It was always the first thing Geoff wanted to see
Whenever he’d drive over from Madison to visit me.
He saw it as the quintessential landscape
Of the Essential City, by contrast with that ersatz one
Some eighty miles away, the juvenile capital
Of record stores and gyros joints and bubble gum.
It splits Milwaukee into South and North, the factories,
The bungalows and taverns of the men who used to work in them
Vs. what remains of downtown, the Pfister Hotel, the lakefront
And the mansions of the millionaires who used to own them.
In early spring it’s still a nearly frozen wasteland
Of railroad tracks and smokestacks and a narrow, dull canal
Flowing past slag heaps flecked with scraps of snow and seagulls.
Down the road from Badger Bumper, the Miller Compressing Company
Flattens what’s left over of the cars, then lifts them up and
Dumps them on a monumental mountain of aluminum and steel,
To be pulverized at last into a kind of coarse, toxic metal meal.
Yet even wastelands change. The noxious smells
That used to permeate the air are gone. The Milwaukee Stockyards
Where we’d stop for lunch (there was a funny restaurant there)
Left town two years ago. The Peckmeat packing plant
Is rationality itself, with trucks with modern logos and an antiseptic air.
The Tannery, an “Urban Business and Living Center”
Lodged inside the shells of what were once some of the foulest
Factories in the country is the first stage of a plan
To redefine this “huge forlorn Brownfield” into a different kind of space,
A place of “offices, light manufacturing, a riverfront biketrail”
Meant to ease the lingering traces of a vanishing industrial sublime.
*
Geoff moved to California, where he shot himself in 1987.
Growing up in San Diego, I would linger at the list of fifty largest cities
In The World Book, San Diego down there near the bottom
And Milwaukee floating somewhere towards the top. The tallest building
Was the El Cortez Hotel, eight stories high. Lane Field,
Where the Padres played, stood at the foot of Broadway, near the harbor
And the tattoo parlors and the shops purveying cheap civilian clothes.
I remember listening to the Yankees and the Braves in 1958
On my new transistor radio, and dreaming of the day I’d move away
Which I did when I was seventeen, just before the country
Started changing, before everything I used to take for granted
Started turning into photographs, and to disappear.
You hardly noticed it at first, the demographics shifting
Imperceptibly, the cities on the list displaced by bland southwestern
Sunlight, like the sunlight in Miami at Geoff’s funeral.
When I’d go back to visit there were always taller towers,
Glassed-in skyscrapers that seemed to all be banks.
A freeway turned Pacific Highway into just another throughway
Running past the empty Convair factory, which had closed.
I used to love the seedy section south of Broadway,
With the joke shop next door to the Hollywood Burlesque,
The pawn shops where I’d look at microscopes, and San Diego Hardware,
Where I’d buy materials for the science fair. Like the Stockyards,
All that’s history now: I heard on NPR last week
The hardware store was moving to the suburbs, driven away
By high rents and a parking shortage in the Gaslamp District, a pathetic
Exercise in urban fantasy designed to recreate a picturesque,
Historic neighborhood you think is real, but never actually existed.
*
My father’s story started in a little town in Texas, Henrietta
Growing up, then going away to school in Oklahoma,
Julliard in New York, playing with some orchestras in Europe,
Entering the Navy at the start of WW II, and finally dying of a stroke
About five years ago in San Diegotaken at the end
From Naval Hospital to a quiet hospice overlooking Mission Valley.
It’s so much vaster than Menomonee, and yet the moral and the landscape
Seem essentially the same: the minor narratives of individual lives
Played out against a background of relentless change. On my last visit,
Driving down the hill on Texas Street, it seemed to open out
Into a vision of the city of the future: Qualcomm Stadium on the right
And Fashion Valley on the left, and spilling over from its floor
And flowing up the farther side, generic condominiums as far as I could see,
Like the ones along the river in Milwaukee. It’s as though the dream
Were just to leave those individual lives behind, in all their particularity
And local aspirations, their constraints and disappointments,
For a thin reality that offers fantasies and limitless degrees of freedom
And for what? Sometimes I wonder if it’s just finance and entropy,
Although I know that can’t be true. Traffic flows in all directions
Through the valleys and across the country, on a grid of possibilities
To be realized in turn, and then abandoned. People move away from home
And die, and the places where they’d lived and whiled away the time
Are temporary, like the units of a mathematical sublime
Reducing what had been a country of localities and neighborhoods
To a bare concept, an abstraction that extends “from sea to shining sea,”
The silence in its fields of derelict machinery and rusting metal
Broken by the din of new construction, as an all-consuming history
Proceeds apace beneath an n-dimensional, indifferent sky.
John Koethe is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UWM. "The Menomonee Valley" will appear in a new book, NINETY-FIFTH STREET, to be published in September by HarperCollins.
