Lost City

If you have not done so, move post haste to look at the photographs by Charles Cushman archived at Indiana University. You may have seen them written about here and here. Cushman lived in Chicago in the middle of the last century and photographed voraciously. The photographs in the archive cover the globe, but it is the mid century Chicago photos I found most fascinating.

Viewing them, a thought coalesced about the city and cultural memory. Cushman’s pictures are images of a lost city. It occupies the same geographic space of present day Chicago, but there is very little that feels familiar. The city that seeps out of the pictures is unknown and unknowable. The people who knew the city left it for greener pastures and we moved into the shell. The city has a permanent case of amnesia.

The 50’s are thought of by many as the golden age of the American city, and while it’s true that Cushman’s photographs document that decade in Chicago, they make clear that this supposed golden age had its share of problems. The 50’s directly preceded the low point that urban America sunk to in the sixties and seventies, and in these photos we can see the seeds of that collapse reaching fruition.

One pair of photographs shows a wood shack that has filled the front yard of an old townhouse. It’s apparent purpose being to extend the floor area of the high basement and better accommodate some sort of business establishment, a common theme throughout the photographs. The townhouse itself is a frightening sight, its large windows and cut stone front mark it as being built for an upper class clientèle, but to call its glory faded would be an understatement. The house was once one of a set of party wall structures, though now it stands with empty lots to either side of it. The demolition of its neighbors clearly carried out in a very hasty manor, with bits of the old buildings clinging to the remaining house. One of the lots has rusting camper trailer parked behind the high limestone curb that somehow escaped the wrecking ball. Perhaps the most unsettling is the sight of a woman with a wooden basket about to enter the house through the pair of doors at the top of the stairs. A faded red mailbox is attached to the center of the top panel of one of the doors. The house is occupied in violation of common sense, it would appear from our remove.

They are pictures of an urban environment in decline. The city is listing and crumbling, and while the images are visually compelling, it is not a place most people would choose to live.
The city was exhausted and on the verge of physical collapse. A depression and world war had left little in the way of resources available for maintaining and improving the building stock and infrastructure. By the time it was available, the forlorn condition of the city conspired with a host of other factors to send people fleeing to greener pastures.

And flee they did. Whether he knew it or not, Mr. Cushman was recording the end of an era. In the space of a few decades, half the city decamped and headed to what would become known as Chicagoland and parts beyond. As working class whites left south and west side neighborhoods by the census tract southern blacks moved in. As ethnic whites fled the north side, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and poor Appalachian whites took their place.

The scale was astounding. Before this, urban depopulation that massive was a result of war, disease, or famine, not racial hostility or the desire for a big lawn and free parking.

Looking at the pictures, you would be forgiven (or hopefully I would be) for not immediately noticing the horse drawn wagons in several images until you remember that these photographs are of mid-twentieth century America. In fact there are a lot of wagons, most in very decrepit states, scattered throughout the pictures suggesting a ubiquity within my parent’s lifetime that is a bit unnerving. The past is never as distant as we think it is or want it to be.

And in Chicago the past is particularly distant. When the city fled itself, a continuity was broken, memories were lost, and a culture disappeared. Modern Chicago knows the lost city only as a caricature, icons or bullet points on a boat or bus tour. The past is trivia; there is no direct connection for most people.

We live in the remains of another people’s city. It surrounds and envelops us, and even shapes us, but we inhabit it as squatters. We might as well have moved into abandoned southwest cliff dwellings. The way of life of the people who built it is not ours, and their knowledge of the how’s and why’s of the city did not get passed on to us.

This state of affairs is not bad or good, it just is. The massive American urban population shifts of the twentieth century are a historical artifact, though, we still have not come to grips with the implications and repercussions.

Between energy costs and demographics, the future is looking to be dense and urban, the very thing that was rejected over the last 50 years by Chicagoans in particular and Americans in general. We cut almost all ties with that way of life and jettisoned our accumulated knowledge of how to create cities and live in them. As things change, potentially very quickly, we will have no choice but to learn how to be urban all over again.