I wrote this last winter. I’m posting it as part of a mini-campaign to publish some things I’ve written over the past couple years. Think of it like a compilation of rarities and outtakes.
It’s a Sunday morning and I decide to go down to an old favorite coffee shop on Selby and Western. A place to write, where I’ve written much.
I forget to turn at Selby so I take Marshall the whole way down. Both roads run east to west, parallel to I-94, Marshall further north and closer to the freeway. A half-mile south, affluent Summit and Grand Avenues run east-west too.
When they put the freeway through, they stayed well away from Summit and Grand and instead punched a hole in the Rondo neighborhood, what is often described as one of the strongest African-American neighborhoods in the country. Before the freeway came.
With the gash of the freeway, Rondo disintegrated. Within a decade it had descended into a neighborhood of old Victorian homes appropriated by squatters and drug dealers. Even 10 years ago, many of the homes were still officially unoccupied.
On the other side of I-94, Frogtown was as bad or worse. Today, Frogtown is dominated by Hmong immigrants, a group which has had a hard time assimilating and has thus turned its alienation into crime.
South of I-94, the wealth of Summit and Grand has slowly crept north. Selby is still a little rough, but every year another couple houses are bought by enterprising individuals who gut them, renovate them, and sit waiting for the rest of the neighborhood to catch up so they can make a killing.
Marshall Avenue has not seen the same influence as Selby. Someday it probably will. But now, it is still a neighborhood of beat up churches, vacant lots filled with dead cars, and block upon block of houses that need paint.
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Bum, did our drive down Marshall/Lake last night inspire you to bring out this bit of writing? I like it, and want to hear more about how you see our neighborhood; its past and future.
katie, nope though it’s a funny coincidence. i posted this before our drive… i’m glad you like it. as much as i sometimes try to focus on “place” and examining this place where we live, too often i am tempted to ignore the ugly and the tragic. as i believe gary snyder said, wilderness is “not all sitting in the sunshine eating berries.”
marshall avenue is as much part of the wild as a flower growing alongside the trail.
Technical Question: I see your rss feeds, but where do I find your atom.xml file? I want to view everyday-beat in my feedreader but only find the dharmablog.everyday-beat.org/feed/ folder, with no atom.xml file in it. Am I missing something?
Hope you’re having a good weekend!
BigFly - Having a pretty good weekend. Finally, no big plans, just staying up and waking up late, trying to find some stillness…
Good question about my atom feed. I’ve known my feeds were kinda f-ed up for a while, but the rss feed I’m used to has been working and I’ve tried to ignore the problem. Now that you’ve mentioned it, I’ll start trying to get it working.
Have a great weekend yourself!
Back in the late 70’s my uncle bought a Victorian fixer-upper on Marshall, about a block or two from Dale. My Scandinavian small-town grandparents thought he had gone nuts when they went to look at the place and the neighborhood. He put a lot of work into the place and I remember it looking pretty nice inside and out, but then he moved to Winona and I guess the place hasn’t been kept up. What a shame!
BigFlyBigFish– try the feeds again. I messed around with some stuff last night and at least some things are working now… Hard to say if it’s what you need.
Deb– sad about your uncle’s place. I hope he at least got his money out of the deal. Some of those homes are amazing, and yet they’ve been so abused over the years… It sure would be fun if you had the time and resources to fix one up, you could have a real nice house…
I looked at an apartment in the Cathedral Hill neighborhood (near Dale and Selby) a year or two ago and the guy said when he bought the place in the early 90s he had to kick out a bunch of squatters that were dealing drugs, etc out of the empty house.
Yes, the feed works now. Thanks. I’ve added it to my feedreader.