The Durability of People and Places

The morning after:  A new normal, or a return to the old normal?

Five weeks into living at our new address in Tampa.  When I woke up about 2:30 Saturday morning, I thought I heard an explosion.  Since I was sound asleep, I assumed I imagined the noise.  We live near a fairly trendy bar/restaurant district, so when I heard a man yelling a few seconds later, I thought it was someone straggling home and being stupid.  Even when I looked out the blinds into the street, I couldn't see anything unusual.

When I heard car doors and voices a few minutes later, I looked out the window again.  Police officers walked up and down the street, police tape was put up to block traffic and that odd-looking trash in the middle of the street was marked as evidence - they were shell casings.  The officer who came to the door told me that one of our neighbors (we live in a triplex) had been attacked and had shot the assailant.

To our knowledge, it was the first act of violence in the neighborhood since we moved here.  We were shocked at the initial event and we remain uneasy.  Julie and I have both walked around the area extensively, during the day and at night, and saw no reason to be concerned.  Should we be now?

In 1992 I lived in Palo Alto, California, in San Joaquin County.  The next door community of East Palo Alto, in San Mateo County, was the "murder capital of the nation" that year.  The few times I went to East Palo Alto it was dramatically different from most of the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area; roads were crumbled, houses and businesses had bars over the windows.  I didn't feel in any particular danger, but I didn't linger.  Housing prices in surrounding communities rose so high that East Palo Alto became the only option for a lot of people.  In only a few years, major retailers started moving in, a bank opened an ATM (no bank had trusted East Palo Alto with an ATM prior to that), and housing prices doubled.  I haven't been there in many years, but I understand crime rates are down and some degree of gentrification has occurred.  I realize many people (including myself) have mixed feelings about gentrification and its impact on diversity.  But there is no doubt that East Palo Alto today is a changed city from what I saw in the early 1990s.

We remain optimistic about our own neighborhood, trying to view the violence in our street as an isolated incident.  But it got me thinking about the pace of local change.  At what point can we recognize change at the neighborhood or city level?  As with a recession, it seems we are well into the event before we identify it.  Often the events we expect to cause the greatest change - for example, a transition of mayors or city council members - bring little recognizable change at all.  The question applies at higher levels, also.  For example, the United States after 9/11:  Was the world really a different place on September 12, 2001, or was it only Americans' perceptions of the world that changed?  And to what extent did those new perceptions result in further global change?

New Orleans provides an example of how a dramatic event, Hurricane Katrina, did not so much cause change as exacerbate change that was already in progress, from a SeedMagazine.com article on Urban Resilience:

"In New Orleans, for example, more than 60 percent of wetlands have been lost in the last 60 years, due partly to oil and natural gas exploration and partly to the levies that were built to keep the Mississippi from flooding the city.  Ironically, the loss of these wetlands contributed very directly to the disastrous effects of Hurricane Katrina.  Researchers have since calculated that restoring 1 kilometer of wetland would reduce the wave height by one meter, and now efforts are underway to begin rebuilding the southern Louisiana coastline."

So what we perceive as change sometimes is just the result of change that occurred while we weren't paying attention.  Or, it may be a result of change that happened elsewhere; change in East Palo Alto was driven in part by the rising cost of living in surrounding cities.

I didn't really get back to sleep that morning after the shooting.  By about 5 A.M., I could hear birds outside singing, just like they do every morning.  When we left the apartment later to run errands, the only visible evidence of the horrible event was a section of police tape left on a telephone pole.  Otherwise, the neighborhood was quiet and looked exactly as it has every other Saturday morning.  People walked their dogs and went about their day.  Emotional shock waves were the only evidence that an exceptional event ever took place.  On some future day, maybe that will pass, too.

The Places We Leave Behind

Sorting through boxes of stuff in preparation for moving, I came across a 1990s newspaper article about the Old Mill Six.  The Old Mill Six was a discount movie theater in Mountain View, California.  If you were willing to wait until just before a film's release on VHS (remember VHS?), you could see a movie at the Old Mill Six for less than $2.  A buddy and I had a somewhat weekly routine of seeing a movie at the Old Mill Six, then searching the jazz room at nearby Tower Records, followed by good conversation at a coffee shop next door to Tower.  The Old Mill Six closed years ago, as did all of Tower Records' U.S. stores.  But when I say I still miss the Old Mill Six, it's not just the place I miss but the camaraderie of a friend I haven't seen since leaving California in 2001.  They are forever linked in my memory.

