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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