Gone Ghetto

I belong to a few Facebook groups that focus on particular neighborhoods in Chicago. Some deal with neighborhoods where I have lived, others with neighborhoods that have particular interest to me. Many of the posts deal with the past, featuring long-gone landmarks whose memories speak of a bygone era which almost inevitably according to the members of each group, was better than the one in which we live in now.
 
A group that focuses on the community in which I currently live, Rogers Park/West Ridge (more commonly referred to as East and West Rogers Park) on Chicago's far north side, is particularly fond of the past. I don't personally know any of the folks whose comments appear on the group's posts, but from what I can tell, most of the people active in the group grew up here, and moved away a long time ago.

Like every neighborhood in Chicago, Rogers Park (from hereon I'll refer to the two communities collectively by the one name), has significantly changed in the past fifty years. Ninety nine and some change percent white as late as 1960 and heavily Jewish, the neighborhood since then has diversified. Immigrants have come from West Africa, all corners of Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe. A large contingent of Jews from Russia, as well as a huge concentration of orthodox congregations, have kept the presence of the Diaspora strong up here. The neighborhood has also become racially integrated over the past half century, welcoming African Americans who left some of the troubled segregated neighborhoods on the city's south and west sides. I've often said that ours is one of the most culturally diverse communities in the city if not the nation.

The subject of one post on the Rogers Park Facebook group that received many comments was Devon Avenue, once a street filled with storefronts mostly catering to the Jewish community but today is the commercial hub of Chicago's Indian and Pakistani community. To me Devon is one of the most fascinating streets in the city; stepping onto it you feel that you have just been transported halfway around the world, perhaps to Delhi or Karachi. It turns out that several of the members of the Facebook group don't share my enthusiasm about the street. They understandably miss the street they knew as children, but not understandably, feel threatened when they return. Beyond the shall I say, creative driving styles of some of the area's residents and the slight chance of unintended contact with a motor vehicle on Devon Avenue today, there is nothing threatening about the street, except perhaps that it is different from the way it used to be.

In another post, a regular contributor posted a photograph of a stop sign that was tagged with gang graffiti. One of the responses came from someone who currently lives in California. His comment was this:

Sadly most of Rogers Park & the surrounding areas have gone ghetto.

Now the phrase "gone ghetto" is a humorous street-slang expression describing losing one's cool and going off on an expletive-filled rant. The most famous use of the term was perhaps the golfer Tiger Woods' description of his wife's reaction to the news of his sexual exploits.

Because of the context and the fact that both the writer and most of his audience are white, I can only guess the comment was not intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but to be taken literally.

I was troubled by that statement on many levels, not the least of which is the fact that no homeowner appreciates his neighborhood being labelled a ghetto. I struggled finding the correct words to respond, not wishing to be confrontational or opening myself up to a barrage of comments pointing out statistics that would seem to confirm his sentiment. My response was simply this:

Having lived in this community for the past 11 years I beg to differ.

In our place and time, "the ghetto" is charged term, inextricably tied to three things: race, poverty, and crime. The word has origins that go back nearly one thousand years. It is defined as a distinct area of a community where people of one particular ethnic minority live, specifically to be separated from the rest of the population. More often than not during those thousand years, the ethnic minority forced to live in ghettos was Jewish. That makes the description of the recent transformation of Rogers Park from a Jewish community into a ghetto, particularly ironic.

In this country today, the ethnic minority usually associated with the ghetto is African American. Contrary to the notion that the United States is a "free country", black people regardless of their economic status, have not been free to live wherever they pleased for a very long time. In Chicago and similar cities, perfectly legal housing covenants in white-only communities once prohibited home owners from renting or selling to people of color. Consequently blacks who arrived in Chicago during the "Great Migration" from the South, roughly between 1915 and 1970, were forced to live in restricted parts of town where they found price gouging, substandard housing, and crime. Thus the Chicago neighborhoods that were the homes for generations of this city's black community, were by the strictest definition of the word, appropriately called ghettos.

Laws would eventually do away with restrictive housing covenants, but Chicago remains a segregated city. The reasons for this are complicated. I've been raked over the coals for posts I've written placing at least some of the responsibility on one group or another. Suffice it to say there is lingering bitterness and distrust between groups who prefer to dwell on assumptions of other people rather than face to face contact, and on our differences rather than what we have in common.

