It’s been one month since the conditions of my life last brought me to the Midwest. I’ve been there numerous times before, but never fully for pleasure nor fully of my own volition.
Anyone who has known me long enough has heard my diatribes against the unbearable flatness of the Midwestern landscape, and the itchy unsettledness that I feel when confronted by it.
Like a cat, I derive comfort from being surrounded by walls, landforms, and surfaces of any kind. Driving through Midwestern highways, jutted against an endless expanse of prairies and cornfields, makes me feel vulnerable and exposed.
I am not exactly from mountainous terrain. The hills that exist in my home turf, central New Jersey, are nothing to write home about. But at least they are there.
And in my New Jersey home, a mere 20 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, I feel the option of escape. There are clear natural borders to the terrain, and constant cargo ships that could theoretically lead me continents away.
Meanwhile, the Midwest is engulfed by the vastness of North America. The Great Lakes feel like an aquatic extension of this discomforting vastness, rather than a reprieve from it.
The Midwest is truly unique in its utter plain-ness, which extends beyond merely its geography into its cuisine, accent, and general character. During my brief times there, I noticed that chain stores felt chain-ier, empty land felt emptier, and the whole region felt more like a liminal space than it did a place in its own right.
The only interruption to the monotony of the Midwest road trip is the occasional city: in my most recent case, it was Detroit and Chicago.
In these cities, my ennui faded, and I discovered that I was still capable of being charmed.
Detroit was beautiful in a gritty, tragic way.
Contrary to its vague, popular perception, Detroit (its Downtown, specifically) felt safe. I could sense that the city’s darkest days were behind it, and that gentrification, for better or for worse, was afoot.
And yet, I didn’t sense hope either. The empty, windswept streets were too marred by the stench of decline.
Obviously, it’s possible to recover from decline. But it’s not as clear if one can recover psychologically from being the epitome of decline, which yields a different and more deep-seated inferiority complex. The fast-paced Northeast pays almost no attention to the Midwest, and yet from childhood I somehow always knew about Detroit and its mid-20th century implosion, before I even knew what deindustrialization was. America’s other post-industrial cities flew under my radar entirely.
Alongside Detroit’s desolate streets sits some wonderful public art that reflects the city’s beautifully complicated character.
The city’s most iconic monument is The Spirit of Detroit by Marshall Fredericks, a bronze sculpture of a man holding up a family in one hand and a representation of God in the other. Fredericks was commissioned in the 1950s to create a sculpture for the city to represent hope and progress, and yet he created a work that transcends progressive utopian visions and explores a dynamic as old as humanity itself.
The man in the sculpture is sleek, heroic, and metallic. He holds his two arms apart and outstretched, as if he is trying to balance between the two forces. He is turned to face his family, and yet God is physically held up higher. Perhaps the meaning is that God is the ultimate good, but as mortal beings, we are unable to face him directly and thus see him through our temporary human relationships. Regardless, the interplay of God and family within the sculpture was potent.
And I love a good spherical depiction of God.
Right across the road from The Spirit of Detroit is another large public art fixture that is more modern and more political, called Labor’s Legacy: Transcending. The name sounds like a shitty sequel film, so I was surprised to find myself genuinely impressed and even moved by the art.
In addition to its two prominent steel arcs, Transcending contains fourteen granite boulders aligned in a spiral formation, each carved with imagery commemorating a victory achieved by workers through collective bargaining: the 8-hour workday, pensions, free public education, etc.
The monument immortalizes the virtues of solidarity and determination. The workers depicted in these boulders rebelled against a vicious, dehumanizing early iteration of capitalism, and they did so not based on a lofty aspiration of universal equality, but simply on the conviction that they had worth as more than mere factory objects.
Detroit leans into its history. It is a city firmly aware of and open about its essence: the union of suffering and triumph, and of modernity and tradition (best exemplified by the juxtaposition between its historic Mariners’ Church and the gigantic, black General Motors headquarters beside it).
Detroit is a “sad” city, but it is a real, honest one, which I appreciate over America’s artificial, burgeoning tech hubs du jour.
Chicago, unlike Detroit, was vibrant and bustling.
I quickly came to love the long, brick row houses, the white marble museums, the patchwork of elevated trains, and the eclectic mix of young transplants and old natives.
Sometimes, there’s just not as much to say about an experience that is uniformly positive. Detroit was a beautiful loser, but Chicago was a beautiful winner, which is more self-explanatory.
Certain blocks of Chicago’s Loop were eerily similar to Manhattan, and it was bizarre at times to simply remember where I really was.
Chicago is not and will never be New York. Dreams are not systematically sought and crushed in Chicago the way they are out East. Maybe the promise of New York - which is, after all, an archipelago - is kept alive by the liberating breeze of the ocean. From the bottom of Brooklyn and Queens, you can look out into the sea as if it is an infinite nothing and either find yourself or lose yourself. I am curious to hear if Chicagoans claim that Lake Michigan has that same effect. I’d imagine not - or at least not to the same extent. After all, on the other side of each Great Lake is just more of the Midwest.
As far as cities go, New York is wildly alluring, but Chicago is pleasant. Pleasant is good, and it may be the best the Midwest can hope for.
The intrigue of Detroit and Chicago unfortunately seemed to end at their city limits. The outer suburbs of the two cities were typical American suburbs, but in usual Midwestern fashion, flatter and plainer. They had no character and inspired no feeling. Perhaps they can be said to have a character in that they evoke such a total lack of feeling.
Despite all of my grievances, I still want to return to the Midwest. I think, or maybe I hope, that I still haven’t seen enough of it to justify my negative judgment. And I think the Midwest breaks my prideful, novelty-seeking, coastal brain in a way that is salutary.
Open land, like outer space, is humbling. It reminds you of how small you are. And I am just humble enough to know that I deserve to be humbled.