Technically, I don’t live in any city. My address (a farm in southern Illinois) falls in the periphery between several small towns in the St. Louis metro. We aren’t tied into any municipal water system, nor do we get garbage service. For all intents and purposes, I am an outside observer into the cities I know best. That said, I prefer to think that I inhabit multiple urban scales rather than none at all. This reflection, then, is meant to offer a glimpse into the two main places where my life happens, Granite City, IL and to a lesser extent St. Louis, MO.
I went to school in Granite City, originally a company town for steel, now home to roughly 30,000 people largely sustained by manufacturing and service industries. Domestic steel production hit its peak in the early 1970s, and after that Granite City met a similar fate to other Rust Belt cities without diverse local economies. The gradual exodus that began in the late ‘80s created the economic stagnation that characterized the Granite City of my youth: boarded up storefronts, entire residential streets abandoned, businesses that opened and closed within a year. My mom sometimes calls GC ‘the armpit of America’ due to a perceived lack of cosmopolitanism and opportunity.
Granite City isn’t any urban studies marvel; frankly, it’s pretty boring. It isn’t particularly walkable or transit-friendly, the school district is regarded as underperforming, and most of my parents’ generation have relocated in the last 20 years. However — perhaps sentimentally — I can’t help but be intrigued by the place: the large parks and civic projects left from a more prosperous time, the disproportionate number of churches, all products of different immigrant communities and with a striking variety of architectural styles. I like to drive around and look at the brick townhouses in the western part of the city, many of which are falling down now, and think about rejuvenation and decay.
I also think of Granite City as a lens through which to view planning and development history more broadly; a lot of the phenomena I read about in school now can be seen in a hyperlocal form within the town’s borders. My grandparents live in what I now recognize as an archetypal postwar subdivision, developed for the white middle class that abandoned urban centers in the mid century; in fact, I’ve found blueprints of their house in a paper about white flight in the Metro East. Naturally, this knowledge of places and the forces that shape them requires one to accept some uncomfortable truths: Granite City necessarily occupies a position in the history of housing segregation. It was also a ‘sundown town’ for a large portion of the 20th century, a fact that most people who live there will claim to know nothing about but nonetheless has visible effects on demographic distributions to this day. All of this makes the city a fascinating place to consider intellectually: it is Middle America in miniature, a hidden laboratory for the history of place.
Perhaps less concretely, I have similar feelings and curiosities about St. Louis, Missouri. I work there, and have been in and out of the city on a frequent basis my whole life, but again, I don’t actually live ‘within’ anywhere, and St. Louis is a place that I have been forced to observe from my bedroom window, 5 miles across the Mississippi.
It goes without saying that St. Louis also has fraught histories surrounding race, education, and industry. It has been at the dead center of national trade and conflict alike for centuries: a left-leaning city in a formerly Confederate state, the symbolic gateway between East and West, with all that that implies. It bears visible scars of urban renewal: a city vivisected by highways, dotted with stadiums, and until recently, haunted by the empty gash where Pruitt-Igoe once stood. To me, St. Louis is where I tell people I’m from when I’m out of town: home, but not really. I am constantly thinking of it, driving through it, and writing about it, but have little basis to claim true ownership. It is in some ways beautiful, in other ways damned.
These are the kinds of contradictions that occupy me as I find ways to be excited about urban conditions that are perhaps mundane on a global scale. In both cities I’ve discussed here, place is deeply interwoven with personal experience and perspective, but hopefully not limited by it. I hope that as time goes on I grow to love and appreciate many more cities, but there will always be a piece of me devoted to the strange intersection of places that I inhabited first.
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