American Gothic on an Old City Street
Our Towns Record Our Lives - Not a Politician's Will
I drift effortlessly on clouds in my subconscious mind when I ride the Crosstown bus as I did from the city limits this week. Every rattle and bump seem to unearth a lost experience; each gasp of the hydraulic brakes carries me further from my being. Through the window, the Chene Street corner looked incomplete without the elderly couple that stood at its bus stop every morning of the decades that this E. Warren corridor was part of my morning commute.
It’s miraculous how the noisy, sweaty whirl around us can be packaged into a two-dimensional snapshot for our memory banks. The multi-sensory blitz of the community - cars moving past people searching for their bus - is compressed into a flat file and stored in mountains of other files in tiny cells deep in the brain. File this one under “Humans in anticipation”. Or, under “Will and Persistence?”
Mysteriously, this particular snapshot surfaces randomly these many seasons later. I followed that route as a Wayne State student and on my work commute, and always noticed the elderly couple at the southwest corner of Warren. At the dawn of the 21st century, the bustling eastside of their youth had become a forlorn plain and they were its lone trees: erect, arms folded and motionless, perfectly parallel to each other as they faced an atomized world. They were resolute figures like the couple in Grant Wood’s classic American Gothic painting, her purse the pitchfork of a post-industrial commercial place.
Were they towers of strength or silos of pain? The American Gothic painting offers few clues about the couple’s feelings. Maybe because people are never one thing, even at one given time. The woman at the bus stop was dressed for work, the man may have walked her to the stop from their neighboring home. They may have wished she didn’t have to go to work; they may have wished they didn’t live in the area anymore - we will never know.
The world around this couple transformed over the many years I assume they lived there. European immigrants to Detroit preceded African-Americans, then fled them, so I presume this couple were born somewhere nearby, and just lacked the means to follow their Polish or German neighbors to the eastern suburbs? Maybe they lived in the small cottage their parents - or their parents’ generation - built in this old industrial corridor? Or, the parish church around which their late middle years were centered remained open and drew them to remain nearby.
The lone trees along the interstates always capture my thoughts as my car slices through the open fields laid fallow by the scar of highway development. In some areas, only the natural majesty of trees distinguishes the endless green banality. They serve the purpose of the unique sandstone formations that invigorate the landscape of America’s tamed west, standing like monoliths impervious to weather or daylight, like buildings and people can do in a city. The ubiquitous owner-occupied storefront and the simply constructed small business venue, regardless of the players in them, stand without pretense to face the world. Their skeletons are apparent under changing flesh.
The 1941 Polk Directory shows a restaurant and Kelley’s Chene-Warren Flowers in the modest storefronts behind the Chene Street bus stop. When I first noticed the couple in the early 1980s, these simple frame buildings had deteriorated, faster than the natural weathering that this man and woman showed. The couple stoically stood before this haunted backdrop. Perhaps in the 1990s, the buildings were vacant, and in the next decade, they were burned shells (2nd image below) destined for unceremonious erasure like one-third of the city landscape (1st image below).
Detroit’s transformation is America’s transformation - and neither are the product of a given political party or official. That “the whole country will end up being like Detroit” if Kamala Harris is elected asserts that Democrats oversaw the city’s disinvestment (- yet, the City’s largest decline in population and jobs happened under Republican Mayors in the 1950s), and it implies that a Mayor determines a big city’s fate (- it’s a product of statewide, national and international policies and activities). The insult is not mere calumny of a bully in front of a captive audience of Detroit business leaders, it is a patently false declaration as wrong as leaving out the four seasons in assessing Detroit’s outdoors.
Detroit today is the logical result of the nation’s last century, just as that elderly couple at the bus stop were the logical result of the universe in which they lived. Disinvestment follows the workings of so many large-scale economic, political and social systems that we never question. Those living inside the disinvested area or outside of it are equal parts of its fabric. One’s gain is another’s loss. One’s lived experience is the other’s ideation.
Many, many places like this bus stop pepper my world, because of the very specific fact that I have inhabited the same space for my entire life. If I relocated as many times as the average American, I would not encounter the physical records of my past experiences, grand or small. I would face novel places upon which I could project my dreams. Perhaps in new places, I would not understand my past experiences in the same real and visceral way, nor see the evidence of others’ experiences fully.
The uninterrupted vista of the railroad tracks in the Conner industrial corridor hold the breathlessness of the eastside industrial area in which Grandma resided in her last years. I pass the large house now in the shadow of the Maccabees building at Warren’s intersection with Woodward, and I imagine my young mother’s voice lessons at the Detroit Conservatory of Music, stifled by the sunlight-eating skyscraper dominating its windows and existence. The field where I hit a homerun in the youth group is smaller than I once thought.
These sites are wildflowers in a vast expanse. They are blissful woodland bunchberries and joyful bluebells. There are so many weeds choking the crops, but the wildflowers perennially bloom. The evening primrose fades with the coming sun but its nectar is so deep in its stems that night moths live entirely from them. We are natural and what is natural is beautiful.
The bus ride is a frolic through the fields. The ordinary couple on the streetcorner is a natural phenomenon as precious as the flora. No politician or billionaire capitalist can own our experience, because they do not control our communities as long as we live in a free society. We LIVE here.
Many people lounge on the E. Warren Crosstown bus, since it stretches the full 25+ miles width of the city. I gazed through the windows over the heads of four children sleeping blissfully in a pile next to a young mom. We share a current and take our places in the recesses of each other’s minds, our own blisses forever captured.