Bronzeville is a southside suburb distanced from Chicago’s marbled institutions by both miles and history, but situated immediately adjacent to the Obama’s family home. I was invited there by a colleague who is renovating a place for his family.
A few important markers and some grand old houses tell you what Bronzeville once was, but there are still questions about what it is becoming. I’m not sure I know, either. I’m beginning to enjoy that feeling.
Detroit has a central core with broad avenues that radiate out. The concentric boundary streets are marked in a way that only a city planner could love. The road eight miles out from the center is called ‘8 Mile Road.’ Five miles later it’s ‘13 Mile Road.’ It goes on like that to the edge of town.
There is a difference between municipal boundaries and cultural geographies, though, especially in Detroit. Teenagers blend the borders of the city with their bikes every day. Muscle cars stream Latin polka through Black neighborhoods and down crumbling freeways. Poverty creates a density in one place and a vacuum in another. The region really is a collection of places mapped out by the cultures that inhabit and transgress its linear design.
Read the full essay at Arts in a Changing America.
The waterways of Pittsburgh give the sense of being at the confluence of something larger than one’s self. Beautiful bridges recall an era of grand public works and the steel barons’ pursuit of an epic city. Immigrant stories are layered into the hillside neighborhoods. Pittsburgh’s past is still present.
My visit reminded me that culture transpires moment-by-moment and over centuries. Through each boom and bust, the city is made and remade. That cycle of growth and decline has an odd effect of the city’s playwrights, photographers, and urban designers. It helps them develop a finer intuitive sense for how we prosper as a people and a place.
Read the full essay at Arts in a Changing America.
Anne L'Ecuyer 