His utopian proposals—cities (just towers really) enmeshed in a net of multilane roads—were perfectly in synch with what the car and oil companies wanted. Given that four of the five biggest corporations in the world still are oil and gas companies, it’s not surprising how those weird and car-friendly visions have lingered. In the postwar period General Motors was the largest company in the whole world. Its president, Charlie Wilson said, “What’s good for GM is good for the country.” Does anyone still believe that GM ever had the country’s best interests at heart?

Maybe we can also blame Robert Moses, who was so successful at slicing up New York City with elevated expressways and concrete canyons. His force of will and proselytizing had wide-ranging effects. Other cities copied his example. Or maybe we can blame Hitler, who built the autobahns in order to allow German troops and supplies fast, efficient, and reliable access to all points along the fronts during World War II.

I try to explore some of these towns—Dallas, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta—by bike, and it’s frustrating. The various parts of town are often “connected”—if one can call it that—mainly by freeways, massive awe-inspiring concrete ribbons that usually kill the neighborhoods they pass through, and often the ones they are supposed to connect as well. The areas bordering expressways inevitably become dead zones. There may be, near the edges of town, an exit ramp leading to a KFC or a Red Lobster, but that’s not a neighborhood. What remains of these severed communities is eventually replaced by shopping malls and big-box stores isolated in vast deserts of parking. These are strung along the highways that have killed the towns that the highways were meant to connect. The roads, housing developments with no focus, and shopping centers eventually sprawl as far as the eye can see as the highways inch farther and farther out. Monotonous, tedious, exhausting . . . and soon to be gone, I suspect.

I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore. One of the houses we lived in there had a housing development to the right and some older houses behind it—with woods and a working farm in front. We lived right where suburban development had (temporarily) stopped—at the point where it met the farmland. Like a lot of people, I grew to disdain the suburbs, their artificialness and sterility. But I could never shake them entirely. There was some kind of weird fascination and attraction that I (and I think many others) can’t quite get out of my system.

I must have gotten hooked on cycling early on: in high school I used to pedal over to my girlfriend’s house in the evenings, which was at least four miles away, so I could hang out and smooch after I’d finished my homework. We almost did it right by the adjoining city dump once—no intruders there.

My generation makes fun of the suburbs and the shopping malls, the TV commercials and the sitcoms that we grew up with—but they’re part of us too. So our ironic view is leavened with something like love. Though we couldn’t wait to get out of these places they are something like comfort food for us. Having come from those completely uncool places we are not and can never be the urban sophisticates we read about, and neither are we rural specimens—stoic, self-sufficient, and relaxed—at ease and comfortable in the wild. These suburbs, where so many of us spent our formative years, still push emotional buttons for us; they’re both attractive and deeply disturbing.

In Baltimore when I was in high school I used to go downtown by bus and wander around the shopping districts. It was exciting. Malls didn’t exist yet! There were lots of people, hustle and bustle. Riding an escalator at Hutzler’s or Hecht’s (downtown department stores) was a thrill! Bad girls went there to shoplift cool clothes. But white flight was already in progress and soon, amazingly quickly, the center of Baltimore was abandoned except to those who couldn’t afford to leave it. Many streets soon featured boarded-up row houses. And in the late 1960s there were race riots in the aftermath of which more whites left and the corner bars adopted what was called riot architecture. They don’t teach this kind of architecture at Yale. It consists of filling in the windows of your establishment with painted cinder blocks and leaving a couple of glass bricks in the center. On the other side of the tracks from the downtown shopping zone whole blocks were simply razed. Like the legendary South Bronx it looked like a war zone—and in a way it is. An undeclared civil war in which the car is winning. The losers are our cities and in most cases African Americans and Latinos.

There once existed natural geographical reasons for most towns to come into being: a meeting of rivers, as in Pittsburgh; a river meeting a lake, as in Cleveland or Chicago; a canal meeting a lake, as in Buffalo; a secure and sheltered harbor, as in Baltimore, Houston, and Galveston. Eventually, what was originally a geographical justification for choosing one place over another to settle got cemented down as rail lines reached across the open spaces and connected these cities. As more and more people were attracted to these towns, the density of habitation and attendant business opportunities became additional reasons for even more people to make their homes there. They were drawn to live in proximity to other people, as social animals will tend to do. In many cases the rivers or lakes eventually became irrelevant, and shipping moved elsewhere or shipping by water was replaced by rail and eventually by trucks. As a result the rivers and waterfronts soon became derelict and the industry built alongside them became ugly inconveniences. Nice people shunned those neighborhoods. I sound a bit didactic in this recapitulation of history—bear with me, it’s a way of trying to figure out for myself how we got here.

