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Springfield
& Beyond
Settling In
I lived in Springfield, Illinois for ten years, longer than anywhere
else since college.
I never did get used to it.
It's not so much moving from the Northeast to the Midwest that
was the problem. I liked graduate student life in East Lansing, Michigan
and even have some fond memories of my two years in Lincoln, Nebraska.
So much for going where the job takes you.
On the Bright Side
My university used to be interesting, and occasionally
still is. But located five miles south of downtown, it has no impact on
the city's daily life. Springfield is definitely not a college town.
There's a small alternative community of sorts--a struggling food
co-op, New Agers, vegetarians and bicycle riders, liberal lobbyists from
Chicago and radical professors from back east, a couple of gay bars, occasional
world music dances dj'd by a friend, an alternative weekly (Illinois
Times), and even an illegal radio station coming
out of the black community.
But people seeking alternatives tend to leave for more hospitable
places, if they can.
The ones who stay are not noticed much by the bulk of Springfield's
110,000 residents.
The restaurant selection is pretty standard and pretty limited. Lots
of Italian and Chinese and steak, a few generic "better restaurants" without
much choice for vegetarians. Still, it could be worse.
There's decent Brooklyn-style pizza baked by real Italians at
Joe Gallina's, delivered to your door by people with authentic
Brooklyn accents.
The new bagel chain restaurants are better than nothing, if you can
get used to the sight of chocolate chip bagels.
A couple of "California-style" yuppie places provide tasty food in
small portions for big prices.
Believe it or not, there's even a great Thai restaurant still resisting
blandness (most local restaurants get rid of anything spicy as soon
as the first complaints pour in). I wonder where the people who eat
at the Magic Kitchen eat when they go someplace else.
The Kerasotes movie chain, which owns every screen in the city, shows alternative
movies at one of its theaters, often to almost empty auditoriums.
Washington Park is a pleasant place to walk, except on nice days
when it's filled with cars.
St. Louis is only 90 long, boring, flat miles away.
Giving us the Business
Business rules.
The city expands to the southwest, constantly turning corn and
bean fields into discount chain stores, the same restaurants you can eat
in anywhere, and expensive upper-middle class suburbs. Some locally owned
restaurants and stores hang on, but others can't compete with the likes
of Barnes & Noble, the Olive Garden, and Best Buy.
When zoning regulations stand in the way, variances are easy
to get.
Call yourself an entrepreneur and people smile. You can even hang an
ugly sign right outside your house to distract drivers.
Downtown, little remains open after the state workers go home in
the afternoon. The last downtown movie theater was urban renewed more than
a decade ago. Most downtown restaurants only serve lunch.
Never-ending efforts to revitalize downtown are yawned at by
people who find whatever they need at the mall.
Jobs are scarce and public transportation a joke where the working
class and people of color actually live in this de facto segregated city.
Many unemployed workers can't take jobs at the new shopping
centers because the bus stops at 6:00.
The bus doesn't go out to the university in the evening either.
This is not generally seen as a problem.
If you like shopping, you'll like Springfield. Though if you like shopping
you probably wouldn't be reading this website.
Lincoln Land
Springfield's number one tourist attraction has been dead for over 130
years.
Lots of things here are named after the local hero--the community college,
the library, the legal aid office. Lincoln Land Firefighters Association.
Lincoln Square Apartments. Land of Lincoln Drywall.
There's an effort to build a Lincoln museum, not so much because the
country's forgotten the guy but to get tourists to spend the night. After
dropping by Lincoln's tomb and Lincoln's house and Lincoln's office, too
many travelers look around and decide to take their dollars to St. Louis.
Makes you wonder why the city hassles the prostitutes congregating
in the Lincoln Home District after dark.
The civic pride in "the president who ended slavery" has inspired few
efforts to end racial inequality.
True, it's not the fifties. Springfield no longer has segregated
movie theaters and beaches. African American legislators from Chicago
and elsewhere can now stay in hotels right in town, unlike the case just
four decades ago. And after a nationally publicized lawsuit in the 1980s
forced the city to switch from citywide voting to voting by ward, the
east side has been able to elect a black alderman to the City Council.
But many landlords on the west side still refuse to rent to blacks or
to hire them. The city's African American population remains disproportionately
unemployed. Racist language is often used in casual conversation. Blacks
who shop on the white southwest side are often followed by store security
guards. Efforts to move blacks out of public housing into the community
have been resisted.
Rumor has it that the university decided to build more on-campus
apartments to help black students from Chicago and East St. Louis avoid
the racist housing market.
