhood was boring, and you lived in a lame place.  Be thankful.  Boring is good.

             On a tangent, I’d like to also say to any and all citizens of New York City that absolutely no one gives a shit that you were born there, grew up there, or live there presently.  There is nothing more narcissistic than New York’s hometown pride.  They are the cream of the crop when it comes to believing that anyone is impressed that they are from a place. They think it's like sharing a war story from a veteran, or like you’ve climbed the Matterhorn with a donkey on your back.  Nope.  You are from a huge city where millions of other people live. New Yorkers love their city, and they have a lot of reason to. It’s an amazing place.  But they seem to be under the delusion that New York is the only city that exists.  It’s not.

 The same goes from wherever you’re from, too.  Texas people believe it means something to be from Texas.  It doesn’t.  Nobody cares.  Chicago, Detroit, Hawaii, Alaska, Miami, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Kalamazoo.  I’m not saying that you shouldn’t love where you live or be proud of a place that you’re from.  I love Oregon.  But I don’t expect anyone to give a shit.  We also aren’t automatic representatives of our hometowns.  I’ve been asked about Florida a bunch after I moved out here and I have nothing interesting to tell.  Outside of the Sunshine State, it’s believed that Florida is part Wild West, part Hee-Haw, part Bizarro World.  It’s not.  It's filled with plenty of lunatics and shit-for-brains, but so is your state.  It’s just really fucking humid there. 

I guess the common thread today is the ideas of home and community.  Not the actual town, but our attachment to the idea of it.  That brings me to an opinion I have that surprises a lot of people. It bumps them because I have a degree in history and I’ve always been mindful of historical contexts.  I don’t care about preserving Main Street. I remember a show on the History Channel before it became about Ice Road Truckers.  It was about the push to keep the buildings of the Main Streets of old towns intact.  Not for any historical significance necessarily, but just because it was built in the forties or so and people don’t like the idea of it going away.

I say, plow that shit.  Unless it actually has some historic value, (a historical figure's home, the site of an important event, the first firehouse built in the state, etc.) I say it’s perfectly cool to let that shit go.  If Main Street failed its Main Street’s fault.  Main Street is essentially a collection of business ventures.  They failed over and over, so it’s time to move on.  These particular buildings were there to participate in our shared capitalist system.  They weren’t like more ancient towns, created around churches or settled near waterways for international trade.  Those places can still exist.  They reinvent themselves over and over.  A lot of these Main Streets were attempts to attract business to small towns.  They wanted to play the game of capitalism and they lost. I don’t need to see why we have to preserve that.  I don’t care about closing malls or old drive-ins either.  You can’t preserve something simply because it makes you bummed that an era is gone.

What was there before Main Street?  A meadow?  Grazing land for indigenous people and animals?  No tears for letting that turn into a Woolworth?

What to put in the place of Main Street? I don’t know…maybe homeless shelters, affordable housing, vocational schools, community food banks, community gardens, pre-K’s, free clinics, city parks, transit systems, windmills, solar panels, fruit trees, shade trees, community pools, adult care facilities, research centers, infrastructure projects that attract workers, dog walks, dog parks, petting zoos, farmer’s markets, art fairs, skate parks, skating rinks, festival space…or you could just raze the whole thing and let nature have it back.