There is often a highway along the waterfront in many towns. Before these highways were built, the waterfronts, already dead zones, were seen as the most logical places from which to usurp land for conversion into a concrete artery. Inevitably, little by little, the citizens of these towns become walled off from their own waterfronts, and the waterfronts became dead zones of yet a different kind—concrete dead zones of clean, swooping flyovers and access ramps that soon were filled with whizzing cars. Under these were abandoned shopping carts, homeless people, and piles of toxic waste. Often you couldn’t even access the water as a pedestrian unless you climbed a few fences.

Most of the time it turns out the cars are merely using these highways not to have easier access to businesses and residences in the nearby city, as might have been originally proposed, but to bypass that city entirely. The highways allowed people to flee the cities and to isolate themselves in bedroom communities, which must have seemed to many like a good thing—one’s own domain, a yard for the kids, safe schools, backyard barbeques, ample parking.

Years ago it was thought that our cities were not sufficiently car-friendly. People who wanted to move about in a car quickly found the streets frustratingly congested and crowded. So planners suggested that massive freeways and concrete arteries would solve the congestion problem. They didn’t. They quickly filled up with even more cars—maybe because more people thought they could get to and fro faster on an expressway. So even more highways were built.

In some cases ring roads were added, encircling cities, to enable the motorist to get from one side of town to the other, or from one suburb to another, without even entering the city. When I bike around these places I discover that sometimes the only way to get from point A to point B is via a highway. The smaller roads have atrophied or sometimes they just aren’t there anymore. Often they’ve been cut in two or sliced and diced by the larger arteries so you can’t get from one place to another on surface streets even if you want to. As a cyclist or a pedestrian it makes one feel unwanted, like an interloper, and you end up sort of pissed off. Needless to say, riding a bike along the shoulder of an expressway is no fun. There’s nothing romantic about it either—you’re not a cool outlaw, you’re simply somewhere you don’t belong.

I am in the middle of nowhere. In the middle distance there is an office building and to my left a hotel. Inside the hotel, women in identical suits sit watching a PowerPoint presentation in a glassed-in room. A man is walking to and fro in the lobby loudly explaining a marketing scheme into his cell phone headset. Americans are focused, intent, bent on self-improvement and enlarging their market share. The newspapers in the lobby show the U.S. Army attacking a mosque and the magazines show hooded Iraqis being tortured and abused by U.S. soldiers. The Salvation Army is setting up tables by the conference rooms. The ladies all have giant Burger King cups.

I have a few hours free so I head off on my bike toward Niagara Falls, which is not that far from Buffalo, though it ends up being farther than I thought. I ride on the shoulder of a road that is lined with chain stores, none of them specific to this area. Everyone who works in them is therefore an employee hired by some anonymous distant corporation. They probably are only allowed to make small decisions and they have almost no stake or investment in the place where they work. Marx called this alienation. Communism may have been a sick dream, but he was right about this aspect. Of course, I can’t see any of the people who work in these places along the shoulder of the highway. There are no people visible anywhere, just cars pulling in and out of parking lots. I pass Hooters, Denny’s, Ponderosa, Fuddruckers, Tops, Red Lobster, the Marriott Hotel, the Red Roof Inn, Wendy’s, IHOP, Olive Garden . . . and roads with names like Commerce, Sweet Home, and Corporate Parkway.

Now I pass some Niagara Falls information joints. I must be getting closer! Then, farther on, there is motel after motel. Years ago, this area used to be a prime honeymoon spot—though now it’s a little hard to imagine anyone honeymooning here except in an ironic way. An ironic honeymoon? Anyway, who would want to honeymoon on a stretch of highway that looks like it could be anywhere in America?

Farther down the road—and I’ve gone at least ten miles now—there is evidence of the massive electrical power generated by the still-invisible falls. The sun is beating down and I’m feeling weird, hot, and a little tired . . . this landscape tells a strange story. Somewhere, off in the distance, is an amazing and awe-inspiring natural phenomenon, yet I pass by land that is unfit even to be industrialized, and has therefore been abandoned—an egret stands in a muddy stream among old tires and bits of busted signage. The mostly closed Lockheed plant on a rise looks disturbingly like a contemporary jail.