The members of the Facebook Rogers Park group have unwittingly tapped into this very issue. Often someone will post a comment saying they wish to visit the old neighborhood but are afraid to because of the threat of crime. "Oh you'll be OK..." is the typical response, "as long you come during the day and don't flaunt any valuables."

They do call this city Chi-raq after all.

I've encountered this attitude often on my travels around small towns in the Midwest when people see my white face then learn I live in Chicago and automatically ask: "which suburb?" When I tell them I live in the city proper, they look at me with apprehension, as if they found out I was just released from prison.

More troubling than the effects of unwarranted assumptions about my city or my neighborhood, is the casual use of labels such as "ghetto" to describe any neighborhood. It is universally assumed that people who live in "the ghetto" are either one of two things: criminals, or helpless victims with no option but to live there. Many of us don't realize that despite the relatively high rates of crime and violence, most of the people who live in places like Englewood and North Lawndale, two Chicago neighborhoods that are labeled ghettos among other much worse things, are honest, law abiding citizens who work for a living, pay their taxes, vote, and have the same needs and hopes for their lives as everybody else. Unfortunately because of the bad press, most of the people I know would never set foot in those neighborhoods let alone talk to the residents in order to find out that simple fact. I dealt with this subject in a post written a couple years ago.

This is not to downplay the rise of violent crime in this city over the past few years. The two neighborhoods mentioned above have been hit particularly hard by the recent spike in violence. We've also been feeling up it here in Rogers Park. A well publicized murder involving an innocent bystander and three gangbangers (who were not from the neighborhood) made the headlines a few weeks ago. Shootings are on the increase; it's not unusual to hear gunshots from our home. Several years ago I was attacked by a group of teenagers behind our building leaving me bloody and pissed off. Believe me, I don't write off crime and violence in the least.

But as I found out in 1968 when my family left the filth and crime of the big city for the clean air, green lawns, and safety of the suburbs, you can never escape reality. Within the first few months in our new home in an all white suburb, for the first time in my life: I heard gunshots, had my bicycle stolen, encountered truly mean and nasty children who no doubt went on to use those skills productively in their adult lives and, heard the word "nigger" used in passing conversation.

The recent tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri have underscored the divisions in our society. Some have expressed surprise, this coming so many years after the triumphs of the civil rights movement and the election of an African American president. But the idea that we live in a post-racial America, one "devoid of racial preference, discrimination, and prejudice", however desirable as that may be, is preposterous. If anything, with the rise of technological innovations such as cable TV, the internet, social media, and the blogosphere, where the views of any idiot (such as myself), can be voiced, we are perhaps more divided than ever. Today a person with any viewpoint no matter how imbecilic or irrational, can find some kind of justification, somewhere.

Not only have we separated ourselves physically, but also intellectually into enclaves, ideological ghettos if you prefer, where like-minded people can preach to each other. No longer do we talk to one another face-to-face about important issues, because that would be imprudent. We express our views with our "friends" in the relatively collegial atmosphere of Facebook, where we can "de-friend" people if we don't happen to like what they have to say. Or we can spew our venom anonymously to the world through Twitter and countless other outlets where we have no responsibility for truth or accuracy.

Rather than reading "all the news that's fit to print", people are more likely today to get their news from sources whose motto may as well be: "all the news you want to hear." As a friend pointed out recently, the events in Ferguson: "sadly (are) no longer about truth but rather, each of us being 'right.'"

Those events taking place as we speak in the St. Louis suburb have shown that most of us are still guided by our assumptions rather than facts born out of evidence. The court of public opinion has already weighed in as judge, jury, and jailer over the death of Michael Brown, only divided by ideology. Depending upon your point of view, the teenager was either: a criminal who assaulted a police officer while reaching for his gun which justified his killing or, an innocent, unarmed young man executed by a racist white cop.

That the truth probably lies somewhere between those two scenarios hardly matters; people will stick to their guns, their assumptions, and their prejudices, come hell or high water.

