The Hard Way on Purpose (21 page)

I picked up a ringing telephone two weeks later to learn that her husband had just been laid off, followed by the hardest words of the contemporary American middle class:

“Now what?”

*  *  *

I conducted this work in a newsroom that was itself living those very concerns. The
Beacon Journal
had, like all American newspapers in the past dozen years, suffered deeply declining circulation and revenues and severe cutbacks in personnel and resources. A 2012 report identified the newspaper industry as having suffered the worst decline of any American industry between 2007 and 2011. My own newsroom had been hit with the first layoffs in its history in 2001, when the staff was cut via pink slips and buyouts. In 2006, Knight Ridder was purchased by the McClatchy newspaper chain, which immediately jettisoned the twelve lowest-­performing newspapers. We were one of them. I've never been in a more anxious workplace.

Waiting to find out who'd buy us, the staff in the old newspaper offices heaved with uncertainty and worry. Within a couple of months, the company was purchased by a Canadian publisher, David Black, who, in a memo to the staff, said there would be no layoffs. Almost immediately upon taking ownership, he eliminated 25 percent of the news staff.

When I had joined the paper twelve years before, the newsroom employed around 200 people. When Black took over, the paper was at about 160. After his first round of staff cuts, it was down to about 120.

So maybe it's not such a surprise that David Knox was able to foresee the coming recession. Reporting on the plight of the middle class from within the Akron newsroom that year was kind of like studying whale depopulation from aboard a sinking ship.

All year, I visited with and wrote about people whose lives reflected the truths of the postindustrial Midwest. It wasn't an entirely bleak story. It wasn't as simple as campaign narratives would suggest. Some of the people who'd suffered most had reinvented themselves in remarkable and uplifting ways. Many people—­probably most—were carrying on, concerned, but resolute. Most of us felt that we were doing our best within a system that felt dangerous, volatile, strained by conditions that had been maturing over the past generation—the very generation into which I'd been born.

And so, as the election season picked up pace in the fall and the economy was quickly rising to the forefront as the dominant American concern, word spread around the newspaper that another round of staff cuts was coming. The owner would be offering buyouts. This might be the last chance for any of us to get out on our own terms.

I decided to leave.

*  *  *

Here's a Paris story.

Or close enough, anyway. To my parochial mind, any story about France may as well be a Paris story.

On the afternoon of September 25, 2009, John Puglia was enjoying one of the best days of his life, strolling with his girlfriend through a plaza in Vernon, France. They'd just returned by bicycle from a visit to Monet's home and garden and had shared a bottle of wine and a picnic lunch from a local shop. John's cell phone rang.

It was human resources. They were turning off his phone. The one he was holding to his ear. He was not to return to the office. His desk would be cleared and his belongings would be boxed and delivered to his home. After sixteen years with the trucking company, he was being terminated. The company had lost hundreds of millions of dollars that year and had already laid off thousands of workers and slashed pay and benefits within the remaining workforce. The landmark Akron headquarters had been dwindling since the 2003 merger, and YRC was about to put the building up for sale.

*  *  *

That was the story of that year. Reduction upon reduction. People who managed to keep their jobs were loaded up with the duties of their departed colleagues and knew better than to complain about it. “Doing more with less” became the corporate mantra not just in the Rust Belt, but across the country.

Akron is a city where, twenty years before, “keeping your job” meant being retained at the factory just long enough to shut it down, and having no choice but to do that work, knowing there might not be anything beyond.

Some of the country was stunned in 2008; we were well acquainted with the feeling.

I don't know if I'd call that vindication, but in these parts we're not too well acquainted with vindication.

*  *  *

I began teaching at the University of Akron. John, after his layoff, made looking for a job his full-time job. We sat at my dining room table and brainstormed, made lists, worked on his résumé. John kept going with freelance work, and after three months he found a place where maybe he'd belonged all along, a job as creative director at a marketing agency in a historic nineteenth-century building that had been a warehouse in the canal era, and a storage building for Model T's, and a horse stable. We'd known it as one of those stubborn, faceless buildings of our old downtown, and now it was rejuvenated as the kind of place we'd always imagined in the void.

