gatsby

The famous passage from 'The Great Gatsby' where Fitzgerald describes kids returning from East Coast schools to the Midwest for Christmas vacation:

'One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o'clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by.

'I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That's and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: "Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?" and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.'

[ . . . ]

'That's my Middle West – not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name.'

summit avenue

Summit Avenue, St. Paul,Minnesota-- one of America's great residential streets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_Avenue_(St._Paul)

buffet

The fairly nondescript Berkshire Hathaway building in Omaha, headquarters of Warren Buffet's far-flung financial empire. And that's about all I know about Omaha.

indiana world war memorial

This is an amazing building I saw for the first time last fall as I was passing through Indianapolis. It's the center of a five-block complex in downtown Indianapolis that includes the national headquarters of the American Legion. Conceived in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I, construction on the Memorial began in 1926 but was not finally completed until 1965. It's modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It's really quite a sight.

View from park in the rear:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_World_War_Memorial_Plaza

November 10, 1975:  Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdFa6XDTJA

whatever happened to new yorkers?

When I was a boy, New Yorkers were regarded as the epitome of elegance and sophistication: café society, the Stork Club, Ciro's, the Macambo, etc. But somewhere along the line all that changed, and now crude vulgarians like Donald Trump, Howard Stern, and Anthony Weiner are thought of as typical New Yorkers. I don't know what New Yorkers think of Anthony Weiner-- I gather his political career is finished-- but most of us out here in the provinces regard him as 'just another New York weirdo.' How exactly did this happen, and when? I suspect the 1960s had something to do with it, but I'd like to see a timeline of this descent into the abyss.

flyoverland before airplanes

It crossed my mind the other day that the Midwest played a very different psychological role in this country before  cross-country air travel became common. The term flyoverland originated, I believe among entertainment executives who routinely flew back and forth between Los Angeles and New York. They would be up in the air for three or four hours and would occasionally look down at this checkerboard of farmland tens of thousands of feet beneath them. After a few seconds of idle speculation along the lines of, 'Do people actually live down there? What could they possibly do?', they would return to their inflight movies or laptops. They evinced no interest in the region beyond that.

Before air travel was common, though, the Midwest was, psychologically, the great stable and powerful center of the country. The breadbasket, of course, but also the industrial heartland, with great factories churning out products that the rest of the world bought. The Midwest was the heart of American prosperity. And Chicago in particular was the great metropolis of this heartland. All railroads led there, and passenger rail was, of course, the mode of transcontinental travel of choice for those who didn't have to 'go Greyhound.' It was the nerve center for transportation, but also a great regional capital, city of the broad shoulders, where all the wheat from Kansas and Nebraska and corn from Illinois and Iowa was traded at the Board of Trade. It even spawned a great school of regional architecture, the Prairie School, and its primary exponent the genius Frank Lloyd Wright. With its long horizontals and overhanging eaves, it was a perfect expression of the solidity and strength of this region.

Now the Midwest is not only 'flyoverland,' but the Rust Belt, and Chicago in particular has become a much more parochial place presided over by ethnic politicians interested only in balancing off their different neighborhoods and groups-- and, of course, getting their share of the gravy along the way. The Chicago of the Columbian Exposition and 'Make no little plans' has certainly left its mark, along with the architecture of Louis Sullivan, Wright, and Mies van der Rohe. But it just doesn't have that feel of being the great capital of the Heartland any more.