Things are never exactly what they seem and if we Americans, black, white, and everything in between, keep living by our assumptions about our fellow human beings and nothing else, we will continue to live in a bitterly divided society.

Like it or not, the face of this country is rapidly changing and before long, the United States will become a majority-minority country. We all would do well to accept and embrace this fact, rather than continually run away from it. Eventually there will be few places left to hide and the remaining enclaves filled with people separated from the rest of society by choice, will become the new ghettos, and their residents and their like-minded, like-complexioned neighbors, the new ghetto dwellers.

How ironic is that?

A death outside the family

Yesterday I learned of the deaths of two individuals, one of whom I knew personally. The other was Robin Williams. 

It's hard to explain why the death of a stranger hit me as hard as it did. I was not exactly a fan of Robin Williams although I did admire his work in several movies. As it so often happens with the deaths of notable people, I've spent more time thinking about him in the last 24 hours since learning of his death than in the past thirty years or so that I've been aware of his existence. Since yesterday I learned about his health issues including open heart surgery, profound depression, dependence on drugs and alcohol, and the steps he took over a long period of time to get better. I learned that his off screen persona wasn't all that different from what he presented to the public, and that beyond the wacky, hyper, over-the-top schtick for which he was famous, it seems that deep down he was a wonderful human being.

And like the whole world, I learned that he died by his own hand.

I used to think that suicide was the most selfish act imaginable. Now I'm not so sure. 

It so happened that within the span of a couple years, two people with whom I worked took their own lives. Both were women in their early twenties. Both had scores of friends and loving families, both were exceptionally intelligent, talented, and accomplished for their young ages.

Granted I didn't know either of these individuals very well, but on the surface these two women would have been the last people on earth I would have imagined to have suffered from clinical depression and would eventually kill themselves. The first was someone I never really cared for. I found her to be unpleasant, aloof, and self-assured to a fault. When I learned that she died I felt ambivalent - terribly guilty that I didn't like her in life, but also angry that she would cause so much pain to the family and friends who loved her. Foolishly I resolved in my head that my assumptions about the kind of people who would take their own lives were correct all along.

Although I hardly knew her any better, the second woman was the polar opposite of the first. Her spirit of warmth, kindness, and generosity was palpable. She was not the kind of person who would have intentionally slighted a perfect stranger, let alone the people who loved and cared for her.

As a society we are just now beginning to come to terms with the torments of clinical depresseion. The fact that we all get depressed at times over the anxieties of life makes those of us who don't suffer from this terribly debilitating and deadly disease feel that if only "those people" lightened up a little and looked on the bright side of life, they'd realize they had nothing to be depressed about in the first place. After all, what does someone with all the money, talent and success of someone like Robin Williams have to get depressed over?

While I'm no psychologist and in fact know very little about the subject, unlike the case of my two former colleagues, I can't say that the news of Robin Williams's death shocked me. I knew nothing about the private man until yesterday, but in retrospect I felt that his outrageous, rollicking comic free-spirit must have been tempered by another, much darker force. It's hardly a surprise that most comedians deep down are rather sad individuals. As a friend put it yesterday, their craft serves in part to make some sense out of a "really fucked up world."

You could say that Robin Williams's mental state, both the highs and the lows of it, (not to mention the copious amount of drugs and alcohol he admitted to consuming over the years), contributed significantly to his "genius." Like that sappy Elton John song about another Hollywood icon, that "candle in the wind" was bound to burn out much too soon. This is not to trivialize the tragedy of his death in the least; but the truth is, Robin Williams lived larger than most of us, as his fall was equal in proportion.

It's impossible to imagine what thoughts must have gone through his head in the last moments of his life. I can only guess that his pain must have been unbearable, so much so that it forced him to do the one act that is alien to the very thing all living organisms are programmed to do, survive.

I'm not sure why deep, psychological pain is such a hard concept for so many people to grasp, but it is. We have a friend whose daughter has for several years experienced chronic abdominal pain which has of late become excruciating. She has been hospitalized for weeks now and so far the doctors have been able to come up with absolutely no explanation for what has been causing the pain. They have been able to medicate it which brings only temporary relief for the symptoms, but are nowhere closer to finding the cause of her condition.

