From Possible to Real: Recognizing the New Frontier

We are not Detroit. We are not Pittsburgh. We are not Cleveland. We are haunted by the same kinds of ghosts, but the ghosts wear different clothes. We are not St. Louis circa 1876. We are not the St. Louis of 1950. The boundaries may be the same, but these days the imaginary parapets serve different purposes. The refinement and luxury of 1904 has eroded under the rub of reality, the daring and opportunity of the journey of even hundred-years prior has become an unsupervised schooner set adrift at sea. We continue to honor an ideal that no longer exists, a sense of trans-historical self that has been subverted by the emptying of warehouses, the abandonment of neighborhoods, and the strategic shirking of any collective responsibility. Having been regularly tested, we have regularly failed. We are not alone in this history; our Rust Belt brethren have much the same record.

Yet, there is something enduring in all of these cities. Beating and pulsing, the hue of life circulating in encrusted factories turned incubators, in new neon signs rising above teeming streets, in cafes dispensing local brews of every breed, in rehabilitated row homes with more dignity in one brick than the entirety of Iowa. We have recognized possibility where our antecedent only saw poisoned prairie. The Detroit commercial, while the product of some public relations Svengali miles from any revivalist mission, has communicated this sense of urban potential and simultaneously captured the national attention. The Super Bowl-watching hoi polloi may not want to stake claim to a Motor City warehouse, but they’re suddenly all rooting for a place often conceded to the scorched-Earth policies of the postindustrial world.