Of course, that means their kids go to Chatham schools, where they're
often the only nonwhites in class.
Civic leaders talk about the importance of ending prejudice, of "teaching
your children not to hate others."
But there's little support for changing institutions.
Being Comfortable
Subjectively, Illinois feels like the most selfish of the seven states
I've lived in. Many people see no shame in admitting they couldn't care
less about other people. Sink-or-swim politics combined with token "volunteerism"
are supposed to cure society's ills. The churches are full.
All in all, people are comfortable. At least those people who matter.
If you've got a pool in your backyard and belong to a health
club, why worry about people who can't get to Lake Springfield's only
public beach or can't pay to swim in the city's only public pool?
My favorite line was the city alderman who was quoted as saying (about
the no-leaf-burning ordinance) "It's not my problem if someone else's
kid can't breathe."
Then there was the school board member in Chatham who insisted
during a teacher's strike that "the teachers get paid enough for women."
Although Springfield ranks near the bottom of most lists of interesting
places to live (except for that all-important "Most Polite City"
category ), locals claim it's "a great place to raise kids," assuming you
don't mind your kids adopting smug middle-class Republican superiority.
Raising a daughter with Elizabeth, I shudder.
Teenagers complain there's nothing to do, but most people who count around
here don't pay much attention to people who can't vote.
Most people who count around here would probably think this website is impolite.
State Politics
The legislature and the governor, the State Supreme Court, Democrats
and Republicans all...
I don't have the heart to go into this right now.
News and No-news
Since Springfield's the state capital, the State Journal-Register,
the city's only daily newspaper, pays a lot of attention to political
gamesmanship.
Of course, if the paper chooses not to cover something, it might as well
not happen. "Political" here means partisan politics.
As an example of issues not covered, there's the paper's past
refusal to print criticism of the
takeover of Sangamon State University by the University of Illinois
a couple of years ago. With the newspaper's publisher serving on a committee
pushing the takeover, why bother reporting any controversial details?
(Since then, the new publisher and editor promise greater even-handedness.
They did run a letter of mine criticizing their reporter's failure to
cover criticism of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. And in
other ways they've tried to open up a bit. They still miss a lot,but perhaps
things are improving.)
Another example: the paper gives essentially no coverage
to one of the most remarkable stories on the political left--the continued
operation of an illegal one-watt "pirate" FM radio station, now called
Human Rights Radio (107.3 if you're in the area). Run by Mbanna
Kantako, it operated out of an apartment in the John Hay public housing
project until the city started tearing it down. The city had ignored
Mbanna for a couple of years, until he started talking on the air about
police brutality against African Americans. Then they called in the
feds, who tried to shut him down. Still operates, though. It's spawned
a whole pirate
radio movement across the country and elsewhere, with lots of press
elsewhere, especially on the left. But not here.
Hasara Watch!
Then of course there's former Mayor Karen Hasara, Springfield's finest.
Embarrassingly, she's a two-time graduate of my own university, first
with a BA in psychology, then an MA in legal studies (ironically and annoyingly,
the two programs I'm affiliated with, though she was gone before I got
here).
Before she was mayor, Hasara was a state senator, learning to do her
best for business. She co-sponsored the bill to "merge" SSU into the U
of I system, brushing off criticism that the legislation also killed
off our faculty union by saying she would fix that little problem
later (a promise still unkept). She didn't much like the "union-buster"
label during her 1995 mayoral campaign, though the media ignored any details
that might hurt their candidate.
They emphasized instead her ability to "bring people together"
(an ability I have yet to see in action)--and her unfailing politeness.
Hasara's husband complained once after I insisted on asking the would-be
mayor about her union-busting when a mayoral debate was declared over.
He told me I wasn't "polite."
In Springfield it's worse to be impolite than it is to kill
a union.
When a friend and I leafleted Hasara during another campaign event we
got arrested. Not her fault, but then again
it was the agreement of the two candidates to ban "campaign material"
that led to the confrontation.
More recently, Hasara's been quoted as saying she'll ignore widespread complaints
about Springfield's fire chief because "as a profession, firefighters are
always unhappy with their bosses" and the many complaints are just the work
of a union that's causing departmental strife. "The firefighters obviously
have a big problem." As she explains,
"Firefighters work mostly 24-hour shifts. There aren't as many
fires as there used to be.... It's the same here as everywhere else."
Nasty people, these union complainers.
The newspaper's now passing around rumors (or perhaps inventing them) that
Hasara has her sights on higher office. Getting her out of City Hall would
be refreshing, though her replacement would likely be no better. In the
meantime, though, she was recently reelected. |
