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Riding around Akron with someone else driving provides time for some interesting societal observation. Akron is an interesting city with an interesting history, part of which can be observed from the surrounding landscape. It was a small place of 30,000 or so until the 1920s, when the rubber moved in. At its heyday, the city hosted maybe 400,000. Today, the population is around 280,000. Demographically, that's quite an arch for such a short time period.
You can see very few old buildings that predate the rubber, with a very very large majority of buildings and infrastructure being of the post-1920 vintage. You can see evidence of the good times of 1920 to the late-1960s, when housing, industry and office buildings were built in the central areas of the city. You can still see some of the 1950s neon and kitsch in the first sets of suburbs. Then, the architectural history of central Akron stops abruptly. These were the bad years, when recessions and offshoring led to the decimation of Akron industry and hence much of the city itself. Very few buildings in Akron evoke the 1970s or 1980s, and those that do are usually found on the periphery -- the suburbs. Many of these are interstate office complexes; you know, four stories of a rectangular building. Then, you see evidence of attempted redevelopment especially downtown, from the late-1980s green-glass bus stop shelters on Main, the retro-1990s ballpark, to the ultra-modern brushed-metal-and-glass sharp angles of the polymer center, the library and the new Akron Art Museum.
You see the history in the housing of urban Akron. Inside the Akron city limits, you have two major types of residential architecture: the 1.5-story bungalow on a thin lot with a front porch, or the 2.5-story steep-roofed rectangular house with four windows on each wall and a little one for the attic. I live in an example of the former, which according to assessment records was built in 1928. I'm approximately 1.2 miles (as the crow flies) from downtown. Inside the city limits, very few homes fall outside these two categories, and even fewer were built after 1960. Of course, as you move out further from the city center into such edge cities as Tallmadge, Cuyahoga Falls, Green, Boston, etc., the houses slowly turn into the ranch houses of the 1960s-1980s, then into the McMansions of the 1990s.
As we drove around, I was reminded tonight of a feature that ran in the Akron Beacon-Journal shortly after we moved here this past August. The feature celebrated the 60th anniversary of V-J day, that is, the day Japan finally surrendered after we twice dumped the bomb on them. The main picture of the feature showed a large crowd of people celebrating the news in downtown Akron, taking up the entirety of Main Street, overjoyed that the war was over. I couldn't help thinking about these people, many of whom were surely dead or at least quite old. I thought about how these people celebrating in the picture had no idea what was to come in the next 20 years of their city, let alone the next 60.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
With these thoughts and my observations of the city, as well as tunes from Beck's Sea Change playing on the stereo, my mind began to drift into this odd historical and geographical perspective. I began to think about what their world was, and how it would dramatically change beyond their wildest expectations.
To those people in the picture, the industry of Akron was going so strongly that it basically single-handedly supported a city of 400,000 people, one of the fastest growing in the country at that time. These industrial jobs basically guaranteed a lifetime of dependable and high-paying work for every high school graduate. This industry was here to stay until they retired, and they knew they could depend upon it. These jobs would enable them to marry their lover, buy one of those aforementioned houses and have kids. Those kids would get to go to schools largely supported by tax revenue paid by the factories. Then, those kids could go to college and get good-paying jobs that weren't in a factory.
As it turned out, this model worked.... for a while, at least. Physical evidence of this is strewn about the city in the housing and the factory complexes.
To keep the economy going after the war, producers had to convince consumers to adopt a whole new level of materialism to maintain demand. The way to maintain growth in a capitalist system is the ever-present increasing of demand. By making so many gadgets and gizmos and whatzits and widgets, and by convincing the American consumer that these things were utterly necessary to survival, both physically and socially, producers created such a demand. Initially, the fruits of this demand were realized by the increased opportunity for the American worker, such is the case of Akron during the peak years of the 1950s and 1960s.
Then, the producers found out that these items could be made more cheaply elsewhere, and the factories in Akron and many other midwestern cities fell silent.
The boom was over.
