Map
Map courtesy of Memorial Library.
Tennessee Willams, he who coined the phrase "St. Louis, Misery" came round in the end and asked to be buried in his hometown. So did William Burroughs. I was happy to see that the gist of the RFT's cover story on novelist Kyle Beachy, who set his first novel, The Slide, in St. Louis, was that he's pro-STL (even though he's living in Chicago), and that part of his errand was to correct The Corrections, at least where dissing St. Louis is concerned. (Also definitely check out the buoyant profile Byron Kerman wrote for St. Louis Mag here; I love that photo, too, because it has a sorta hagiographic/Tron look to it.)
I'm not a native St. Louisan. My better half always laughs when I tell people "I moved to St. Louis on purpose." Meaning, this is a great place, no matter what some natives think! I was at a party the other night with some art folks, and we were discussing this perplexing problem. Why do people beat up on St. Louis? Now Forbes has come out with their annual "Most Miserable Cities" index, and we're on the list. My uncle sent me a snarky congratulations note about that, but signed off, "it's not that bad, is it?"
Now, there were some things the list addressed that I'll absolutely concur with; the political corruption here has shocked me. And to that end, the way some of the Superfund sites, especially the nuclear ones, have been handled is distressing. But I noticed with the exception of two California cities, one of them foreclosure grand central, every city on the list was Midwestern. I think these dumb lists have more to do with the mainstream media's rust allergy - Rust Belt, that is. I guarantee that if you walked around L.A. or Manhattan and threatened a random person with being nailed into a box and mailed to Akron, Buffalo or Cleveland, that person would start screaming and tearing out their hair and running into traffic, because they would consider that a fate worse than being run over by an SUV.
For me, this phenomenon can be summed up in the fact that Americans often view place through this filter: what's the "In-Crowd" index? And how much money and/or fame can I poach by being in proximity? When you have that much glitter in your eyes, it's hard to really see a place for what it is. I had a major epiphany about this a few months ago while looking at old tribal maps. Through that filter the Midwest is anything but a wasteland. It's the Plains, the prairie, a landbase with its own peculiarities and various pros and cons which don't necessarily outweigh the pros and cons of, say, Manhattan island. The Osage were not nudging each other and saying, "Man, we really have to get out of this lame, boring grassland and head to the coasts, so we can be on T.V." Looking at it from this angle, the way we think about place seems mighty neurotic, if not borderline insane.
I'm in publishing too; I know readers love these lists, and that they move magazines. But as a human being, I don't have much patience for them. What dinos like Forbes don't realize is that there is a huge groundswell of young artists moving, and staying in, Rust Belt cities. Not just because the housing is affordable -- the problem in big cities now is not only that there's nowhere to live, but risks are increasingly harder to take; it's all about turning a buck. Everything is micromanaged. In a city like Detroit, on the other hand, you have a good solid base with old institutions like Cranbrook, yet there is room for the grassroots to tap into the dirt and grow. That's why artists view it not as an apocalypse, but a sea of possibilities. Ditto Cleveland (which also make that miserable list). The interesting thing to me is that a lot of younger artists and activists are creating alliances, often via blogrolls, championing the place they're at, while helping to booster people in other cities undertaking similar projects (the Great Lakes Urban Exchange, or GLUE, is a great example of this). It's local but national at the same time. I haven't seen any large news organizations taking notice, though various local papers have written about it, at the very least by covering these folks' art projects.
We have a great contingent of place-sensitive, brilliant, creative people who are doing that work here locally, too. When seen through this filter, St. Louis is anything but miserable. Tiny ripples are starting to reach shore; PSFK, "a trends an innovation company" that runs a daily news site, has been doing a "Report from Middle America," series, and today's post focuses on Black Bear Bakery. This weekend, scores of those young bloggy creative types will be gathering in the West End to protest the possible demolition of the San Luis Apartments with a "Valentine's Day Love-In." They may just save that building, and more: the astrological alignment that the Broadway hippies saing about in "Age of Aquarius," will actually occur tomorrow! Now, that's having some major mojo on your side, at least if you're organizing a love-in. Change, I think, is continuing to blow through the air, but I think it will be a while before the list-makers figure that out. --Stefene Russell
