Genius Loci

As a follow-up to last week's post about Rebecca Solnit's book on the anthropology of walking, I should mention that I went out of my usual bounds today to take a short walk downtown. I used to work downtown, and its streets, buildings, cafes, and sidewalks were a part of everyday life, but I rarely have reason to go there anymore. I was only there today because I needed to go to the library on an errand and decided it would be easiest to go to the main branch. I was struck by how little downtown felt like a "hometown" any more, in any sense of the word. I almost had the feeling that I had been living elsewhere and dropped in for a visit after an absence of several years--that's how alien it felt. And yet I've been here all along.

There have been many, many changes downtown over the years; I'm old enough to remember "Urban Renewal," and even before that, what the city looked like when it still had department stores on Main Street. I have nothing against shopping malls per se, but I do think the decline of downtown areas as principal shopping districts has had a bad effect on many communities that they have spent years trying to compensate for. In many cases, "downtown" is still the principal business district and offers such diversions as restaurants, museums, and nightclubs--such is the case here. But the changes I felt were more subtle than the coming and going of a business, the resurfacing of a street, or the introduction of a new parking lot. The soul of the place seemed to have leaked out somehow.

It looks much the same now as it did when I was down there every weekday, but it felt foreign to me. Of course, you have a major problem any time the center of your downtown district has, literally, a hole in it. Directly across from the library is a huge pit in the ground that takes up an entire block, the result of a stalled construction project that began a number of years ago, when I still worked downtown, in fact. Why would any city, especially one with such pride in its historic districts and one-time reputation as the "Athens of the West," allow such a gaping hole to exist for years at a time in one of the most visible spots in the entire city? Good question.

Some people regarded the long-existing buildings on the block before demolition as eyesores; others saw them as treasures. I remember trying to frame what was happening during the initial controversy over the project, a proposed multi-story hotel, in mythological terms. Certainly it seemed that two diametrically opposed forces were at work, one that valued the old and one that championed the new, a sort of clash of the Titans. Regardless of the merits of the project itself and who was right and who was wrong about its benefits and costs, it's tough to argue that having what looks like a rock quarry in the middle of Main Street is an improvement over what was there before. It gives downtown an air of neglect.

I can remember when it was fun to walk around and notice little things, a pocket garden here, a public art project there, something in a store window that caught the eye. A public art project called "Horse Mania" once transformed the streets into an outdoor sculpture garden with creativity and imagination on display at every turn--who would have thought there were so many ways to interpret the basic form of a fiberglass horse? Another project involved the installation of doors recovered from a demolished housing project that had been transformed into works of art--pure genius.

When I looked around today, I noticed a couple of sad-looking murals, neither one of which did much to appeal to either the eye or the heart. I actually stopped and asked a parking lot attendant who had painted the mural of the somewhat demented-looking elvish creatures presiding over one corner. He couldn't tell me. Any city that allows something like that to pass for art needs a bit of shaking up, if you ask me, and you didn't, but I'll tell you anyway. No amount of Thursday Night Lives or Gallery Hops is going to cover up something like that. Why is it even there?

It seems to me that the genius loci of our town is either missing in action, falling down on the job, or has something else in mind. If that's what passes for progress, I guess I'll stick to the suburbs. They're only marginally better, but at least there's no risk of stepping off the sidewalk and falling into a chasm that could lead, who knows, right into the center of the earth. I mean, it's a really big hole.