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Gentrifyin' Blues
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14992 |
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BOOK WORLD
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9 / 1988 |
3,949 Words |
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James J. Thompson, Jr.
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THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY
Jonathan Franzen
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988
571 pp., $19.95
It would probably take most people about five seconds to rattle off everything they know about St. Louis: Budweiser, the Arch, Ozzie Smith and the Cardinals. Two out of three rates excellent; list all three and you qualify as an expert in urban arcana. "But all cities are ideas," Jonathan Franzen avers. "They create themselves, and the rest of the world apprehends them or ignores them as it chooses,"
If this is true (and like most pop-sociological obiter dicta, it sort of sounds reasonable), then St. Louis has a problem. It does not stick in the mind or evoke a rush of associations. An unkind observer--a resident of Kansas City, perhaps--might borrow Gertrude Stein's quip about Oakland: "There's no there there." A hundred years ago St. Louis ranked as one of the nation's premier cities--Queen of the Upper Mississippi, Gateway to the West, Capital of the Heartland. By 1980 it had receded into obscurity and fallen to twenty-seventh in population among American cities.
For those unfamiliar with the city, this statistic may conjure up an image of Rust Belt decay and dereliction: cold smokestacks and sepulchral factories, weeds pushing through cracked sidewalks, rats scrabbling through the rubble of tumbledown shopping malls. Not so. In recent years, St Louis has undergone one of those ubiquitous "urban renaissances" that have become the urban planner's banality--banal, because of the dreary sameness of the phenomenon wherever it crops up. Slap together a few glass skyscrapers; throw in a couple of chichi hotels with a tiny Niagara and a luxuriant jungle in the lobby; convert some decrepit warehouses into fern bars, quiche dives, and fussy boutiques; sweep up the winos and hide the blacks: Voila!--a renaissance.
Granted, St. Louis proper has lost population, but this has resulted largely from white flight to the suburbs than fan out across neighboring St. Louis County. Despite this, old St. Louis is enjoying a revival, and its suburbs, not to be outdone, exude something akin to Sun Belt ebullience. As a whole Greater St. Louis, even in the absence of a recognizable identity, is not a city on the skids.
Franzen's surefire Device
The urge to put St. Louis on the map--to force the rest of the country to gape in wonderment at the historic city on the Mississippi--furnishes the motivation for Jonathan Franzen's movers and shakers. They hire an internally acclaimed police commissioners from Bombay, India—a thirty-five-year-old woman named S. Jammu--to head law enforcement in St. Louis. As the Post Dispatch's star reporter observes: "In a city still struggling to overcome its image as a 'loser,' the Board's unorthodox choice makes good public-relations sense." The city bargains for publicity--and gets it. What it doesn't figure on is a massive conspiracy, mounted by Jammu and her Indian agents, to seize control of the city, with a scheme so deftly executed that St. Louisans never know what hit them.
Franzen's odd idea is arresting (no pun intended). No wonder the perpetually nervous bottom-line
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