PRETTY VACANT

My wife is petite, healthy and strong—enough to have birthed two babies and survived a childhood home with six siblings and one bathroom, and to have hammered out a life with a frequently illogical husband. She is quite beautiful, exercises regularly, eats right, has all her teeth and a lot of nice dresses. The phrase
brick hauler
is not the first that comes to mind.

Except for one thing.

So. There we were. An overnight getaway. A hot summer afternoon at the foot of Mount Washington, next to a chain-link fence separating us from the CSX tracks and the Monongahela River and the stunning skyline of Pittsburgh beyond, her in a polka-­dotted sundress, scanning the ground diligently as I did so expertly.

“There's one,” she said, pointing next to a clutch of weeds a little ways up the hillside.

“Nope,” I said. “That's a building brick.”

“How can you tell?”

“I can tell.”

Full disclosure: this was our wedding anniversary.

We continued along the edge of the road. There—there's one. No. Wait. Almost, but missing a corner. There—another, sticking up through the dirt, but—no, uh-uh, the face is crumbling. A half brick. Another half brick. Three-quarters of a brick. And then, a little way up the rise, a promising shape. I scaled the rubble and rolled it over with my foot. A keeper.

A light terra-cotta paver, more tan than red, a street brick worn at the corners, nine inches by three and three-quarters, eight pounds, stamped in block letters:

PENNA

CLAY Co.

I hauled it down the hillside and set it near her sandaled feet. I'd said I only wanted one, but now that the search had begun and borne fruit, I was hungry for another. Blood in the water, etc. A little farther along, I found an exceptional one, flat on top, nice rounding at the edges. And then a bonus surprise, the broken half of a flat fire brick, bearing the cryptic letters of the first half of its stamping:
BENEZ
—. And there, up the hillside, one more
PENNA
block, a gift for my father.

And that, I promised, would be it.

“Do you mind carrying one?” I said, offering her a paver while I gathered up the other three.

“I can take two,” she sighed.

We made our way back to the car.

*  *  *

It is in many ways an unfortunate term: Ruin Porn. It has taken hold in recent years, somewhere in the same lexical parking lot as Rust Belt and industrial rock and brownfield and brain drain. Ruin Porn is applied mainly to photography of abandoned, decaying urban spaces and has especially been focused on the postindustrial regions of the Midwest and Appalachia and on toward the East Coast, with urban explorers—ranging from amateur point-and-shooters to high-profile artists—trespassing in empty buildings and distressed neighborhoods, documenting what others have ignored.

The art of Camilo José Vergara, Matthew Christopher, Sean Posey, Andrew Moore, Yves Marchand, and Romain Meffre typifies this style, and although their approaches and philosophies vary greatly, a consistent thread of criticism of exploitation dogs them, some deserved, some not. Their work unfolds inside collapsed libraries where trees have taken root in rotting texts. And in vacant factories, floors strewn with trash, paint on the brick walls curling into psychedelic hieroglyphs of neglect. And around foreclosed homes succumbing to mold and rot. And along polluted rivers strung with run-down industrial strips. And in abandoned theaters and churches and transit stations, places dripping with the tension between opulence and decadence.

Here's one I'm looking at right now, by the photographer Andrew Moore, of a collapsing nursing home on Seven Mile Road, a closely framed image of a room with broken ceiling tiles littering the floor, one wall blasted open, another wall on which someone has spray-painted a message that in any other context would seem melodramatic:
GOD HAS LEFT DETROIT.

Moore's work was the subject of a major exhibition,
Detroit Disassembled
, curated by the Akron Art Museum in 2010. The photographs in that collection are huge, several feet across, and hyperreal, and entirely familiar to those of us who exist in cities that continue to struggle back up from a collapse.

Here's another: an empty office at the former Ford Motor Company headquarters, the rich floor-to-ceiling wood paneling mottled with water damage, the green carpet distorted into a weird rotten grid. (I once explored an eerily similar office at the former General Tire headquarters, a blastedly cold, profoundly empty interior decorated with stained glass of the founding-­family crest.)