No one would have any problem understanding and sympathizing with this young woman's physical pain and the incredible frustration she and her family are experiencing in not finding its source, let alone a cure. As I see it, suffering through the depths of depression is much the same; the source of the pain is inexplicable, and the cure for its symptoms in the form of medication, is fleeting at best. The only difference is that other people simply can't understand.

I can only guess that what was on Robin Williams's mind at the end was not his loving family, his adoring fans, and all the good that he brought to the world. My guess is that the only thought on his mind was how to make the pain stop.

Those of us who do not suffer from clinical depression can learn a great deal from the struggle of Robin Williams. The one good thing that may come out of the tragedy of this beloved public figure and his family is a better public grasp of the disease that took his life. And hopefully those of us with loved ones who suffer from debilitating clinical depression will learn to better understand them, listen to them, and most of all love and care for them.

It may not make their pain go away, but it's sure better than the alternative.

The Quintessence of Life

At the end of a particularly draining Saturday one month ago, my wife suggested we head to a Redbox machine in our neighborhood to find a DVD for an all too infrequent family movie night. Frankly there's little in those machines that interests me. Call me a snob but I just don't care for many contemporary Hollywood movies. With their one dimensional characters, predictable story lines, interminable chase scenes, incessant devotion to special effects, gratuitous violence and sex, (well violence anyway), and their target audience, the least common denominator, I'd take an old, a foreign, or an indie movie any day.

Out of the dozens of choices in the machine, only two movies appealed to me, and one was not appropriate for the children. The other was the new version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, directed by and starring Ben Stiller in the title role. I always liked the James Thurbur short story, probably because I can identify with a character who spends much of his time in a dream state which he prefers to reality. My kids like Stiller, especially from his role as the security guard in the two Night at the Museum movies. My wife was just happy we could find something to agree upon. I was prepared for a much needed, mindless evening chilling in front of the tube watching a pleasant, harmless movie. I figured the worst thing that could happen was that I'd fall asleep, which is what usually happens when I plant myself  in front of the TV.

That last thing I expected was to be engaged, enthralled and overwhelmed by a film that was not only entertaining, but also touched upon several issues that are close to my heart, issues that have been dealt with in this blog.

In this version of the Mitty story, our hero begins the movie late for work having missed his train as he becomes lost in a fantasy about the woman he has a crush on, a co-worker named Cheryl Melhof, (played by Kristen Wiig). Walter's tardiness does not bode well for him as he learns upon arriving at the office that his company has just been bought out and the transition team has already arrived to eviscerate the staff. We are soon to meet the chief antagonist of the story, the leader of the transition team, a pompous, self-serving weasel of a man named Ted Hendricks (Adam Scott), dressed in a suit and ridiculous beard, (the source of one of the funniest lines of the movie).

The business Ted Hendricks's company bought could have made cars, investments, or widgets; it hardly matters to people like him who are only interested in the bottom line. It so happens that the business in question is Life Magazine. Hendricks proves time and again that he is completely in the dark about publishing a magazine. While he lacks any knowledge of the industry he's just been thrust into, his people skills are worse. In the first meeting with his new staff he tells them the bad news: most of them are about to be fired. Then the good news: before they lose their jobs they are about to have the honor of creating the magazine's final print edition, as Life was about to go entirely online. *

While the Hendricks character is merely an apparatchik for the entity who bought out Life Magazine, he serves well as a metaphor for today's corporate world that cares little about what a company actually does and needless to say, less about the people who work for it. I wrote on this very subject a few years ago, about a corporate takeover specialist named Edward Lampert who bought out K-Mart and Sears. Despite his ostensible interest in saving the two struggling national icons, it became clear that Lambert's actions were motivated out of the profit gained by selling off those companies' vast holdings of real estate, rather than selling hardware, clothing, and appliances.

Anyway, Hendricks told his stunned audience that the last issue of Life Magazine was to feature on its cover a photograph made by the esteemed photographer Sean O'Connell, (Sean Penn). According to O'Connell, his picture which at that point had been unseen by anyone but its creator, depicted nothing less than "the quintessence of life." Hendricks had no idea what that meant but was told by his two goons, also in suits and ridiculous beards, that it meant something special.