I arrive at the town of Niagara itself, which is a peculiar ghetto of black and Italian immigrants. I pass Italian grocery stores, hair salons, and liquor stores. I stop for a sausage sandwich and a Gatorade. A pale woman of maybe seventy sits in front of an ashtray overflowing with butts, leafing through a Country Weekly magazine. I suggest she might get sunburned on a hot day like today. She sniffs and ignores that warning and instead shows me a photo of Alan Jackson in her magazine. He’s her favorite—“this year”—she says.

The falls are truly amazing. Out of nowhere, one emerges from this crappy town to signs pointing to the bridge to Canada, border guards, and the park. As one approaches the falls one can see a strange mist rising in the distance and the air is now cool, as if one had entered a giant air-conditioned room. I stand at a rail and stare at this mighty weirdness, looking, looking, as if prolonged looking will cement this thing in my brain, and then I turn around and head back.

It’s jaw-dropping—hilarious and sometimes horrific. It’s hard to look as a kid slices himself with a razor to make the blood flow so it will all look more real.

In some cases their parents cheer them on.

Much of it is all about putting on a good but harmless show, as it is with the WWF, but a good show also seems to demand a certain amount of real blood, genuine risk, and danger. And sometimes these performers seem to get just a little carried away and the border between show and real life starts to get awfully fuzzy.

I ask myself, are these kids who—to borrow from the Trent Reznor song—need to hurt themselves to see if they can feel? Are they so feeling-deprived that any sensation, including pain, will do? Pain is a pretty easy feeling to achieve. Those on the receiving end of the punishment at these events often seem to stand there passively, waiting patiently to be smashed over the head with a fluorescent tube or trash can. The “punishment” appears to be accepted and unavoidable, almost wished for. Is it really punishment if one desires it?

Here then is what’s going on behind the placid suburban houses I’m biking by: wildly over-the-top shows, dangerous dramas, torture, pain, and shrieks of loopy excitement. My friends and I liked to play army in our suburban neighborhood growing up, but we weren’t nearly as creative as this lot—and there was almost never any physical contact.

Mr. Eastman, as they refer to him here, never married, lived with his mother, and eventually killed himself with a gun. He left a one-line suicide note, which is on display: “To my friends: My work is done. Why wait?” He did the deed almost immediately after signing an updated will. Ever considerate, efficient, and maybe just a little obsessively neat, he placed a damp cloth across his chest to minimize any splatter before he pulled the trigger. George was physically ill and wanted to avoid further suffering.

There are clocks placed inconspicuously all over the residence. Most of them are hidden in corners of rooms and alongside paintings so Mr. Eastman could keep his servants punctual. They knew that he could always tell what time it was because, though he might appear to be looking at them, there was likely to be a timepiece somewhere right behind them. Every object and piece of furniture owned by him had an engraved tag (Prop of G Eastman) screwed into it on some hidden surface.

His mother’s bedroom, which was directly across from his, has two small beds in it placed side by side. George’s bedroom is now empty—only the fireplace remains. It was the scene of the suicide. I sort of suspect that George and his mom actually slept side by side, but maybe I have an overactive imagination.

In the center of Rochester there is a wonderful waterfall, a smaller but still spectacular Niagara where the Genesee River plummets into a deep gorge.

I biked by this cataract last time I performed here, sort of stumbling upon it by accident. The falls are pretty spectacular, and why the city hasn’t made them more of a focus is at first a puzzle. The writer Rudy Rucker says that thirty years ago one couldn’t even see the falls as they were so obscured by industrial pollution, so I guess that sort of answers that question.

I look around the gorge. Dominating one side is the almost abandoned Kodak plant, which doubtless used the river as both a source of power and as a dumping place for lots of photo chemicals. On the other side of the river are more factories and the remnants of a hydroelectric plant. It seems that this boomtown (the first boom was when the Erie Canal connected here, allowing shipping from the Great Lakes and Chicago up and down the Genesee and on down to New York City) happily made industry a priority and it soon dominated the waterfront on all sides. The river was almost hidden from public view throughout most of the town in those days. The mansions of the wealthy were situated well outside that industrial zone. George even had his own cows on his property, as he liked fresh milk.

