Jan. 12 – Des Moines, IA
Des Moines is another place that, from a glance at the atlas, doesn't look like it would be all that interesting. But it is the capital and metropolis of Iowa, and does a nice job holding down the fort between Minneapolis and Kansas City (a place best known for not being in Kansas). Downtown high-rises flirt successfully with the thirty-story mark, and there is the ubiquitous indoor Skywalk between buildings. The capitol building, straining the shackles of Midwestern plainness, shows with its multiple domes a likeness to a Byzantine church, and Travelers Insurance shelters the business district under its red neon umbrella.
I have come to realize that American cities can be divided into two broad categories: those that are in an economic and social resurgence, and those that are not. Des Moines has a civic center that could recently afford a new digital video marquee, a center-city entertainment district that people actually go to, and a completely rebuilt system of urban arterial highways. And somehow it supports a viable enough economic base that its residents are blessed with Jordan Creek Town Center way out on the outskirts. Of course, by then you're halfway to Sioux City.
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Monday, February 11, 2008
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Governed by the Mortar Board?
Jan. 10 – Mason City, IA
With our visit to Mason City, we completed another circle: the life of Buddy Holly. In Lubbock, where he was born, we'd seen his statue and visited the museum where, on display next to his iconic glasses, are the much lesser-known Buddy Holly's Contact Lenses (it sounds like a Far Side cartoon, but it's true). On the way from Lubbock to Farmington, we had passed through Clovis, New Mexico, where he did much of his recording. And now we were taking the Interstate 35 exit for Clear Lake, Iowa, where he played his final concert, and passing the Mason City airport, from which his chartered plane took off that winter night bound for Fargo. We had already driven by the cornfield in which he died.
Mason City, for its name, displays a surprising paucity of stone buildings, although it does have a modest, old-timey downtown featuring a Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie-style hotel and numerous references to River City, its alter ego from The Music Man. And as you walk down Federal Avenue past turn-of-the-century storefronts, you abruptly come upon Southbridge Mall, whose north entrance sits athwart the street, oozing out like the Blob between the old façades as they march forward inaccessibly into its maw. The south entrance stockades the business district behind a portcullis, shining like a citadel across the wide asphalt moat that guards it.
As we made the trip home from our venue, located miles outside of town across the vastest field I think I have ever seen, scarcely a light was burning in any house window. Ice was the rule on every paved surface, and dinner was hours beyond obtainable. To me that night, north-central Iowa was something that not even Wyoming had matched: remote.
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With our visit to Mason City, we completed another circle: the life of Buddy Holly. In Lubbock, where he was born, we'd seen his statue and visited the museum where, on display next to his iconic glasses, are the much lesser-known Buddy Holly's Contact Lenses (it sounds like a Far Side cartoon, but it's true). On the way from Lubbock to Farmington, we had passed through Clovis, New Mexico, where he did much of his recording. And now we were taking the Interstate 35 exit for Clear Lake, Iowa, where he played his final concert, and passing the Mason City airport, from which his chartered plane took off that winter night bound for Fargo. We had already driven by the cornfield in which he died.Mason City, for its name, displays a surprising paucity of stone buildings, although it does have a modest, old-timey downtown featuring a Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie-style hotel and numerous references to River City, its alter ego from The Music Man. And as you walk down Federal Avenue past turn-of-the-century storefronts, you abruptly come upon Southbridge Mall, whose north entrance sits athwart the street, oozing out like the Blob between the old façades as they march forward inaccessibly into its maw. The south entrance stockades the business district behind a portcullis, shining like a citadel across the wide asphalt moat that guards it.
As we made the trip home from our venue, located miles outside of town across the vastest field I think I have ever seen, scarcely a light was burning in any house window. Ice was the rule on every paved surface, and dinner was hours beyond obtainable. To me that night, north-central Iowa was something that not even Wyoming had matched: remote.
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Thursday, January 17, 2008
In which we administer a colonoscopy to an Upper Midwestern state
Jan. 9 – Wausau, WI
Wausau seems to be doing all right for itself, although I can't say what it is that drives the place. As it's a relatively far northern outpost in Wisconsin, my first guesses would have been lumbering or the manufacture of cheese, or perhaps skiing, since we lodged under the snowmaking floodlights of the Rib Mountain ski area. Wikipedia, the uncredited co-author of this blog, says it's paper-making, home building and insurance; from a peremptory survey of the various business fronts, I might add real estate, light manufacturing and banking to the list, and at the moment, capriciously re-arranging the highway grid seems to be another prevalent livelihood. Or hell, maybe it's just an outdoorsy Northwoods river town where thirty-eight thousand people just happen to want to live and work.
