Essay by William H. Gass / Photographs (below) by Michael Eastman
I let my white eyes walk this long stretch of street because my eyes are so much faster than my feet. There is quite a lot of empty sidewalk, but, hey, it is Sunday morning, the shops are closed, and, since this street belongs to Martin Luther King, local people—or at least those who prefer to pray in public—are attending church.
It is risky having a street named for you. If you are French, your name will be misspelled or mispronounced (“creeve core” for “Creve Coeur”); if you are German, it will be replaced, during the heated days of war, by an emblem of patriotic hatred (“Pershing” for “Berlin”); if the name commemorates a historic revolutionary occasion, the street’s signs will be torn down as soon as angry citizens change their political orientation (“Leningrad” for “St. Petersburg,” then back again); if the name is a piece of ballyhoo, the residents will stubbornly continue using its former title (in New York, “Sixth Avenue” instead of “Avenue of the Americas”). What we now call political correctness has made sure H.L. Mencken’s statement, in his classic study The American Language, that “every American town of any airs has a Great White Way…” is no longer true. But the curse of the sign continues, for if a street is called “Elm,” all its trees will die of that disease; if dubbed “Main” or “Central,” “Market” or “Bank,” the associated businesses will fail within the year.
Some streets shed their names as often as their trees release their leaves (“Prune” became “Christy,” which turned “Green” and is now “Lucas”). Mass reordering occurs when town councils reject one street system for another: A numerical grid will be eventually preferred to simple happenstance (“Third” replacing “Barn”), or English titles will supplant French (“Walnut” usurping “Rue de la Tour”). It is common to throw minorities a bone (in New York City, there are enough for a skeleton; “Luis Muñoz Marin Boulevard” is one). Developers lie by nature and design, so a road that wades across a swamp will not be ashamed to call itself “Heights Avenue,” or a barren plain to get its shade from “Woods Way.” You can bet that, although located miles from the nearest water, some narrow, dusty lane will nevertheless proclaim itself “Lakeside Drive.” And if the street is named in hope of memory, good regard, and thanksgiving, everybody will up and move, leaving it empty, barren, scarcely remembered, its new occupants Mr. Neglect and Miss Ruin.
Politicians and similar notables disappear into anonymity as rapidly as their signs go up. Thus it was with lawyer Rufus Easton, the first postmaster of St. Louis. Surely the social station and achievements of such a prominent citizen would discourage any alteration. He had the clout to name Alton, Ill., after his son, and his daughter helped to found Lindenwood College, so having his own street should have been easy. Just imagine, one of the city’s first cable cars could travel (speed limit: 6 mph) Easton’s considerable length before coasting, as on Delmar, into its own loop and turnaround. Nevertheless, Easton was eventually eaten, block after block, by changing times and the appetites of Martin Luther King. The smart money might bet on immortals like Shakespeare or Goethe, but St. Louis has no “Shakespeare,” and the street once called “Goethe” is now named “Calvary,” to honor the nearby cemetery where Goethe’s name is buried instead of his body. So much for undying renown. Best to be given a neutral number like the occupant of an internment camp.
Still, numbers are not immune from disaster (“I live at the intersection of High and Fifth,” or “69th and Elaine”). Alphabets aren’t safe either (in D.C., Avenue O is not permitted to cross K). Sometimes street designations have to be replaced because their present sidewalks are locally referred to as “The Stroll” or because a booming business in bordellos has soiled their reputation (in Montreal, “Cadieux” had its presence but not its sins soaped away by “De Bullion”).
If we put a man on a horse in the middle of a city square and call the square “Samuel Dunwoody,” are we honoring Sam or dignifying the square? Or both? If it is an alley that his name is being nailed to, where is Sam’s pleasure in such an award? And what recourse has Barack when, in a lurch of enthusiasm, some twit wants to make Obama the next Laughingstock Lane? Not listening to itself, Washington University called one of the campus’ little imitation streets “Snow Way.” Do cities pay much attention to the subtle steps of meaning that might govern their choice of transit descriptions, such as the increasing scale of path, lane, alley, way, street, avenue, boulevard, drive, road, route, highway, interstate? Mencken says this about “avenue”: “In America the word was formerly used to designate a thoroughfare in the suburbs, not built up like a street, but laid out for future building, and hence not a road.”
I don’t know what it looked like in 1972, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive got its present appellations, though now the road is certainly wide enough and its name long enough to be considered a “Drive.” The symmetry of its title is quite unique: Dr. (doctor) and Dr. (drive) distinguishing both beginning and end. We haven’t handy nomenclature for a street that is laid out for future deconstruction and therefore likely to become a road, or at least a drive, and ultimately, when sufficiently swept clean of people, a highway. Easton was always a principal thoroughfare, but as Martin Luther King it became increasingly speedy and elastic.
The Drive begins now in a southeastern suburb of East St. Louis, near one of my favorite place names—Bunkham—then angles north to the river and crosses as the Martin Luther King Bridge. It rests a moment downtown and begins again on the western side of the America’s Center. At one time just the stretch that was initially named “Franklin” and ran parallel to Delmar until it swerved northwest to strike Cass (where Cass customarily became Easton) was called Martin Luther King Boulevard. I have a map with only this slanting section bearing the famous name. If you find this hard to follow, it is no easier in a car. Nowadays Martin Luther King Jr. has taken over for Easton and remains a boulevard till it passes through Wellston, when it finally becomes a drive before the whole shebang collides with St. Charles Rock Road.
