Armpits of America

A photo of the Jackson brothers' childhood home in Gary,
Indiana, following Michael Jackson's death. (Wiki Commons)

A Facebook post and resulting conversation thread about Gary, Indiana, this evening got me thinking about areas of the world that are regarded as the worst places to live. Gary certainly ranks high on that list, if not at the top of it. Like many cities that are unfairly dubbed "armpits of America", Gary is riddled with vacant buildings, urban blight, joblessness, searing poverty, crime, and drugs. In an effort to lure people back to the city, properties are on sale for $1.

I find myself thinking of armpits of America as I try to wrap my head around our latest personal financial crisis. As a one-income family living in a rural area that some might regard as an armpit, our bank account is always tight. Usually, though, we can manage to make it to the next payment with a few dollars -- $11 or so -- still in the bank. This week has been different. A combination of work-related trips that require waiting periods for expense reimbursements, a snag in an effort to reconfigure the distribution of paycheck funds via direct deposit, and the IRS finally implementing the payment plan we had requested for an unusually high 2012 tax bill last week left our account in the red. A couple pending items pushed it further into the red, and an overdraft fee was slapped onto a declined payment, leaving us with, well, nothing, until the next paycheck.

I stressed out, but surprisingly not as much as I might have a year or two ago. I know a paycheck's coming in a week, that there's plenty of food in the house and garden to last until then, that we have the skills and willingness to wash clothes by hand, and that the expense reimbursements are on their way. As with every other crisis that has hit me and my husband in our eight years of marriage, we'll survive this one, too. But I look around my armpit area and wonder what has happened to those who did not.

A bank repossessed a house across the street about two months ago. A neighbor has had to put self-employment on the back burner in order to earn extra income through a wage-labor job. Another neighbor will go another year without fixing an increasingly leaky roof, and for sale signs on available land up and down our tiny rural street abound. Most of the "for sale" signs are on the same lots that were for sale when we bought our place two years ago. We're far away from Gary, but perhaps the tragic fate of urban Gary is not so distant from us.

I grew up in Muncie, in the 1960s. My first memory of Gary has to do with the Jackson Five. Michael, Jermaine, Tito, Jackie, and Marlon were wonder-kids then, rocking out "I Want You Back" and "ABC". I knew them as Indiana boys, but didn't know much about their family, their history, or the place where they were raised. Years later, as Gary fell into blight, the Rogers & Hammerstein song "Gary, Indiana" filled my ears, and later still, I remember driving between Muncie and the rich Chicago suburb where I was attending college (Evanston) through Gary with nose plugged (because of industrial smells), doors locked, and windows firmly rolled up.

And, many many years later, when I knew a little more about Gary's socio-economic situation and its placement in America's messed-up history of race politics, deindustrialization, and urban abandonment, I would either drive or take a train through Gary and think of it as a potentially nice town.

Peter Jennings offers a portrayal of Gary in a coffee-table book published in 2000. Entitled In Search of America, the portrayal paints Gary as the unfortunate cousin of its typically American counterpart Muncie and despairs over its future. A teenage boy in a class at the St. Paul, Minnesota High School for the Recording Arts further described Gary -- his hometown -- as "Ghost Town Gary".

If you don't know anyone in the city, I remember the student saying, “you’re fucked. If you don't have a weapon to protect you, you’re fucked. And you don’t want to carry anything you don’t actually need on your person.”

The teacher explained to other students that Gary was a town that had been abandoned by its industries, its employers, and ultimately its people. When the teacher asked what happened in such situations, students had some ready answers: Guns, Violence, Drugs.

Guns, violence, drugs were terms used to characterize my old neighborhood in Seattle when I first bought a house there in 1993. Many of my friends and co-workers tried to dissuade me, saying I would be too afraid to un-shutter my windows, hang out in my yard, or even leave open my front door. I'm an obstinate contrarian at heart, and their warnings motivated me to do the opposite. My windows were always un-shuttered and on warm days often propped wide open. I was always in my yard when I was home, and often I had both the front and back doors open. Kids in the neighborhood would climb a tree in the front yard and sometimes run animatedly through the house. It felt like the way home should be.

I wonder what kind of people might be drawn to Gary by the $1 property deal. Would they de-shutter the city? Plant gardens, and encourage kids to climb trees? Or would they gentrify the city, surrounding homes with high walls, security systems, and barred materials over windows? Which would be the safer alternative in the long run? Would Gary remain an armpit -- or could its people transform it into the rich, vibrant, energy-pulsing place it deserves to be?