The Grand Theater (one of the few venues we've visited to use that spelling) is unremarkable but drew a healthy crowd, and we had a hoppin' time in the hotel bar that evening, playing darts and enduring the wiles of a rather inebriated Dairyland gal who seemed to be paying excessive attention to anybody other than her husband. The next morning I made the mistake of guessing when the Free Continental Breakfast would end and was off by an hour, leaving me with no other option than a Burger King several hundred sub-freezing yards farther away than it appeared. I passed a lone surveyor, no doubt plotting the further confounding of GPS street databases, and had the urge to ask him why they'd not built sidewalks to go along with the new double-barreled county trunk roads that stymied my efforts at a geometrically logical path toward my breakfast.
It was time to go back whence we'd come, to Iowa. Our travels, like an embarrassing doctor's visit, had caused us to invade Wisconsin from both its ends without piercing its middle, and Minnesota was showing a habit of following us about like a toilet paper streamer. Lunch on the way to Wausau had been at the Mall of America, in a suburb (what else?) of Minneapolis. If you count the amusement park in the middle (known as "The Park at MOA" for crying out loud), it is the nation's largest mall, and also the one most undistinguished from any of the others, making its name quite fitting. Hours prior, in Windom near daybreak, I'd bought coffee from a woman who was the Minnesota archetype; with her sensible, muted sweater and short, motherly, Nordic blond coif, she asked where we were go-een and showed us where the gar-beej was. A group of paunchy men, who looked like they knew something about ice fishing, looked on, apparently still rather awestruck by the arrival of our busload. They witnessed in five minutes more business transactions than they probably expected for the entire day, and I'm not at all sure that they didn't speculate afterward what the experience portended for the rest of their day.
End 'a story.
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Wausau seems to be doing all right for itself, although I can't say what it is that drives the place. As it's a relatively far northern outpost in Wisconsin, my first guesses would have been lumbering or the manufacture of cheese, or perhaps skiing, since we lodged under the snowmaking floodlights of the Rib Mountain ski area. Wikipedia, the uncredited co-author of this blog, says it's paper-making, home building and insurance; from a peremptory survey of the various business fronts, I might add real estate, light manufacturing and banking to the list, and at the moment, capriciously re-arranging the highway grid seems to be another prevalent livelihood. Or hell, maybe it's just an outdoorsy Northwoods river town where thirty-eight thousand people just happen to want to live and work.
The Grand Theater (one of the few venues we've visited to use that spelling) is unremarkable but drew a healthy crowd, and we had a hoppin' time in the hotel bar that evening, playing darts and enduring the wiles of a rather inebriated Dairyland gal who seemed to be paying excessive attention to anybody other than her husband. The next morning I made the mistake of guessing when the Free Continental Breakfast would end and was off by an hour, leaving me with no other option than a Burger King several hundred sub-freezing yards farther away than it appeared. I passed a lone surveyor, no doubt plotting the further confounding of GPS street databases, and had the urge to ask him why they'd not built sidewalks to go along with the new double-barreled county trunk roads that stymied my efforts at a geometrically logical path toward my breakfast.
It was time to go back whence we'd come, to Iowa. Our travels, like an embarrassing doctor's visit, had caused us to invade Wisconsin from both its ends without piercing its middle, and Minnesota was showing a habit of following us about like a toilet paper streamer. Lunch on the way to Wausau had been at the Mall of America, in a suburb (what else?) of Minneapolis. If you count the amusement park in the middle (known as "The Park at MOA" for crying out loud), it is the nation's largest mall, and also the one most undistinguished from any of the others, making its name quite fitting. Hours prior, in Windom near daybreak, I'd bought coffee from a woman who was the Minnesota archetype; with her sensible, muted sweater and short, motherly, Nordic blond coif, she asked where we were go-een and showed us where the gar-beej was. A group of paunchy men, who looked like they knew something about ice fishing, looked on, apparently still rather awestruck by the arrival of our busload. They witnessed in five minutes more business transactions than they probably expected for the entire day, and I'm not at all sure that they didn't speculate afterward what the experience portended for the rest of their day.
End 'a story.