A man driving me to Eastman House says that housing projects built in the 1960s now dominate part of the riverfront, that they were built there because it was not prime real estate at that time. Soon the projects became run down, and now developers are hoping to oust the remaining folks who live there, as the riverfront is gradually becoming cool, desirable, and lucrative.

This area is home not only to Kodak, but also to Xerox, Bausch & Lomb, and, in a nearby small town . . . Jell-O. All of these industries seem to me to be evocative of the last century. Kodak has made some serious layoffs lately, and, curiously, they seem optimistic about their future, as who really believes that film will remain a large industry for long? And who uses a Xerox machine anymore? There’s always room for Jell-O though.

Biking around one can see that the city is beautifully situated—but the past is holding on for dear life with a viselike grip, a grip that strangles too many of these towns. Not that old buildings and neighborhoods should be torn down, just the opposite, but they probably need to have new functions.

A bronze statue of a couple carrying bags—a mother and daughter, caught in mid-shopping spree—is anchored to the sidewalk. A monument to shopping, or a memorial? I walk on and feel a chill—I am more scared here than in a bad New York neighborhood. It’s as if a neutron bomb exploded here just before I arrived, or as if there was once a bustling civilization here that has just abandoned the place. Am I about to find out why they left so quickly? Everywhere there is lush vegetation fed by hidden sprinklers, and everything is clean. It seems to be a physical manifestation of the Little Richard quote “He got what he wanted but lost what he had.” This place is obviously a dream come true—visually at least. It seems to be everything we say we want—but sometimes when we get what we want it turns out to be a nightmare.

In the morning I am driven to the combined offices and set of the HBO series Big Love, and I get a short tour of the interior sets of this TV show—sets that represent the homes of the show’s three Mormon wives. I love these artificial places. You’re on the set and it’s completely believable as a suburban home—there are books and magazines lying around that the characters would plausibly read, and here are some of their clothes they’ve apparently tossed aside. And then you look up and there is no ceiling above you and huge air-conditioning ducts loom overhead. Outside the “window” is a massive photo backdrop of the mountains that ring suburban Salt Lake City, where the show is set.

These jarring juxtapositions are beautiful—in some ways they make our own homes, offices, and bars seem just as hollow and superficial as the sets. What we call home is just a set too. We think of the familiar intimate details in our own spaces—those magazines and books, the tossed-aside articles of clothing—as unique, integral to our lives. In a sense, though, all they are is set dressing for our own narratives. We think of our personal spaces as “real,” and we feel they are filled with the stuff of our lives that’s different than everyone else’s. But especially out here, in Valencia, the “real” built landscape, those places I walk around, are made of structures that are no more real than this movie set. The mental dislocation is a wonderful feeling. The disconnect is somehow thrilling.

I am on a train passing through Baltimore, where I grew up. I can see vacant lots, charred remains of burned buildings surrounded by rubbish, billboards advertising churches, and other billboards for DNA testing of children’s paternity. Johns Hop-kins Hospital looms out of the squalor. The hospital is on an isolated island situated slightly east of downtown. The downtown area is separated from the hospital complex by a sea of run-down homes, a freeway, and a massive prison complex. Eastern Europe and the Soviet bloc come to mind. Failed industry and failed housing schemes and forced relocation disguised as urban renewal.

I hear the faint cacophony of many distant cell-phone rings in the train car—snippets of Mozart and hip-hop, old-school ring tones, and pop-song fragments—all emanating out of miniscule phone speakers. All tinkling away here and there. All incredibly poor reproductions of other music. These ring tones are “signs” for “real” music. This is music not meant to be actually listened to as music, but to remind you of and refer to other, real, music. These are audio road signs that proclaim “I am a Mozart person” or, more often, “I can’t even be bothered to select a ring tone.” A modern symphony of music that is not music but asks that you remember music.

Two men in the woods by the side of the train tracks are crouching by a small fire on a piece of overgrown, unused land. They share a forty ounce. Urban camping, of a sort. Behind them, beyond the thinning fall foliage, one can see a busy street. Here they are. Huck Finn and Jim. Hidden in plain sight. A parallel invisible world.

Baltimore, I read this weekend, has five times the homicide rate of New York City. Five times! No wonder the HBO show The Wire took place in Baltimore. They adopted the name Charm City the week that the garbagemen went on strike.