Jobs began to disappear, and money quit flowing into the city. Many people left, seeking to find their dream elsewhere. Many more stayed behind. The strange thing about humans is this: while humans themselves are remarkably mobile, they typically choose to be as geographically stationary as possible. Those that stayed behind faced a very different city, one where schools weren't funded and where good-paying jobs weren't as easy to find. Schools and neighborhoods deteriorated, the constructive dynamism of downtown vanished, and crime peaked. To those in the picture on V-J day, Akron in the 1970s and 1980s would have been an unforeseeable nightmare, much like the skewed 1985 of Biff in Back to the Future II.
Workers that had been depending on industrial employment as a career were forced out, usually into the lower wages of the service industry. Those that did send kids to college found their offspring in a white collar job in those interstate office parks, endless mazes of cubicles in which the work was just as repetitive as the factory tasks of the generation before. And everyone who made any money moved away from the city center, to get away from those without money or means who were left behind.
People are even more immobile when they're broke!
Sad thing is, at the same time in order to keep the increasingly service-sectored economy going, that increasingly growing demand was required. More materialism was forced down the throats of the American public, convincing them to buy second cars, second televisions, and more and more personal electronics. These "needs," combined with shrinking incomes led the many households to send an additional wage-earner into the workfoce.
It's a funny thing when certain conservatives blame the "downfall of the American family" on feminism and it causing women to work outside the home. That's baloney -- the American family was "destroyed" (to their definition) by rampant consumerism created to continue the lining of conservative capitalist pockets.
From this decimation, Akron leaders sought to regain the former glory of the city. As Akron began attempts at revitalization in the late 1990s, strangely enough, the sectoral disparity in labor widened. The areas to be revitalized were done so in ways that encouraged the creation of both white collar and service sector jobs, but not blue collar industry. The transformation of a large portion of downtown by the University of Akron into a research complex is an excellent example of this. The jobs directly created were white collar, while direct support staffs and nearby economic stimulation was overwhelmingly service sector.
Which brings me to the main question: what now?
Let me attempt to introduce my positionality. I have always sought career paths in which I could have a strong essence of control in what I do and in which I would have something productive come of it. I've never been terribly impressed with the idea of working for 45 years in a job, doing menial or unchallenging tasks to make someone else money. See my seven majors during my undergraduate: telecommunications (specifically TV production), meteorology, secondary education, elementary education, journalism, philosophy and geography. I always wanted to be helpful in some facet. Now, I'm working to become an academic, so I can expand the world's accumulated knowledge and teach.
In our drive through Akron, I wondered how those former factory workers were faring. I wondered if they still had the homes they had worked so hard to get and if they were still making it all right. I wondered as we drove past office parks about the workers in the cubes and if their droning was allowing any form of sanity.
I wondered what would happen if they drove around like me and witnessed the progression of modernity that the physical landscapes of Akron present. In such a short drive, you can see the prospects of modernity and industrialization change from beyond optimistic to non-existent. You can see such optimism in the faces in that photgraphy in the Beacon-Journal.
I wondered what would happen if these folks, upon emerging from their jobs one day, would sit back and think about the events of the past 80 or so years. I wondered if they would look at their current less-than-ideal situations and think about that optimism that our society had found in the promises of modernity. How would they view things? Would they sigh and see it as the logical progression of the world as many of us have been trained to do, or would they question the promise of modernity in the first place?
The promises of this modern world upon which today's Akron was built were strictly economic, from which many cultural and social inferences were made. The promises were broken by those who originally proposed the ideas when opportunity for more profit was made. Human costs were not a consideration, but dollars certainly were.
We are living in a post-modern, post-industrial world where the economy is stirred through the selling of information (literally blips of electricity) and material. Without demand for such goods, these workers have no jobs. Materialism isn't just for social status anymore -- it's realized as a necessity to keep America working... literally. In order to buy more things, they work ever more hours, and the cycle continues.
I wonder what the workers would think about this. I wonder what would happen if they realized these broken promises and the subsequent enslavement into the system that such lies had brought. I wonder what would happen if these workers finally grow tired enough of team-building, mission statements and cubicles to give up the home comforts that such a society had brought. I wonder what would happen when these workers too are forced out after capitalists found out that the work could be done cheaper overseas.