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Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Out with the old, in with the ugly
Jan. 8 – Sioux City, IA
Sioux City is a worn-out, dog-eared old cardboard box of a town, done up at regular angles with some of the corners missing, in shades of brown, buff and ecru. As in many cities of the northern Plains, enclosed second-story walkways, as lightly-used as the streets they pass over, connect various downtown buildings. One of these buildings houses the Orpheum Theatre; though not nearly as lavish as the Rialto Square, it is another example of a relative gem in the midst of a used-up town. I think the presence of these beautiful old music halls in the smaller cities is not a complete accident. Mid-sized municipalities, larger than Sioux, tend to have remained economically viable into the postwar period of Utilitarianism, of the new and modern replacing the stodgy and old, and so in the fifties and sixties these cities purged almost all of their turn-of-century infrastructure to make way for what have subsequently become the eyesores of today. Meanwhile, less populous industrial centers often never recovered from the Depression and had consequently given up all hope of renewal by the time it was fashionable to raze these historic structures.
We'd had lunch that day in West Des Moines, at something called Jordan Creek Town Center. Despite its name, Jordan Creek is not in the center of anything and it most decidedly is not a town. It is a brand-new upscale shopping mall with a self-admitted (from its web site) "streetscape design"; across the man-made lake another part of the complex, called The Village, is a cluster of outbuildings having an "open-air lifestyle design." Of course, in real towns and villages, streetscapes come about organically as a continual result of commercial and human processes, and lifestyles develop naturally from the influence of the communal experience. The idea that a streetscape or a lifestyle can be artificially "designed" in the cornfields of Iowa is nothing but pompous corporate branding.
To me, the most grating application of this marketing technique shows in the outbuildings' full moniker, "The Village at Jordan Creek." The increasingly prevalent naming pattern "The Such-and-such at So-and-so" is meant to suggest that "So-and-so" is unto itself such a world-renowned destination as to require no particularization of the "such-and-such" located there. You're supposed to equate places like "The Village at Jordan Creek" or "The Links at Westwood Green" with "The Palace at Versailles," "The Shops at Rodeo Drive" or "The Projects at Bedford-Stuyvesant."
Give me a friggin' break.
If Jordan Creek is the shiny new toy city of the future, then I'll take the discarded box it came in. A man who called himself "just a dumb ol' farmer" told us how much he and his wife enjoyed our show, which they had attended as her birthday present. At Jordan Creek we saw everyone but met no one. The farmer we met in The Clarion at Sioux City.
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Sioux City is a worn-out, dog-eared old cardboard box of a town, done up at regular angles with some of the corners missing, in shades of brown, buff and ecru. As in many cities of the northern Plains, enclosed second-story walkways, as lightly-used as the streets they pass over, connect various downtown buildings. One of these buildings houses the Orpheum Theatre; though not nearly as lavish as the Rialto Square, it is another example of a relative gem in the midst of a used-up town. I think the presence of these beautiful old music halls in the smaller cities is not a complete accident. Mid-sized municipalities, larger than Sioux, tend to have remained economically viable into the postwar period of Utilitarianism, of the new and modern replacing the stodgy and old, and so in the fifties and sixties these cities purged almost all of their turn-of-century infrastructure to make way for what have subsequently become the eyesores of today. Meanwhile, less populous industrial centers often never recovered from the Depression and had consequently given up all hope of renewal by the time it was fashionable to raze these historic structures.
We'd had lunch that day in West Des Moines, at something called Jordan Creek Town Center. Despite its name, Jordan Creek is not in the center of anything and it most decidedly is not a town. It is a brand-new upscale shopping mall with a self-admitted (from its web site) "streetscape design"; across the man-made lake another part of the complex, called The Village, is a cluster of outbuildings having an "open-air lifestyle design." Of course, in real towns and villages, streetscapes come about organically as a continual result of commercial and human processes, and lifestyles develop naturally from the influence of the communal experience. The idea that a streetscape or a lifestyle can be artificially "designed" in the cornfields of Iowa is nothing but pompous corporate branding.
To me, the most grating application of this marketing technique shows in the outbuildings' full moniker, "The Village at Jordan Creek." The increasingly prevalent naming pattern "The Such-and-such at So-and-so" is meant to suggest that "So-and-so" is unto itself such a world-renowned destination as to require no particularization of the "such-and-such" located there. You're supposed to equate places like "The Village at Jordan Creek" or "The Links at Westwood Green" with "The Palace at Versailles," "The Shops at Rodeo Drive" or "The Projects at Bedford-Stuyvesant."
Give me a friggin' break.
If Jordan Creek is the shiny new toy city of the future, then I'll take the discarded box it came in. A man who called himself "just a dumb ol' farmer" told us how much he and his wife enjoyed our show, which they had attended as her birthday present. At Jordan Creek we saw everyone but met no one. The farmer we met in The Clarion at Sioux City.
View Larger Map
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