Major Corrections-Decay

The US.

A reader alerted me to timeline errors that I made in the telling I of the story. Looking into it, I noticed that I made several errors, their biggest was forgetting that I had actually made two trips back to the States for Christmas after getting married. Not only was my memory confusing the two trips as one, while typing the years of both and somehow not catching it, I found that I had also saved albums of photographs of the two trips in the wrong folders, which without checking the meta data, did not betray this fact to me. What follows is a clumsy edit of my earlier post with dats and other information corrected. The short version is that the missing Christmas decorations in my home town and the local mall are actually from 2007 and all else, the decay of homes, towns and cities, from 2011.

Sorry for the confusion and thanks to Edward Hunt for tipping me off about my error.

My last time to the States was for Christmas in 2007 2011 returning to Japan early in 2008 2012.

It was the second and last trip to the US for Christmas for my wife and I as a married couple.  Before the our first trip in 2007, I had long been telling her of the awesome Christmas displays at home.  “You think that the Christmas light display at Shinjuku Southern Terrace is something?  Just wait until you see how it is done “back home”!”, was just one of the many such statements I made to her on what to expect when we visit my home town.  This trip was just 3 years after my last time to the States for our wedding.  Yet, I was still not prepared for the decay that awaited me on this trip nor its continuation in 2011.

In 2011 she had been working in the US for several months on a secondment that finished shortly before Christmas.  We met in Chicago, a city I knew quite well, not as one who lived there but as one whose family is from there and who visited it often to visit them and as one who was stationed at Great Lakes Naval station for “C” school.  Beautiful city, or at least it was at one time.

During the summers of my childhood and roughly every other Christmas were spent at my maternal grandparents’ home in a suburb of Chicago.  A farmer in his youth, he dropped out of school at ten to run the family farm upon the passing of his father, he would later become a carpenter.  The house they lived in since before I was born was built by my grandfather.  Being the oldest son and a farmer, he was prevented from going to war with the land of his father’s birth.  Dropping out of school so young left behind his heavy German accent and partial illiteracy, neither of which prevented him from providing the middle class, suburban lifestyle for his family.  For sometime, he worked in the John Hancock Tower in downtown Chicago.  My grandmother brought us down there once to say “hello” while he was at work.  When one of the big wigs of one of the companies in the building learned that we were visiting my grandpa at work he spoke very highly of him.  My grandfather also built the Christmas decorations for the first floor and lobby displays.  If you saw these in the 70s and early 80s, you saw my grandfather’s handiwork.

I grew up in a small town with a population of 8000 in the middle of corn fields.   Loved visiting Chicago regardless of the season but Christmas was special.  My grandmother would take us down to see the Christmas displays along the Magnificent Mile.  Those who grew up in the States in the 70s and 80s know what I am talking about.  Those who did not can never know, no one can express the magic of Christmas in the States during this time, though I suspect those who grew up earlier have similar experiences.  Truly, everyone was happy, at least outwardly so.  Christmas lights everywhere.  Christmas carols omnipresent.   

But not just in the big cities.  Every power pole along the main streets of my small town was adorned with Christmas Decorations.  The country court house on the city square had a nativity scene in addition to a Christmas tree.  A friend of mine once played Joseph one year when they had a live nativity scheme there.  Every store front was decorated for the holiday and Christmas music was played within those too.  Many homes in our town made Clark Griswald’s attempt at holiday cheer seem puny by comparison.  A town a few miles away had a full neighborhood competing with the other families for the best decorations.   Driving to the mall, 40 miles distant, was always a treat but especially so during Christmas as we could see many decorated homes from the interstate.

Once parked and inside, it was Christmas fantasy land.  It’s was like Chicago’s Magnificent Mile condensed and compacted into the confines of the mall.  Regardless of the decibels the cacophony of shoppers raised, Christmas music was omnipresent here too.  And of course Santa.   Bright.  Festive.  Cheerful.

That is what I hoped to enjoy with my wife.  I had heard and read of the “Assault on Christmas” and how bad the economy was under Obama but doubted either was as bad as reported.

I flew into Chicago from Tokyo the night before she did from the East coast.  We spent two nights there.  I took her to the Magnificent Mile.  A full third, perhaps more of the stores were empty.  This was masked to some degree by the remaining stores putting up Christmas displays in the empty store fronts.  Many of the businesses that were operating along this street were ATM centers, payday loan, and pawn shops, not the high rent stores that once graced this area.  I did not and still do not recall which one, but an old department store building with its 1880s guilded architecture stood vacant.  There were more people asking for handouts than there were Salvation Army bell ringers, and those were on every street corner!   

