Bicycle Diaries

by David Byrne

  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.

  Detroit

  I bike from the center of town out to the suburbs. It’s an amazing ride—a time line through a city’s history, its glory and betrayal. Detroit is not that different from many other cities across the United States, just more dramatic in its ups and downs. In the center of town there is the convention center and the sports arena. There is a shopping district downtown that, like Baltimore’s, has seen much better days—it’s now mostly dirty discount stores selling wigs and cheap imports. There’s a strip of Greek restaurants in an area called Greektown. They smash plates in some of these places, which is fun. Once I leave the central district I begin to encounter some true devastation. As in many similar towns, there are vaguely concentric rings of office zones, industrial zones, low-income housing, businesses, and eventually suburbs. As I leave downtown I find myself riding first through what seems to be the remains of a ghetto, now overgrown and returning to the earth: vast vacant lots, covered over with grasses and some filled with rubble. If you have seen pictures of Berlin after the war, then that’s what this area looks like—desolate, uninhabited. Once in a while there is evidence of some habitation, but mostly it’s a posta- pocalyptic landscape at its finest.

  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.

  Sweetwater, Texas

  I eat at a restaurant across the highway from the hotel where I’m staying. My steak is delicious—as it should be here. The decor in the restaurant is all red—chairs, tables, and trim—in honor of the local high school football team, the Mustangs. There is a very large painting of the football coach covering the wall behind me. I watch a man across from me shoot up his insulin at his table after he and his wife finish their meal. He does it deftly, as casually as one would look at one’s watch. It’s beautiful.

  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, t
hen 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.

  Columbus, Ohio

  I bike across a suburban industrial park, which brings me to the backside of a complex that includes a shopping mall and a simulated street filled with restaurants and some condos. Night is just beginning to fall, the sodium vapor lamps are beginning to flicker on, and their orange chemical glow fills the parking lot. The landscaped and perfectly smooth grassy areas have turned a strange color in this odd light. It’s an otherworldly experience gliding through these zones. I’m reminded of a movie in which the pleasant landscaping and the gently curving drives outlined by white curbs hide violent and perverted crimes and secret research taking place within the ubiquitous anonymous modern buildings. No one would take much notice of weird behavior around here. Nothing would look suspicious or out of place. I glimpse an interstate highway briefly through a planted grove of trees. It leads to Cleveland and Cincinnati. The whoosh of the cars and semis passing on it is like distant industrial Muzak, the sound of a mechanical wave machine, or a whispered conversation heard through dense foliage.

  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.”

  New Orleans—an Alternative

  Pre-Katrina I biked around New Orleans many times. The city is pretty flat, which makes it easy on the knees. On one trip I discovered a bike path along the top of some of the earthen levees. It was delightful; one could see the river on one side and the city spread out on the other.

  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 Return of Pittsburgh

  I meet my friend John Chernoff, the teacher, writer, and drummer, at the Mattress Factory, an art space on the north side of town. He talks to me about city finances and the transformations this city has gone through. Some old-timers still remember when Pittsburgh was booming and smoky. Between the smoke from the foundr
ies, the coal dust, and the exhaust from the coal heat in the houses, the sky was often dark at noon. Black clouds covered the city for much of the year. It’s hard to imagine such an apocalyptic landscape being real, but it was. There are probably quite a few cities in China just like that now.

  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.