I imagined in my head a couple of laid-off white collar contemporary workers driving through the city in the inevitably near future, reminiscing at locationally appropriate times about the old times and how their grandparents had been able to get a good living from the factories, how their parents had worked so hard to eke a living while getting them everything they needed, and now, their own services weren't even necessary. Would they look through these progressions of modernist society realized in the architectural landscape, consider the arch of worker profitability, and then notice that they just happened to come into the world at the wrong time to realize similar dreams to generations past? Would they lament the progression of this modernism, which had done so much to make other people money and left them behind in the process, and ask:
"What now?"
You see the history in the housing of urban Akron. Inside the Akron city limits, you have two major types of residential architecture: the 1.5-story bungalow on a thin lot with a front porch, or the 2.5-story steep-roofed rectangular house with four windows on each wall and a little one for the attic. I live in an example of the former, which according to assessment records was built in 1928. I'm approximately 1.2 miles (as the crow flies) from downtown. Inside the city limits, very few homes fall outside these two categories, and even fewer were built after 1960. Of course, as you move out further from the city center into such edge cities as Tallmadge, Cuyahoga Falls, Green, Boston, etc., the houses slowly turn into the ranch houses of the 1960s-1980s, then into the McMansions of the 1990s.
As we drove around, I was reminded tonight of a feature that ran in the Akron Beacon-Journal shortly after we moved here this past August. The feature celebrated the 60th anniversary of V-J day, that is, the day Japan finally surrendered after we twice dumped the bomb on them. The main picture of the feature showed a large crowd of people celebrating the news in downtown Akron, taking up the entirety of Main Street, overjoyed that the war was over. I couldn't help thinking about these people, many of whom were surely dead or at least quite old. I thought about how these people celebrating in the picture had no idea what was to come in the next 20 years of their city, let alone the next 60.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
With these thoughts and my observations of the city, as well as tunes from Beck's Sea Change playing on the stereo, my mind began to drift into this odd historical and geographical perspective. I began to think about what their world was, and how it would dramatically change beyond their wildest expectations.
To those people in the picture, the industry of Akron was going so strongly that it basically single-handedly supported a city of 400,000 people, one of the fastest growing in the country at that time. These industrial jobs basically guaranteed a lifetime of dependable and high-paying work for every high school graduate. This industry was here to stay until they retired, and they knew they could depend upon it. These jobs would enable them to marry their lover, buy one of those aforementioned houses and have kids. Those kids would get to go to schools largely supported by tax revenue paid by the factories. Then, those kids could go to college and get good-paying jobs that weren't in a factory.
As it turned out, this model worked.... for a while, at least. Physical evidence of this is strewn about the city in the housing and the factory complexes.
To keep the economy going after the war, producers had to convince consumers to adopt a whole new level of materialism to maintain demand. The way to maintain growth in a capitalist system is the ever-present increasing of demand. By making so many gadgets and gizmos and whatzits and widgets, and by convincing the American consumer that these things were utterly necessary to survival, both physically and socially, producers created such a demand. Initially, the fruits of this demand were realized by the increased opportunity for the American worker, such is the case of Akron during the peak years of the 1950s and 1960s.
Then, the producers found out that these items could be made more cheaply elsewhere, and the factories in Akron and many other midwestern cities fell silent.
The boom was over.
Jobs began to disappear, and money quit flowing into the city. Many people left, seeking to find their dream elsewhere. Many more stayed behind. The strange thing about humans is this: while humans themselves are remarkably mobile, they typically choose to be as geographically stationary as possible. Those that stayed behind faced a very different city, one where schools weren't funded and where good-paying jobs weren't as easy to find. Schools and neighborhoods deteriorated, the constructive dynamism of downtown vanished, and crime peaked. To those in the picture on V-J day, Akron in the 1970s and 1980s would have been an unforeseeable nightmare, much like the skewed 1985 of Biff in Back to the Future II.
Workers that had been depending on industrial employment as a career were forced out, usually into the lower wages of the service industry. Those that did send kids to college found their offspring in a white collar job in those interstate office parks, endless mazes of cubicles in which the work was just as repetitive as the factory tasks of the generation before. And everyone who made any money moved away from the city center, to get away from those without money or means who were left behind.