Much of nearby Washington, DC, is like this too, although there are isolated swaths of wealthy enclaves there. Baltimore lost its steel industry, its shipbuilding, its port industry and associated shipping, and much of its aerospace industry (which was located in the suburbs anyway). I’m not nostalgic for steel mills and coal mines, not even for GM plants, where they refuse—still!—to make anything but gas guzzlers, as they have for decades. Hell, fuck ’em—they’ve got it coming (as I revise this in April 2009 they are looking for a government bailout). They deserve to go down for such greedy, shortsighted behavior. Sad thing is, it’s the little guy who will lose his job because of the big guys’ stupidity. The big guys will get rewarded with another high-paying job. Those GM bosses should all get replaced by new folks, maybe by Japanese or Koreans, who at least know to make economical, fuel-efficient cars.

We encounter this kind of decay and devastation in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet republics, but we’ve been taught to expect to see it there. We in the West have been told that those societies were under the boot of an evil, inefficient empire—where the will and gumption of the people was squashed—and that such desolation is the result. But would the will of the people, if they had been able to express it in that land, have arrived at something different? Haven’t we, in our presumed democracy, arrived at the same end?

The reality in front of me clashes with what I was taught in school. The reality I see says that there isn’t really any difference, that no matter what the ideology the end result is pretty much the same. I’m exaggerating: from a train window or from a bicycle on surface streets I sometimes only see the backsides of everything, which might be unfair.

The train heads out of town. One sees the hind parts of factories. Kudzu. Honeysuckle. Sumac with its fuzzy branches. Chain-link fences. Garbage. Old tires and rusty truck parts. Identical streets of identical row houses—workers’ housing like in a Dickens novel. A billboard announcing “I Love You Baby Doll.” Parking lots and truck yards. Then, suddenly, we’re out of town. Herons skim wetlands and wade in brackish water. East Coast second-growth forests appear—skinny little trees, densely packed.

As I ride on I enter a zone of light industry, or former light industry, as most of this area has been abandoned as well. Future condos or artists’ lofts, one might imagine—were this London or Berlin. But poor Detroit seems to have been hit repeatedly, and the likelihood of its recovery seems like a long shot. Though if someone had told me that the most expensive apartment building in New York City would now be a stone’s throw from the Bowery I would have said, “You’re dreaming, and try not to step on that homeless guy sprawled there.”

Miles later—through some funky but at least inhabited neighborhoods—I emerge into the suburbs. There are little “villages” and houses with manicured lawns. I gather that beyond this circle, somewhere near Eminem’s now famous Eight Mile Road, the film begins to run backward; the desolation reappears, though this time the funkiness is more rural—trailer parks and little houses.

In a way, this was one of the best and most memorable bike rides I’ve ever taken. In a car one would have sought out a freeway, one of the notorious concrete arteries, and would never have seen any of this stuff. Riding for hours right next to it was visceral and heartbreaking—in ways that looking at ancient ruins aren’t. I recommend it.

The restaurant (the only one within walking distance of the hotel, which doesn’t have one) doesn’t serve alcohol. I’m not that surprised. Between the early—for a New Yorker—dinner hours and the many dry counties around here I know we’re not in New York anymore. I enjoy not being in New York. I am under no illusion that my world is in any way better than this world, but still I wonder at how some of these Puritanical restrictions have lingered—the encouragement to go to bed early and the injunction against enjoying a drink with one’s meal. I suspect that drinking, even a glass of wine or two with dinner, is, like drug use, probably considered a sign of moral weakness. The assumption is that there lurks within us a secret desire for pure, sensuous, all-hell-breaking-loose pleasure, which is something to be nipped in the bud, for pragmatic reasons. In a sense maybe loosening up was, for the early settlers, not something to be encouraged, as the farmers and ranchers who settled here had to survive by the skin of their teeth. You never know what will come out of that bottle once you open it. If life is hard, if you’re just getting by, then slipping off that straight and narrow path could have serious consequences. Drinking, therefore, like drug use, becomes relegated to “bad” places—to honky- tonks and dark, sad bars. Either way both druggies and drinkers tend to create their own countercultures. Being ostracized then creates the “bad” scenes that the punishment had hoped to eradicate.