I've written previously about my grandmother's caution to me about wanderlust in the Bravard family.  I've moved many times and lived in five states.  My launching point for this blog was the plan for another move - Julie and I moving from St. Petersburg to Tampa.  We've rented out our house in St. Petersburg and found a small apartment in Tampa, so this week is moving week.  We're caught up in the rush of packing boxes, changing our utilities and all the many things you have to do when moving.  We're not moving far, only Tampa Bay separates the two cities, but for some reason it feels to me like a vast distance.

I've also written previously about the definition of home; about how wildlife often has an instinctive need to return to its place of birth while people have considerable flexibility to change homes as needed.

Moving is a situation designed for nostalgia.  It's natural to think not only about the logistics of moving and setting up a new home, but about the emotional impact of what we're leaving and what we're about to find.  "Place" isn't just a house or the built environment, it's the people and experiences that fill that environment.  Time and distance don't just take places from us, they take the people who complete those places.  My advice is to enjoy your place as much as you can, because you never know when it might change or circumstances might require you to leave.  I still miss the Old Mill Six.  I still miss my grandparents' farmhouse in central Indiana.  I still miss the wonderful couple who lived across the street from us in North Carolina; they treated us like family and invited us to all of their holiday get-togethers.  And in St. Petersburg, I'll miss the Good Fortune Chinese Buffet; Julie and I are regulars there and it's a great place to have a long conversation over some General Tso's chicken.

There are pros and cons to settling in one place, just as there are pros and cons to my affliction with wanderlust.  I've seen places and met people I would never have seen or met otherwise.  And places change regardless; the Old Mill Six would have closed whether I stayed in California or not.  Still, it's hard not to feel a little sad over the places we leave behind.  Sooner or later, it seems, the time always comes to walk along a new sidewalk.

Where to see a movie in a small town

Well Saturday night about eight o'clock

I know what I'm gonna do

I'm gonna pick my baby up

And take her to the picture show

The Drifters

When I was a child, I didn't realize the Castle Theater was such a unique place.  The Castle is a real movie theater, at the time the only theater in my hometown of New Castle, Indiana (there is a drive-in just outside of town).  It opened in 1935, before the days of metroplex shoeboxes where the sound from one microtheater leaks into the next.  I saw some of my favorite movies there, including the original Star Wars in 1977.  As I've written before, I've only returned to New Castle three times in the last twenty-one years.  On the last visit Julie and I saw American Wedding at the Castle.  The movie was forgettable, but Julie was impressed by the Castle and I couldn't help feeling proud that my hometown could sustain such a nice theater.

Except, it almost couldn't.  The Castle closed in January.  It was a real shock to many of us who grew up there.  The good news is the Castle is scheduled to open in March under new ownership.  I admire the new owners but I don't envy them; operating the only movie screen in a small city can't be easy.

I lived one terrible year in Stockton, in the Central Valley of California.  One of the few things I liked about Stockton was the Empire Theater, another historic movie theater.  They often showed classic films and I saw The Godfather there.  Some folks suggested the classic film route for the Castle.  I like the idea, but I don't know if New Castle has the population (18,339 in 2008) to sustain such a niche business.

Part of what defines a place is the kind of businesses it attracts and retains.  Cheap consumer electronics and a global trend toward urbanization haven't been kind to small towns and their movie theaters.  Movies are one of the things America has always done well and many of our fondest memories are what movies we saw, the theaters we saw them in, and who we saw them with.  A night at the movies is local entertainment that is culturally unifying whether we're in a theater in Newton, Iowa, or Middletown, Connecticut, or New Castle, Indiana.  Every small town theater that closes causes a disconnect bigger than the business itself.

The good news is that the Castle Theater will open again.  Maybe this is not a great thing in the grand scheme of economics.  But I'm relieved because in a world that changes more rapidly all the time, the theater's presence is a constant that links several generations.  And I hope for the best when the Castle reopens, because while the movies are still good, the movie theaters have really gone downhill.  And the Castle is a great theater.