And another: the ornate ballroom of the Lee Plaza Hotel, where the paint on the arched ceilings and the broad walls is alligatored, flaked, and crumbling, the vast expanse of center space anchored by a collapsed grand piano. (I made a table out of slabs of marble salvaged from the floor of Akron's historic, abandoned Portage Hotel just before it was demolished.)

And another: the James Scott Mansion, a stone castle with a turret and grand arched entrance, its windows all smashed out, walls overtaken by ivy. (I live in a gracious Tudor home with six fireplaces, stained-glass windows, servants' quarters, and a billiards room, purchased on the verge of condemnation from underneath a stack of health-department orders, a house that was infested with wildlife, with no working plumbing, no safe electricity, overwhelmed with decay.)

I've always felt inspired by such places and never thought about feeling any other way.

One night, exploring downtown in the moonlight when I was still in college, I found an old metal colander in the weeds near the canal and picked it up and carried it with me. I had no practical purpose for this. I don't recall being in need of a spaghetti strainer nor recognizing some resale value in this random kitchen implement. It was just the old scavenging instinct at work, a notion bred into my generation to catch things before they fall into irrelevance.

The
Detroit Disassembled
show was preceded by an exhibition of Lee Friedlander's
Factory Valleys
collection, those photos of Akron, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Canton in the early 1980s, and then by the photographs of Andrew Borowiec, distinguished professor of art at the University of Akron, who moved to the city in the crucial year of 1984 and has made the social-industrial landscape a main subject ever since.

The three exhibits placed in that context depict three distinct visions/versions of an unfolding story. Friedlander shows the last days of a highly evolved, once-thriving culture. Moore shows the highly evolved, thriving ruins.

Borowiec's work does something different. (Full disclosure: Andrew Borowiec is a friend, and I have written the introduction to one of his books.) The museum displayed photographs from two of his collections in separate galleries. The first set, from his
Along the Ohio
project, contained black-and-white images of mostly small-town and urban landscapes near the Ohio River, taken in the 1980s and '90s. The second was from his series
The New Heartland
, photographs from 2004 to 2009 depicting the suburban and rural residential and commercial development that has represented a next phase of Middle American evolution.

Which is to say that Friedlander and Moore offer the drama of a moment and Borowiec offers an ongoing narrative rumination. And there is the key difference. Borowiec maintains a continuing engagement with his environment, and an emotional connection to the conditions behind it, and regardless of whether that makes his art better, it provides an ethical transcendence, one particularly important in places like this, where the story is more often told by someone who has parachuted in, with return ticket at the ready.

The prevailing criticism of Ruin Porn is that such art is exploitive of someone else's pain, that it does nothing to address solutions, that it invites slumming aesthetes, that it rarely reflects people interacting with these usually very public spaces, that it sensationalizes, that it isolates the worst of a community from the context of the bigger and far more complex socioeconomic picture.

Moore offered a preemption by including text panels alongside some of his
Detroit Disassembled
images, offering wider context to the immediate scene, often injecting a tone of hope and perseverance. Friedlander's series, as arranged in the book
Factory Valleys
, evolves from desolate urbanscapes to portraits of workers in their environment, indicating a desire to connect the drama of the visual moment to the real lives it contains.

Yet, despite these attempts, I find a recurring frustration, an old defensiveness, rising in my response. In 2009, the
New York Times Magazine
ran a cover piece by Alex Kotlowitz titled “All Boarded Up,” about the housing foreclosure crisis, visiting a Cleveland neighborhood where a third of the houses were vacant, in a city where an estimated one in every thirteen homes was in foreclosure. The story was deeply reported, sensitive to its subjects, well written, apparently accurate, and yet I found myself bristling at its myopia.

What about what's happening a mile away? What about the suburbs? What about the highway between the cities, onion layers of nuance unfolding mile by mile? What about the urban neighborhoods that are actively working toward their own vitality? What about the patchwork of these cities, the way the social personality often changes radically from one block to the next? (My wife and I have owned two houses, both in the same middle-class neighborhood, a half mile apart. Our current home is in a solid, stable, relatively safe city block. Our previous home was next door to a Section 8 crack house. How to tell that story simply?)