In the local paper a debate is taking place over whether high school students should be subjected to a curfew. It’s not clear what hour is being proposed, but some of the students who aspire to have after-school jobs would certainly not be able to take those jobs if the work hours extended past this proposed curfew. Other students who have after-school sports or other activities would likewise be hamstrung. Many of these students would have to walk home from these jobs or activities, as they are not yet old enough to drive or don’t have their own cars. They would therefore risk being picked up as curfew breakers.

One student quoted in the paper offered that since the local skating rink and some other activities have been closed there is nothing to do in town, so kids, bored out of their minds, will inevitably find something to do, and sometimes it might be disruptive—all that young energy has to go somewhere.

Some students, though, are all in favor of the curfew, as are the local football coaches, who seem to function as the resident wise men around here. I suspect that this proposed curfew could be an unspoken and underhanded way to facilitate and legitimize the rounding up of “loitering” Mexican kids—who are no doubt seen as the principal troublemakers here.

I ride around the older part of town. A motel that was once on the main highway reiterates the moral message: if Jesus never fails, then by implication the problem must be with you.

I wonder if this frontier Puritan fundamentalism, combined with economic pragmatism, is what makes buildings like this minimal one so common, unremarkable, and acceptable out here.

They are beautifully Spartan and purely functional—in their austerity they are in perfect keeping with nineteenth-century architect Louis Sullivan’s dictum “form follows function.” He claimed, “It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical.” The implication was that this was not just a style or aesthetic guideline. This was a moral code. This was how God, the supreme architect, works. This humble structure—and many others around here—has followed that dictum to the very end of the line! These structures take the prize: they make the twentieth-century modernists all over the world look positively baroque—and therefore less moral.

There are people selling watermelons in a shopping-center parking lot, next to a U.S. flag made of plastic cups jammed into a fence.

Down the road is an abandoned drive-in and a church in a prefab metal building with a sign urging visitors to Come Be Apart.

This perfect landscape has retained its surface familiarity, virtually, but the deep reasons for its existence—the social and sensual—have been eliminated. Immaculate green shapes fill the dividers on the access roads. The placement of a carefully pruned grove of leafy trees softens the edges of a mirror-walled research facility. Hidden cameras are mounted on posts among the branches, and discreetly posted signs warn of the presence of guard dogs—the only things that betray the seriousness and gravity of whatever goes on inside. Decor and manicured landscaping allude to some memory of landscape—they are a visual “description” of a place, but they are not that place. The sculpted grassy areas and bushes are allusions that “point at” and reference an archetypical bucolic scene. All the proper elements that are needed to constitute a lovely landscape are here, but reduced to signs and symbols. This is an imitation of a planet, with a well-developed culture, where these things originally evolved.

I sense that the same impulse that keeps a bottle of beer or a glass of wine out of a restaurant and that sees radically Spartan architecture as eminently wise has been at work in the landscaping here. The wacky religious fundamentalism that drives much of the United States makes for places that on the surface don’t betray any religious foundation at all. But it’s there, a deep invisible base implicit in the landscaped industrial parks and weird nonspaces that evoke nostalgia for the nonexistent.

A soap opera character on the bar TV says, “You killed him, you smothered him with doughnuts!” Another character, another scene—she is sitting in a room with a man and an elderly woman—the lead character wonders if she’s dead. The man says, “No, you’re alive,” and the other woman hands her a plate of doughnuts.

A commercial comes on. A couple are on a date and the woman’s voice-over articulates interior thoughts of what a wonderful guy her friend has set her up with: “He’s so cute, and his IQ is higher than my bank balance . . . but she didn’t tell me he has . . . Tourette’s syndrome.”

Here there are few of the usual interstates that divide and wound cities. There’s mostly just I-10, on its massive concrete pilings, which snakes into the center of town, desperately trying to stay above most of the funk and humanity below. New Orleans was, and I suspect still is, one of a few large cities across the U.S.A. with character and personality, with its own food, culture, language, and music. It never fails to inspire, though it has clearly flourished despite much neglect and years of abuse that were revealed to the world when the hurricane struck.

I bike along Magazine Street and then on St. Charles where what at first glance appears to be Spanish moss in the trees turns out to be Mardi Gras beads, hanging from the weird branches, block after block—and it’s not even Mardi Gras season.