Walter Mitty's position at the magazine was photo archivist, his official title in comically ironic corporate-speak, "negative asset specialist." In that role he and O'Connell had developed a close working relationship over the years, although the two men had never met face to face. In this capacity, Walter was entrusted with the roll of negatives, (yes O'Connell still shot film thank you very much), containing the important picture. The trouble was, the roll was completely intact except for the one important frame, #25.

The rest of the film depicts Walter breaking free of his dream life by embarking on an ever broadening journey to find the elusive photographer and his missing negative. As with most literary and cinematic quests, whether it be for the Holy Grail, Private Ryan, Mr. Kurtz, or Rosebud, this search reveals at least as much about the searcher as for what is sought.

This film received by and large, ho-hum reviews. Many of the critics didn't accept the premise of a search half way around the globe for one picture. Taking the premise quite literally, Richard Roeper said: "It's hard to get too excited in the digital age about a missing photograph." Not too surprising a comment I suppose coming from a reviewer who works for The Chicago Sun Times, the newspaper that recently laid off its entire staff of photographers.

The filmmakers who made this Walter Mitty story take the medium of photography more seriously than the Chicago tabloid and their reviewer, as their movie is liberally populated with important photographs. The halls of Life are covered with decades worth of iconic photographs that graced the pages of the magazine. Peering down at us from the walls of Mitty's workplace are the images of a generation, the likes of Ghandi, Martin Luther King,  JFK, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali and John Glenn (or is it?). We see the first moon launch up close, Mt. Everest from a little more of a distance, and Moses holding up the Ten Commandments on the screen of a drive in theater.

These are not images made by just anybody with their smart phone, they were made by artists who were the best in the business. Just as having an e-mail account doesn't make you a writer, having a phone with a camera doesn't make you photographer. That inherent truth is something beyond the grasp of a businessman like Hendricks just as it is to the current owners of the Sun Times. Throughout the film, as the photographs begin to be removed from the halls of Life Magazine, we learn what is about to be lost. In one scene, a particularly alluring Marilyn Monroe looks on from down the hall as the clueless boss surveys the institution he is about to disassemble. You can almost hear her say indignantly: "really?"

I keep thinking that the late Roger Ebert, Roeper's predecessor at the Sun Times would not have missed the significance of that scene.

An important part of the movie that many critics did not buy was the portrayal of the elusive photographer Sean O'Connell. He's clearly an eccentric character marching to the beat of his own drummer, an artist led entirely by impulse, creating work for himself above all others. I suppose the most difficult thing to understand about O'Connell takes place when we finally catch up with him in one of the remotest parts of the world. He is about encounter something he has traveled half way around the world to photograph. After a long wait, the camera trained upon his subject, he observes it through his telephoto lens, then shows it to Walter. Walter asks O'Connell if he's going to take the picture and the photographer answers no:

Sometimes I don't. If I like a moment, for me, personally, I don't like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it.

It takes a true artist to understand that sentiment.

With his long hair, scraggly beard and disheveled appearance, O'Connell is cast as the stereotypical artist directly out of central casting. If people like Sean didn't exist, you'd have to invent him. In reality, Sean O'Connell is not much of a stretch, I just wrote about two artists who would make O'Connell look no more off-beat than Aunt Bea. One is Josef Koudelka, the other is Vivian Maier.

One frequent criticism of the movie is its simplistic message that it's better to do than to dream. One critic called Walter's break out experience nothing more than an extended Nike "Just do it" commercial. I think these critics miss the point. Walter is not, as some folks see him, a simple milquetoast, everyman of a character. There is depth to the guy as we learn early on that his more or less mundane existence is the result of circumstances beyond his control. Much like George Bailey, the central character of the classic film It's a Wonderful Life, the teenage Walter was forced to abandon his youthful dreams of exploring the world because of family responsibilities caused by the death of his father. As we meet him many years later, he still takes full responsibility for the care of his elderly mother (Shirley MacLaine) and his demanding sister (Kathryn Hahn).