So, even in the work of Friedlander, which I find historically essential, and the work of Moore, which I find visually arresting, and in the work of Kotlowitz, which I find journalistically sound, I have the old, impossible-to-shake, involuntary response.

He's not one of us.

This is mine.

This is who I am.

I want to be the one to define it.

Friedlander and Moore came from their studios in New York to do their work. Kotlowitz came from suburban Chicago. They all went back home when they were done.

So my struggle is not so much with them or their work, but with my own internal paradox, which is just a fancy term for my own hypocrisy, a hypocrisy that is at least a minor plague among my people—I don't want them to interpret me,
even if they get it exactly right
.

*  *  *

In regular excursions of my childhood, I rode shotgun with my father in one of his company's tin-can surveying trucks or in his shit-brown Impala station wagon, off to collect what he was prone to describe, deliciously, as a “mother lode.” I came to know the very smell of approaching clay and stone in the shimmer of summer heat, and the ceremonious arrival, taking stock, then clawing through piles of unearthed street brick, or the rubble of a demolition site or the holding yard of a highway-construction contractor. Hot, dusty afternoons, I learned the heft of a paver, the century-old interlocking street bricks he craved for his readaptations in walkways and patios. I learned, very young, the qualities of age, of wreckage, of wear, of patina. These were not so much described to me as they were inscribed on me.

I learned how to read the faces of the bricks, and the stories they told—
BESSEMER BLOCK
and
BIG FOUR
and
AKRON BLOCK
and
HARRIS ZANESVILLE
. Sometimes the letters were so worn that we couldn't make out the words, and so the stories deepened, mysteries that drew us to crayon rubbings or just accepting the unknowable nature of some things.

Sometimes the stampings were ornate. We once found a whole pile shot through with commemorative bricks from the 1893 Chicago world's fair, decorated with an elaborate depiction of Columbus's discovery of America, commemorating the previous year's four-hundredth anniversary of the event, which provided the fair's theme. When I rebuilt my front stoop, I incorporated rows of these lighter-colored bricks into the pattern. (I recently looked the World's Fair paver up on Google and found an eBay listing for one with the current price of $10.49. Even though I knew these bricks are rare, this was the first time the notion of their monetary value ever occurred to me. Partly because I'd never sell one, and partly because I've never paid for one.)

Such intrigue was more the exception than the rule. The stampings generally were simple, pragmatic, and pointedly regional:
CLEVELAND BLOCK; CANTON METROPOLITAN.

My dad was a connoisseur of ruins. He befriended the guy who had the contract to demolish buildings for the city, and so these excursions grew into elaborate, exotic outings, sometimes requiring whole weekends and skid loaders. When I was in my early twenties, my dad asked me if I could round up half a dozen friends because he'd scored scavenging rights to the foundation of a demolished barn and had bartered to borrow a flatbed truck for a Sunday. So I showed up with a carload of sleepy-eyed, hungover, self-taught musicians and an itinerant stand-up comic, the lot of them dressed in canvas sneakers and Hüsker Dü T-shirts and jelly bracelets, not altogether prepared for this sort of work, lured chiefly by the promise of twenty-five bucks apiece. (My father, fully expecting such a scenario, had brought along a bucket full of work gloves.)

Down the hillside behind the barn site, I found a junked washing machine, scrambled down to it, pulled off the chunky, silver plastic knobs and instantly recognized the size and shape of the control stems. Sure enough, when I got home that night and tried them on the volume and tone controls of my Fender Mustang, they fit perfectly, and I played it that way for years, looking as if I were adjusting for temperature and rinse cycle.

Was I drawn to these things because I was following my father's instincts? Did their elemental nature appeal to me naturally as a child, a real-life version of LEGOS? Was it because of the male appetite for destruction? Was it because of the architecture of my place? Would I have the same attraction if I'd grown up in, you know, Phoenix, where the bricks are all new and synthetic?