The vibe here is open—people look at you, talk to you, and are incredibly friendly. It’s a bit like Brazil that way, a bit more African, in how people acknowledge one another, certainly more so than Denver or San Diego, where people avert their eyes and are suspicious if you say hello. Though it might seem strange to propose this here in the Deep South, this also seems like one of the least racist cities, in certain respects. I know that can’t be strictly true, but I sense there are more black-owned businesses, cultural projects, and enterprises here—mixed in with the usual white financial hegemony—than in many American cities. I sense a little less of the anger, fear, and suspicion that often permeate American cities—though I’m aware that this is for many also a desperately and inescapably poor city. Hopelessness and violent crime live here too.

I would like to think that some of the positive aspects of this town might be due to its African American heritage, but then I think again of my former hometown—Baltimore—which is largely black, or of Washington, DC, aka Chocolate City, which, when I was growing up, was 70 percent black. Those places, their urban centers, are, outside the government buildings and white enclaves, depressing, sad, and dangerous. There must be other factors at work in this town that have stopped it from going down that same road. Maybe the French Roman Catholic attitude toward sin and pleasure that got mixed in helps make the African sensuality more acceptable down here. My guess is based on its similarities to Latin American cities like Havana, Lima, Cartagena, and Salvador, where the mix of Africa and Roman Catholicism have also produced vibrant music and culture.

I also sense less alienation among people doing their jobs here. Maybe it’s because more businesses are locally owned or maybe people just relate to one another differently. Whatever it is, it’s one of the few U.S. cities that is about living, though the life here is far from easy and much of that life was taken away and the infrastructure destroyed by Katrina and the lack of response. Sad that one of the few large U.S. cities with a unique character was abandoned and left to be washed away.

For many years I found it surreal, amusing, and just downright weird to bike through dead zones, barren suburbs, or downtowns on the verge of becoming ruins. Such strange landscapes have their attraction. But the novelty has worn off a little, and now I’m more drawn to destinations where I can bike on paths in parklands bordering rivers and lakes rather than on the shoulders along expressways, sucking in fumes and risking my life.

The last steel mill closed only recently. They tear them down and the areas that remain are called brownfields—especially if they are being rehabilitated. John says, “The new developments along the river are all brownfields. There are a lot of sites that are now under major reconstruction, such as the old Homestead foundry site that is now a development called Waterfront. Along the South Side, the site of the old Jones and Laughlin steel plant, redevelopment is under way. What makes it a ‘brownfield site’ is that it has been cleared in preparation for rehabilitation or redevelopment.”

In their heyday these foundries were vast—the largest one stretched for miles along the riverbank. The little valleys that branch out from the river each were home to their own mines, and little towns of workers’ housing and churches would be squished into the remaining spaces in these furrows. A law, still on the books, says that if coal is found under your house you have to allow it to be dug out.

Now, of course, with the passing of all this industry, many of those little towns are boarded up, as were large sections of Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods. But other parts are now, in 2005, emerging, beginning to revive, in one form or another. In 2000 Pittsburgh had more unemployment than Detroit or Cleveland—things were looking pretty dismal. People who used to get twenty-three dollars an hour in a steel foundry were having to take jobs in restaurants. Many left town; those who stayed hoped the steel industry would come back. It didn’t, but many eventually found jobs in the healthcare industry or technology, jobs that didn’t pay quite as much—but with some restructuring they were able to get by.

The city is pretty much bankrupt, especially after having built two incredible stadiums right next to one another. The voters said no to the stadium expenditures, but a revamped initiative snuck through, and now the bills have come due, and, as there was no increase in taxes to pay for them, the debts are devastating. The Republican legislature squashed any tax increases, especially in the wealthier suburbs, so other services have been cut instead of the stadiums: city pools were closed, the police force cut. The financial and tax burden has fallen on those, mostly poor, who still live in the city itself.

Luckily some of the oligarchs—the Heinzes, the Mellons, and a few others—continue to live in the city and don’t want their town to go straight to hell, so they are working to reinvigorate the city center, block by block, inch by inch, and to figure out some means of obtaining funds from the wealthier property owners. The largest tenants in the city now, post-heavy industry, are schools and hospitals, which unfortunately don’t pay taxes, so something else has to be done to raise money. Money either has to be found or those institutions will have to close up shop. But John and others seem optimistic. John elaborates: “The city is not bankrupt just because of the stadiums. There are a lot of factors at work, such as the shrinking population. Like many other cities, this one lacks sufficient federal and state funding support. There are people working to turn places around in addition to the oligarchs—grassroots community groups and small businesses all over the place. The bakery we visited in Millvale is an example of a business locating itself in an old neighborhood, which helps bring life back to those areas.”