The next day we took Amtrak to St. Louis.   I have taken this train several times and always enjoyed looking out the widows at the various towns we went through.  Decay.  Everywhere decay.  Dilapidated homes.  Derelict storefronts.  Few and far between were any notion of the season.  Public properties completely devoid of any and all Christian symbols and almost bare of secular, seasonal decorations.  Arriving late, we decide to walk from our hotel to Union Station Mall.  This I had known well as I went here almost monthly during my time in college, a couple hour drive away.  While far fewer than the past, the city center did have decorations, though none of a religious nature.  Despite it being right before Christmas, the few remaining business were closed.  Most buildings were vacant.

We entered Union Station Mall from an entrance I had never used before.  In the past, I had always come by car and would use one of the entrances that served the parking lot.  I was taken aback by how expansive it was, much more so than I recalled.  Looking around in bewilderment, I eventually said that I did not remember the large breezeway but chalked it up to entering from another door and seeing a part of the mall I had somehow missed.  Then we came to the Faustian in the center of the mall.  My memory was not wrong.  Gone were all the stores on the first floor of that wing of the mall.  Not just the stores, but the store fronts and walls leaving only the load bearing, outer walls.  No empty store fronts, everything that would have supported commerce removed, gutted!  Exploring the rest of the almost empty and now silent mall we find several nice mini museums showcasing the history of the building and St. Louis in general…in place of stores I used to frequent.  Found an Indian couple selling items from their homeland in what used to be Banana Republic, the familiar facade of the store still there, just painted over.  Besides this, there were a couple of Indians selling jewelry and music, a fortune teller, ATMs and no other retail activity.  The food court was devoid of activity except for the Fudge Factory, which was the only sign of life in the whole place, except for the quiet Indians and the fortune teller.  A couple of homeless occupied the otherwise deserted seating of the food court.  We dined at a restaurant outside but joined to the mall, the only one of several still in business.  On the way home, we saw someone doing drugs at the bus stop.

The next day, we went to Laclede’s Landing.  Along with Union Station, this area had been revitalized decades prior.  It was filled with a large number of old brick buildings.  By the mid 80s, many restaurant, bars, nightclubs, boutiques and antique stores were to be found here.  The Spaghetti Factory was immensely popular and always had a long line.  This was the first place I experienced beepers for those waiting.  You would sign the waiting list, receive a beeper and go shopping as you waited to be informed that a table was ready for you.  With my interest in history, I would always stop by here to peruse the antique stores on my way home from my monthly naval reserve drills held at the airport.  Bought my very first stereo views there.  Upon entering the building that I was certain housed the store I bought these in, the security guard and all the business people looked at me with amusement.  All the stores, restaurants and boutiques in the building had been replaced with offices.  That sadly, was about the only building still in use.  Mississippi Nights still had its sign up and looked like it could reopen with the turn of a key, had a “Tenant Wanted” sign in the window.  More empty lots than I recall and everything I remembered was out of business.  Except for the Spaghetti Factory, where we had lunch, one of the few dinners in a resultant I had never seen an empty table in before.

Most everything I wanted to show my wife no longer existing, we loaded up the rental car a started off from my childhood home several hours earlier than planned.  The 2 hour drive was much the same.  An entire large multistoried mall that I had shopped in from time to time was completely closed.  Not a single store still in business.  Many of the fine, old homesteads that I marveled at from my childhood through graduation from college, now derelict or completely gone; only the ancient trees that mark their locations remaining.   

Turning off the interstate at the exit my hometown, down from 8000 to 7000 residents, I am saddened further by the lack of decorations which we first observed in 2007.  None at the courthouse in the square, none on the power poles.  What was new this trip (2011) was The beautiful, stately homes that line the Main Street across from my high school to whose residents I once delivered newspapers to are vacant and in disrepair.  The road I rode my bike to school was worse.  Homes that I remember being built missing windows and doors, just black, gaping holes in their place.  Reminded me of skulls of people I once knew.  The home of a childhood home that I spent quite a bit of time inside, once inside the foyer you could see a garden through a glass wall surrounded by the house built around it.  I have never seen similar anywhere in the States.  This modern home, another I remember well being built was set back in the woods from the road.  Now long neglected, the woods reclaimed the once nice yard, the roof collapsed with at least one tree growing through where the roof once was.  This is just one street over and a block down from my parents’ home.

On Christmas Eve 2007.  I drove my wife the 40 miles to the mall.  Gone were the Christmas lights on houses along the highway.  One was the parsonage for a pastor.  It was always lit up for the holiday.  Not this year.  The mall was dead.  Not completely but compared to a regular day, sloooooow.  For Christmas Eve, dead.  It was dark as one of the anchor stores was out of business and one whole wing and a portion of another closed due to no stores in them, the hallways dark.  There was music but despite the funeral home atmosphere, I could tell it was there but if it was Christmas music or not, that I could not tell.  Decorations were few and there were no Christian symbols at all.   Santa was there, but not much more.

All this change in Christmas had happened in less than the 7 years I was away and the economic decline in less than 4 years.