Walter may lead what many consider a hum-drum life, but what slowly becomes clear if you pay attention, is that he is thoroughly engrossed and passionate about his work. It is the very thing that motivates him to go on his fantastic journey in the first place. Sean O'Connell entrusts Mitty with his work knowing full well that without Walter, he would be nothing. No, Walter is not escaping from his life and his "boring" job, rather he is taking his work to a higher level. When Mitty returns from his first journey empty handed, he tells his new boss that in 16 years on the job he has never lost a negative. The heartless response is: "put that on a plaque and hang it on the wall, at your next job." But after receiving another clue about the whereabouts of O'Connell, Walter embarks on his most ambitious adventure to find the negative, after he his fired. Hard to imagine your typical 9 to 5 office grunt doing that. This film teaches us that a person's job and a person's work, are not necessarily the same thing.

I suspect that most of the negative criticism of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty comes from the fact that the movie doesn't live up to the expectations of the reviewers. As it would be difficult in this day and age to revolve a feature length movie around a the daydreams of a man during a Saturday afternoon shopping excursion with his overbearing wife, this is definitely not James Thurbur's Walter Mitty. It's also not a remake of the the 1947 version of the story starring Danny Kaye, simply because Ben Stiller is not Danny Kaye. In fact, Ben Stiller in this movie is not even Ben Stiller, as a typical comedy featuring the popular actor is driven by a frenetic comedic pace where the setup for one gag begins as soon as the laughs from the previous gag die down. There are funny moments in this Walter Mitty story and some amusing lines in the screenplay written by Steve Conrad, but you would be hard pressed to call this introspective film a comedy. The two other stars of the movie, Wiig and MacLaine, best known for their characterizations of over the top characters, here downplay their roles so naturally that it hardly ever seems they're acting.

The one universal bit of praise this film has received has to do with the magnificent cinematography of Stuart Dryburgh. The film looks beautiful, especially after we leave the confining environments of Walter's Manhattan apartment and workplace for the great unknown, in this case shot on location in Iceland. To many critics, the scenes of these remote places, while stunningly cinematic, have little to do with moving along the story, they are eye candy at best. Here I reserve my harshest critique of the critics. To me, the most memorable scenes in what I consider to be a remarkable film, are three prolonged sequences containing no dialogue. They involve, a helicopter flight, an extreme skateboard ride, and a pickup soccer game.

These amazing scenes represent transcendent moments in Walter's life where he breaks free of the restraints he has placed upon himself, finds the freedom to do the thing that comes most naturally to him, and finally accepts and lets go of at least some of his old assumptions about they way he should live his life.

Save for jumping into shark filled waters and coming face to face with an erupting volcano, much to the chagrin of critics like Roeper, Walter's excursions abroad aren't filled with scene after scene of conflict and resolution. Instead they are filled with wonder and discovery. Some reviewers speculate that those scenes are just more of Walter's dreams, but clearly they are not. In the dream sequences which we see in detail at the beginning of the film, Walter is at the center in the role of hero, whether he's leaping into a building to save Cheryl's dog from an imminent explosion, or telling off his pompous boss in front of his co-workers. Far from it during his excursions abroad where he is continually dependent on the help of strangers, including a drunken lout in a Greenland bar and an Afghan war lord who is smitten with a piece of Mrs. Mitty's famous Clementine cake. Walter's encounters along his journey are for me the most poignant part of the story. These encounters with people who are vastly different than him, and by extension, us, speak to the fact that while we all may be different, there is an essential quality of the human experience that connects us all.

By the end of the movie, things are hardly resolved for Walter. He's back in New York without a job, his future uncertain, and he's failed to come through on the promise to his mother that she would never have to sell her most prized possession. The "feel good" ending is laced with not a small amount of melancholy. I'm not giving away anything by telling you that Walter gets the girl at the end. That should come as no surprise as it's already clear by the second reel that there is a mutual attraction between Walter and Cheryl; quickly enough she becomes both his muse and soul mate. The real payoff which I'm not going to give away, comes about a minute before the final frames of the movie where we see Walter and Cheryl holding hands for the first time. To some critics, the resolution of this movie was the biggest letdown since they discovered that Rosebud was only a sled.

Personally I found the resolution of this story nothing less than sublime. The real message of the film is more complicated than: "just do it." As I see it, the message is that it may be better to do than to dream, but in order to live a complete life, they're both important. And finally, that we all hold the quintessence of life right in the palm of our hands, but sometimes we have to go to the ends of the earth to find it.

