By 2008, thousands of middle-class and rich people in Juarez, desperate to avoid shakedowns, murders, and kidnappings by cartel hit men, had begun packing up and fleeing to El Paso, where they bought houses and opened businesses. Their migration kept the northern side of the border economically afloat and turned Juarez into a pariah city—or worse, a ghost city that El Pasoans ceased thinking about. More…
The mayor told us that the city would be holding a special council meeting so that both production companies could pitch their show ideas to the people of Whittier. We were invited to come and watch. “A reality show could be good for bringing attention to our little town,” he said, “but it does worry me, too. I don’t want to be some Alaskan Honey Boo-Boo.” More…
Kansas wasn’t always this way. Until World War I, the state was a hotbed of radicalism: it produced figures such as John Brown and Mary Lease, and was a major base of operations for the Populist and Socialist movements. It is only since the 1990s that Kansas has become associated with a long row of reactionary ideas, leading many commentators to argue that the state took an abrupt right turn. More…
So people in Reading find their own means of exchange and escape, and when the drugs stop working they turn to piercings and tattoos. This is only a temporary measure, because there is only so much skin on the human body, and only so many things that can be pierced. And when all the skin is filled and all the holes have been made they move on to other plans. More…
For the small, longstanding music venues on the eastern edge of downtown—places like Mohawk and Emo’s, which helped establish Austin’s international reputation for live music—rising property taxes and the encroachment of high-rise condos mean the beginning of the end. The tension between the music scene and high-rise development is growing in the Live Music Capital. More…
To grow up in Omaha is to confront the void. The Void should be capitalized, though, because it is a big deal. Here, the buildings are stout, the streets are wide, and there are twice as many bars as there probably should be for a mid-sized city. In the winter, when the surrounding farmland lies fallow, the only thing in your rearview mirror will be sky—ominous, gray-streaked winter sky with giant clouds hanging low. More…
Manocchio’s prosecution seemed to me representative of the city’s recent transformation. In order to transform itself into an up-and-coming arts mecca and a good place to meet singles, Providence first had to shed its old reputation—of being a corrupt and dying city and a good place to meet mobsters. More…
My parents moved us into an apartment complex in northwest Fresno called Cobblestone Village. This was the scaffolded edge of the city, only half a mile from where the suburbs disintegrated at the sandy banks of the San Joaquin. The apartments were surrounded by acres of troweled lots. A wide pit had been dug in one with I-beams and rebar sticking out of the dirt. More…
As I put my shirt back on, it was explained that there used to be more women, “born women,” in our escort service. A lot of clients will want one, and we’ll run out early. Try to “up-sell” them. You can send a boy to a client who wants a girl. “You can?” He shrugged. “Once in a while. I tell ‘em, ‘Hey, a blowjob’s a blowjob.’” “Does that work?” “It has worked.” More…
Maple Shade is a place that is pleased with its small-mindedness. It was and is a working-to-middle class town, proud of its outsider status as a blue collar island in a sea of richer towns: Cherry Hill, Moorestown, Haddonfield. “There’s a carload of people from Cinnaminson at the custard stand,” somebody would say while sledding on a hill. “Let’s help beat the shit out of them!” More…
A family in the Powhatan collected Joseph Cornell boxes, which my mother once took Lucy and me to see. Lining a dark dining room, the boxes held frightening arrangements of clock faces, newspaper cuttings, and birds, which I was afraid might start moving. Looking at the boxes was like listening to adults talk to each other, overhearing some words I couldn’t understand, but whose feeling I could begin to guess at. More…
The April 2008 issue of Forbes included Seattle in its list of “recession-proof” cities, citing manufacturing growth and declining unemployment. Amazon and Microsoft were still hiring. But that May something strange happened—with three new condo buildings in progress in South Lake Union, Vulcan rolled out an incentive program, offering to pay part of the closing cost for current renters who’d like to buy. More…
I was born in 1986 in Mt. Auburn, an old annexed suburb just up the hill from Over-the-Rhine, and for the eleven years I lived there I was the only white kid on the street. It was the kind of street white Cincinnatians patronizingly call “black middle class“—as though if you’re black in Cincinnati, and you live in a neighborhood where only 25 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, you’re doing pretty well. More…
In my parents’ eyes, founding a feminist club at my school had made feminism the x factor that would get me into a good college, which meant that when I told them I was going to sleep at P.’s house because it was the twentieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade and Operation Rescue was hitting DC’s abortion clinics at 6 in the morning and we had to be there first to keep the clinics open, they had to let me go, because feminism was my thing. More…
The Cone Mills White Oak denim factory sits out past the college football stadium and baseball diamonds on the nether edge of downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. Named for a large tree on the property, it is bordered by narrow, numbered streets cluttered with eyeless and empty ranch-style houses that seem to clamor up to the factory gates, dusty “for rent” signs swaying in their freshly seeded front yards. More…
M is a journalist in Kentucky who went through a nasty divorce a few years back. She was drinking white wine in those days and coping with an abusive ex-husband but she pulled herself together, went through rehab, and raised two kids who adore her. The kids are out of the house now, and M is six years sober. She lives alone in a small town along the I-75 corridor just south of Cincinnati. More…
I spent most of my teenage years in Wauwatosa, one of Milwaukee’s oldest suburbs. In the 1960s, at the height of the city’s civil rights struggle, it was one of the hotbeds of racist resistance: when Father Groppi led a protest march into the town, he was met by Klansmen and other onlookers who waved signs reading “Keep Tosa White.” By the early 2000s, such explicit racism was rarely seen. More…
The funeral came off without a hitch, in spite of the snow. It was as dignified as we could have hoped for and no one from the altar mentioned what had happened. I parked my rental car on Argyle Avenue, feeling a bit more alert than usual. In Atlanta, just after Thanksgiving, two gunmen robbed me of my station wagon and wallet; two days before Christmas I didn’t want to invite fate’s wrath a second time. I was back home in Baltimore. More…
Americans have always been suspicious of our cities. Before the Civil War, writers competed to denounce them in the strongest possible terms, culminating in the twin Transcendentalist broadsides of Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden. The latter prompted Henry James, himself no fan of the city, to describe its author as an “essentially sylvan personage.” More…
