a tourist view of three american cities

In Aspen there are cobblestone streets, biodegradable doggie bags, French fashion stores. One called Theory has black bags and coats against lots of white walls. Everyone’s white and rich. The mountains are gorgeous, many over 14,000 feet. No suburbs here, only the cool air of the mountains, snow, expensive cars and houses, money earned elsewhere and white segregation. The elites need cheap labour, they just don’t want to have to live near them or see them while they enjoy steak dinner and a clear view of the mountains. For some reason Hunter S. Thompson lived here till he blew his mouth open with a shotgun. Why? He was in the same enclave as Mariah Carey and Michael Douglas. Maybe to live as some kind of clown, parodying life in these hills?

St Louis

Riding the freeway through the suburbs and then turning off into North St. Louis, driving downtown on West Flourissant Street, brick buildings and people drinking on the street, liquor stores and fast food, hair stylists, no white people anywhere, shit, buddy bumping music in the ford sedan behind me has metal caps on his teeth. Every second or third building is vacant, garbage drifts by. We drive into downtown, more crumbling brick only there’s malls and the odd new building and a few people walking quickly by in suits, still vacant buildings, just they’re taller now, the only park is by the central library and filled with black street folks on benches and dying grass.

I ask a rich looking white guy in a suit if we need to plug the mirrors and someone in the park yells that we don’t. The suit looks across the street and says sarcastically, ‘look, they know more than we do,’ and walks away. Over the trees in the park you can see the looming granite of the five story tall city hall; a cross between the uniform bleakness of communist architecture and the threatening dominance of a Catholic Church. There’s a quote about democracy in foot tall angular cuts across the face of it, it feels like the people who built downtown were scared. They must have been white.

The missisippi river is dirty through downtown, watching the river pass and a few tourists aboard a riverboat while cars rush on the bridge overhead, a broken mirror reflecting the st. louis arch in the garbage under the bridge. The river is dirty and slow, there’s rusting metal everywhere.

St louis is the centre of America, where north, south, east and west meet, highway 66, the Mississippi, but its crumbling. The downtown is falling apart. Wikipedia says that St. Louis proper is 46% white but we stayed close to downtown and rarely saw any whites on the street, not many Mexicans either. The roads were shit. The suburbs are 30% wealthier per household and I’d say that whites have gotten scared and fled to homogeny and chain stores in the suburbs.

Hannah, a young activist who gave us instructions on the best produce dumpstering ever at the farmer’s market said that the population of the city itself fell for thirty years in a row, Wikipedia says that its peak was 856 thousand in 1950 to its current level of just over 350 thousand. Hannah squats a building in the North of the city and works as part of a collective which has funding to provide after school programs in a mostly black and Latino neighbourhood. There is a shed out back filled with donated bikes that you can work on. A black kid yells at another about drugs and how he should be respected while a couple people work on bikes. Hannah says there’s lots of opportunities and resources due to all the empty buildings and funding from municipalities but even in area of Cherokee, which would be the Commercial Drive of STL there are rows of empty stores until a row of antique shops.

And I didn’t hear any Nelly. There’s strip bars and a club where Nickleback is coming to across the state line in Illinois. Later in Chicago Illinois the strip joints are across the state line in Indiana…

Hannah tells me whites have done this all across America, running to the suburbs where they can appreciate the end of slavery and equality through their televisions.

Chicago

Drove through the suburbs this time, rich, white, rich, white, and black folks too, rich, new, chain stores, construction, chain stores. The corn and soy of Illinois give way to subway, shell and Home Depot, everything looks new and not shiny instead classic chain store suburbia luminescent. Dull neon, like everything is a fast-food sign board, even the stucco somehow. Lots of pharmaceutical stores and fast-food.

Getting closer, the roads turn to shit just like in STL and there’s black people everywhere. More smaller stores although still fast food, chicken everywhere, brick buildings again. Even at city speeds we hit a pothole big enough to fuck up Carmen’s alignment.

Then we hit North Chicago, Lincoln Park, the hostel. Its mostly white again, Chicago is a rich city, downtown has an amazing amount of skyscrapers, whole blocks of them, the city had enough inertia that gentrification hasn’t gutted downtown, only strengthened it although it is surrounded by poorer neighbourhoods in the south and west until the suburb ring. There’s a gorgeous coastline on Lake Michigan which is clear and blue, people dress well, food is not advertised only on the basis of price.

Demographically the city is split in three thirty percent each Hispanic, white and black. In Pilsen neighbourhood I didn’t see a non Hispanic person on the street for 30 minutes till a couple guys wondering over the food they bought from the Spanish language grocery. In Bronzetown driving south it seemed the same, only black, both working class neighbourhoods, both segregated. Music crosses borders though, jazz, techno and indie blending together...