Various disastrous urban renewal schemes of the 1960s and ’70s have yet to be undone. A beautiful freeway cuts the North Side in two, insulating the stadiums and all their attendant businesses from the local neighborhoods. John: “There are grassroots efforts being made to work on such matters as the North Side neighborhoods around the stadium. The renovated houses we saw on the North Side, around central North Side and the Mexican War streets, are worth a lot of money now.”

Housing projects created high-crime zones. The neighborhoods that were deemed beyond help—that didn’t get that “gift” of urban renewal back in the day, the neighborhoods of immigrant worker housing scattered here and there—are the ones that are reviving now. Some of them look beautiful. They still have local bars, mom-and-pop stores, and pedestrian traffic. I saw the same thing happening in Milwaukee.

After lunch we visit a church in Millvale that had been recommended as having interesting murals. Millvale is a few miles up the river, a former mining village nestled in one of those little valleys. Lots of boarded-up stores line the streets, but a great French bakery, as John mentioned, has courageously made a stand. I buy a cake, as it’s my birthday.

The church in this little town is Croatian, and the murals, by Maxo Vanka, are spectacular. The Diego Rivera of Pittsburgh, I would say. The murals were done during eight weeks in 1937, and they cover the interior of the church. Of course there is one of the Virgin holding a child, but below her, for example, on either side of what is now the altar, are images of the Croatian people: on the left is a crowd of them from the old world, and on the right from the new; a steel foundry can be seen belching smoke behind this grouping.

More unusual for a church are the political and antiwar aspects of the murals that echo the Crucifixion—widows mourn over a soldier in a coffin containing a bleeding corpse, and crosses cover the hillside behind them. Another wall depicts corrupt justice: a figure in a gas mask holds scales on which the gold outweighs bread. Clearly World War I had a big effect on Maxo.

In one image the Virgin, on the verge of being bayoneted herself, separates two soldiers.

In another mural an oligarch done up as Death reads the stock reports while being served a chicken dinner by two black servants. Finally, we see Jesus being stabbed by a bayonet, in a kind of second Crucifixion.

Bold and brave stuff to confront the Sunday parishioners with. The murals are all badly in need of renovation—years of coal dust have darkened them. But one can hope that these amazing things will survive and be cleaned soon.

On a more recent visit I ride around through the hills that are everywhere here except by the waterfront and that make cycling a challenge. I can see changes since my visit just four years earlier. It seems that Pittsburgh is more than just standing—the cultural district downtown is jumping on the weekend, the little neighborhoods are thriving with their corner bars and grocery stores, the strip district still has its booming markets and, I am told, folks are moving back into the city. This latter change is essential to turning a town around, as it will provide the tax base, and the humanity, that will enable this kick start that the Heinzes and others have initiated to keep things running on their own steam.

Sometimes a rebirth can be started in one neighborhood and then it spreads to the surrounding areas—if they’re not cut off or isolated. Artists move into a former factory district and soon cafés and grocery stores follow. A music club opens, a gallery and a bookstore. Developers turn the warehouses into luxury condos and the process begins again, somewhere else. Or, as in some downtowns like Kansas City’s, a local impresario might decide to put shows in someplace like the Uptown Theater, a venue in a sketchy part of town that was on the verge of being torn down. A business opportunity and a show of faith. A bar opens close by, a record store, and before too long the area has begun to be more livable. One significant investment can sometimes trigger a chain of events. The Heinzes have done something like that in downtown Pittsburgh, renovating theaters and arts centers, which have attracted other businesses. It’s working.

Some of these other cities I visited might come back too. Often it only takes some political will and one or two significant changes and then things begin to change by themselves. Cities as a rule use less energy per capita than do suburban communities where people are living spread out, so as the cost of energy spirals up, those grimy urban streets start to look like they might have possibilities. The economy has tanked, the United States can lose its place as number one world power, but that doesn’t mean that many of these cities can’t still become more livable. Life can still be good—not only good, it can be better than what most of us can imagine. A working-class neighborhood can be full of life. A neighborhood that has many different kinds of people and businesses in it is usually a good place to live. If there were some legislation that ensured that a mixed-use and mixed-income neighborhood would emerge when developers move in, it would be wise, because those are the liveliest and healthiest kinds of communities.