There is a boulevard named for Martin Luther King in Kinloch, but not, I think, for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is not an accident that so many honorifics, fore and aft, have collected around King. The oppressed frequently look for and seize on any show of respect or badge of achievement. In Portland, though, his street is reduced to an abbreviation: “MLK Jr. Blvd.” The shorter version is still long enough. Chicagoans simply say “King Drive,” but they are always in a hurry.
Usually, if you use your full name—“Franklin Delano Roosevelt” or “William Howard Taft”—you are deemed pretentious and your signage expensive; but “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” is a name that should also be uneasy with itself—as uneasy as Martin Luther was with any king, especially the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, who issued a fatwa against Luther after the Diet of Worms. A brave and resolute man and therefore a name for our King to be proud of, but if by an edict of Charles V every hand was to be raised against Luther, both of Luther’s were raised against the Jews whose homes he wanted burned down. Scurrilous websites pretend to be outraged with King (they decry his personal morality, the legality of his degrees, the originality of his texts) because he changed his given name from Michael to Martin, as if this were an additional anti-Semitic act. What’s in a name? Too much, I’d say, risking the objections of the Bard. Your new hybrid tea rose won’t smell as sweet if you describe its leaves as stench green, and its brilliant blooms thorn scarlet. Alas, to give an urban street our chosen appellation is now no commendation. The comedian Chris Rock has joked, “If a friend calls you on the telephone and says they’re lost on Martin Luther King Boulevard and they want to know what they should do, the best response is ‘Run!’”
Another contributor to a Web discussion on whether street names matter came up with one I simply must repeat, because with it the frivolous reaches new heights: “On the outskirts of Las Vegas, off the access road leading to the Mount Charleston resort area, there is a small street with the best name I’ve ever seen: Elvis Alive Drive.”
If we don’t remember the whole history our honored name reflects, we shouldn’t insist on its recital. When we get used to it, and think no more of it, we do so because we are used to it and think no more of it.
Now, only by looking along the rooftops that remain on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive can I imagine anything of what it looked like nearly 100 years ago, when St. Louis was not yet one of the murder capitals of the U.S., but a world-class city still basking in the electric glow of the Fair. Wherever you went, a streetcar was within reach, Judy Garland accepted your fare and sang the clang. For cutting-edge reading one could have recourse to the remarkable and world-famous St. Louis magazine, William Reedy’s Mirror. Apparently we loved windows whose tops were arched, and built thousands. How much wood would it have taken then to board so many shut? On Martin Luther King panes are shattered as if it were a pastime. Shards from punctured glass brick still collect against walls and in gutters like Christmas glitter. In 1904, social peace was temporary, but the riots of the 1850s were half a century old. Alas, marring my trip to the past: Photographs show many streets gluey with mud. Cart wheels oozed. Now cars speed over empty six-pack cartons. An improvement. They are designed to fold flat.
The upper stories of most beleaguered streets (whether in St. Louis, Mexico City, or Cairo) frequently retain the looks they possessed decades ago—a bit worn and blistered, windows often boarded with a fatal firmness, bricks darkened by dirt—but with fronts that still display the opulence of their ornamentation, buildings of the scale that ambition once required, in a time when proof of wealth was often supplied by the number of windows—those windows—willing to face the street, and by the gables erupting from their roofs.
The MLK is a thoroughfare that encourages traffic to bustle by, but it is also supposed to slow things down now and then and behave like a business street should by showing us close rows of inviting shops, a few trees, a bank, a sprinkle of restaurants from barbecue to noodle, a post office, library, or some other sort of public building. But Michael Eastman’s photographs are pitiless reminders of another, grimmer result. For what should such a so-named avenue ideally be but aspiration and expectation, celebrating a few victories now and then, and otherwise as peacefully assured as Gandhi? Certainly its citizens are not to blame, but presently it is a street of locks, chains, boards, and iron bars. The stereotype, presumably supported by a similar condition of most of the roughly 300 MLK streets, is here repeated. For most of its length, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive says the same six words: I am shut—shut against myself.
That is not all MLK says, of course. The road is made of words, like a lengthy sentence. There are a lot of pauses, as if many expressions had been edited out. Buildings sit surrounded by the only graves disappearance digs: asphalt flats, weedy lots, a bush or two, a shriveled tree, abandoned machines, and other useless items of an immediate past. When we want to take the vertical measure of a street, we look up its facades toward its original nature. When we want the horizontal measure, we examine the facade for layers—not those of reams of paper, with sheets on top or bottom, but anything “next to,” the way clothes go about their cover: brick in front of plaster, paint over boards, grates and gates to close openings, whitewash and pasted paper across glass, white spots the size of unbaked cookies which once glued face to faces.
The irony is that there is much beauty to all this. Wherever humans have abandoned their habits of desecration, nature has taken over, and metal has rusted, boards have rotted, posters have torn, surfaces have patina’d, colors faded, even hand-lettered signs and pathetic folk art (depictions of King himself on occasion) have been royally framed, though by violence and repetition. Eastman’s unerring artist’s eye has let his lens capture this outcome, so that we can appreciate the camera’s heroic transformation with sadness for a society that permits poverty and oppression (as most societies do), yet with wonder at the way an indifferent but determined Nature acts to heal its wounds and display its domination.
Michael Eastman’s photographs have been featured in publications such as Time, Life, and American Photographer, and his work has been collected by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and other institutions. William H. Gass, the David May Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Washington University, is the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently A Temple of Texts. His numerous honors include three National Book Critics Circle Awards for Criticism and a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. Eastman and Gass live across the street from each other in the Parkview neighborhood near University City.
Photographs by Michael Eastman Essay by William H. Gass