Those may not be the most profound messages in the world, and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty certainly doesn't rank up there with the great films of all time. But for the life of me, I haven't been able to stop thinking about the movie since I saw it.



*The real Life ceased publication as a weekly magazine back in 1972. It resurfaces from time to time in commemorative issues published by its parent company Time INC.

Old signs

An article called Nostalgia's Burning Glow, written by Ginia Bellafonte in the New York Times questions the current trend of preserving old, defunct signs in the urban landscape. The author makes some interesting points asking why we are so fond of these signs advertising products our "enlightened" era finds distasteful or harmful; in her words:

mammoth emblems to industries whose output or methods of production are (or were) anathema to a prevailing value system that holds in relentless contempt anything processed, chemically supplemented, bought in a chain store or intended for ingestion more than 11 minutes after harvest.

Bellafonte uses the examples of the well known Domino Sugar and Pepsi Cola signs along the East River in Brooklyn and Queens respectively, that are prominently visible across the river in Manhattan. While "liberal" New Yorkers gleefully endorsed former Mayor Bloomberg's law banning the sale of "super sized" sugar-laden soft drinks, Bellafonte claims those same people ironically loved the signs and wholeheartedly approved of their preservation, including the great lengths taken to keep them standing.

Not satisfied that people are just thinking inconsistently about these signs and what they represent, the author goes further to define the issue in terms of class struggle. She suggests there is a disingenuous nature to the longings of well-heeled, upper-middle class New Yorkers who are fascinated by these symbols of a more modest world or:

 ...an extension of creative class fetish for the workingman’s life.

About the endangered, roof-mounted Kentile Floor sign that has been a landmark for riders on the F train through the industrial neighborhood of Gowanus in Brooklyn for fifty years, Bellafonte writes:

...there is almost no one belonging to the brownstone Brooklyn renovating class who has ever said, “You know, for the living room I’m just going to forgo the reclaimed zebrawood and retain the integrity of the 1958 vinyl flooring.

Yet according to Bellafonte, the Brooklyn renovating class almost to a person wholeheartedly supports the preservation of the sign above the factory that manufactured vinyl flooring until the 1990s. It would be much better the author chimes in, if those pampered New Yorkers put their time and effort into supporting the cause of the working class people of today, rather than the icons of their ancestors.

Beyond the heavy-handed, class conscious arguments of Ms. Bellafonte which I find somewhat ridiculous, I disagree with the assertion that people are interested in these signs purely out of a sense of nostalgia.  The signs that folks are interested in preserving are examples of great industrial and graphic design, and as objects were crafted with care and an eye for quality that we are unlikely to find in today's throw away world. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, most of the signs and their supporting structures are beautiful objects in their own right, at least in my own opinion.

Our cities are reflections of ourselves and those who came before us. Great cities are not torn down and re-built with each new generation, but evolve over time. Each generation contributing bits and pieces of itself, combined with bits and pieces of other generations, create a gigantic crazy-quilt pattern of architectural and design styles which gives a city its sense of place. Some of my favorite cities like Rome, London, and New York are prime examples of this. All three are layered with centuries' worth of cultures built on top of, or right next to one another.

I said in an earlier post that "advertising speaks volumes about the culture that created it." We think of ancient cities as consisting of austere temples and cathedrals as that is what remains of them. As we've lost much if not all of the ephemeral, low culture of the past, we forget that life went on well beyond those sacred spaces. It's the presence of that low culture ephemera that differentiates a living, breathing city with a city of ruins, a place of the dead.

As someone who is interested in historic preservation, I believe we need to consider holding on not only to the high culture: the great landmarks such as notable buildings and monuments of the past, but also to the low: mundane objects like vernacular architecture, examples of outmoded technology like water tanks, and yes, even defunct signs. Obviously we can't save everything; the rights of property owners must be taken account, especially because it is they who are left to foot the bill to maintain structures that in themselves may not have any commercial worth to them.

While keeping these monuments to the past which have no inherent value may seem frivolous and inefficient, that very frivolity is an indication that a city is alive and well.

Long may those signs live.