People are even more immobile when they're broke!
Sad thing is, at the same time in order to keep the increasingly service-sectored economy going, that increasingly growing demand was required. More materialism was forced down the throats of the American public, convincing them to buy second cars, second televisions, and more and more personal electronics. These "needs," combined with shrinking incomes led the many households to send an additional wage-earner into the workfoce.
It's a funny thing when certain conservatives blame the "downfall of the American family" on feminism and it causing women to work outside the home. That's baloney -- the American family was "destroyed" (to their definition) by rampant consumerism created to continue the lining of conservative capitalist pockets.
From this decimation, Akron leaders sought to regain the former glory of the city. As Akron began attempts at revitalization in the late 1990s, strangely enough, the sectoral disparity in labor widened. The areas to be revitalized were done so in ways that encouraged the creation of both white collar and service sector jobs, but not blue collar industry. The transformation of a large portion of downtown by the University of Akron into a research complex is an excellent example of this. The jobs directly created were white collar, while direct support staffs and nearby economic stimulation was overwhelmingly service sector.
Which brings me to the main question: what now?
Let me attempt to introduce my positionality. I have always sought career paths in which I could have a strong essence of control in what I do and in which I would have something productive come of it. I've never been terribly impressed with the idea of working for 45 years in a job, doing menial or unchallenging tasks to make someone else money. See my seven majors during my undergraduate: telecommunications (specifically TV production), meteorology, secondary education, elementary education, journalism, philosophy and geography. I always wanted to be helpful in some facet. Now, I'm working to become an academic, so I can expand the world's accumulated knowledge and teach.
In our drive through Akron, I wondered how those former factory workers were faring. I wondered if they still had the homes they had worked so hard to get and if they were still making it all right. I wondered as we drove past office parks about the workers in the cubes and if their droning was allowing any form of sanity.
I wondered what would happen if they drove around like me and witnessed the progression of modernity that the physical landscapes of Akron present. In such a short drive, you can see the prospects of modernity and industrialization change from beyond optimistic to non-existent. You can see such optimism in the faces in that photgraphy in the Beacon-Journal.
I wondered what would happen if these folks, upon emerging from their jobs one day, would sit back and think about the events of the past 80 or so years. I wondered if they would look at their current less-than-ideal situations and think about that optimism that our society had found in the promises of modernity. How would they view things? Would they sigh and see it as the logical progression of the world as many of us have been trained to do, or would they question the promise of modernity in the first place?
The promises of this modern world upon which today's Akron was built were strictly economic, from which many cultural and social inferences were made. The promises were broken by those who originally proposed the ideas when opportunity for more profit was made. Human costs were not a consideration, but dollars certainly were.
We are living in a post-modern, post-industrial world where the economy is stirred through the selling of information (literally blips of electricity) and material. Without demand for such goods, these workers have no jobs. Materialism isn't just for social status anymore -- it's realized as a necessity to keep America working... literally. In order to buy more things, they work ever more hours, and the cycle continues.
I wonder what the workers would think about this. I wonder what would happen if they realized these broken promises and the subsequent enslavement into the system that such lies had brought. I wonder what would happen if these workers finally grow tired enough of team-building, mission statements and cubicles to give up the home comforts that such a society had brought. I wonder what would happen when these workers too are forced out after capitalists found out that the work could be done cheaper overseas.
I imagined in my head a couple of laid-off white collar contemporary workers driving through the city in the inevitably near future, reminiscing at locationally appropriate times about the old times and how their grandparents had been able to get a good living from the factories, how their parents had worked so hard to eke a living while getting them everything they needed, and now, their own services weren't even necessary. Would they look through these progressions of modernist society realized in the architectural landscape, consider the arch of worker profitability, and then notice that they just happened to come into the world at the wrong time to realize similar dreams to generations past? Would they lament the progression of this modernism, which had done so much to make other people money and left them behind in the process, and ask:
"What now?"
Posted by Your Friendly Neighborhood DJ on April 1, 2006 12:58 AM | Permalink
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