Narrating Past and Future: Deindustrialized
Landscapes as Resources
Sherry Lee Linkon
Georgetown University
Abstract
A growing body of contemporary American literature, “deindustrialization literature,”
most of it by writers who grew up after major plant closings, is set in former industrial
areas, such as Detroit and Youngstown. These texts focus on the lives and perspectives
of those who have inherited the physical, economic, and cultural landscapes of the rust
belt. For these writers and their characters, the past is always an important part of the
present. The deindustrialized landscape provides not only the setting but also
signiﬁcant plot elements, themes, and symbols through which these writers narrate
stories about young adults wrestling with their identities, afﬁliations, and opportunities
during a period of economic decline and social change. These narratives complicate the
relationship between past and present through characters’ observations of and
interactions in the deindustrialized landscape. With a complex, ambivalent perspective,
they suggest the possibility of revival for both communities and individuals. A novel
and works of creative non-ﬁction by Youngstown’s Christopher Barzak and the short
stories of Detroit’s Michael Zadoorian illustrate how representations of abandoned
mills and decaying commercial and residential sites can reveal the complex and
persistent signiﬁcance of deindustrialization, decades after closings began, while also
pointing toward a future that uses the past as a resource.
While we often think of deindustrialization in historical terms, as an economic
event of the 1970s and ‘80s, it has had a lasting, complex effect on working-class
people and their communities. For the American cities that were built around
large-scale manufacturing and that lost tens of thousands of jobs starting
in the mid-1970s, deindustrialization has replaced industry as the deﬁning
characteristic of community identity. It is not simply that cities like
Youngstown, Ohio and Detroit, Michigan continue to struggle with high rates
of unemployment and crime, vacant properties and empty lots, and the challenges
of redeﬁning their identities and rebuilding their economies. Equally
important, these cities have become identiﬁed as sites of failure, decay, and
struggle.1
What was once the Motor City is now widely known as the most
depopulated, bleak landscape in the United States. Steeltown, USA has, in
recent years, become famous for accepting its decline and adopting new policies
that aim to accommodate shrinkage.2
In these communities, and more broadly, the deindustrialized landscape
has become an iconic image, one that speaks both to the history of industrial
work and its loss and to the ways economic change is interpreted in the
present and imagined for the future. The representations of decaying urban
International Labor and Working-Class History
No. 84, Fall 2013, pp. 38–54
# International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2013
doi:10.1017/S0147547913000240
spaces that have become popular in both ﬁne art and popular culture in recent
years draw our attention to two historical eras: the period when industrial labor
and community activities gave life to these cities and the period of decline as
jobs disappeared, buildings crumbled, and communities struggled to survive
amidst economic shrinkage. Some of these representations, such as the many
websites, books, and museum exhibits featuring photographs of abandoned factories
and other structures, seem to invite us to view the decay of deindustrialization
as a spectacle, to ﬁnd beauty in destruction. As Tim Strangleman notes in
this issue, a number of scholars have criticized this trope, warning us that “smokestack
nostalgia” or “ruin porn” draws on romanticized ideas that skim over
the hardships of industrial work and the role of capitalist exploitation in both
the building and the destruction of industry.3
Such a perspective is only possible
because the viewer of the image, and often the photographer, is not personally
involved in the history being represented. S/he can view the scene of destruction
with emotional distance, focusing on “beauty” rather than experience.
Deindustrialized landscapes can thus allow a voyeuristic perspective that may
at once erase history by aestheticizing industrial structures, rendering the
people who labored in them invisible, and construct places like Youngstown
and Detroit solely in terms of their past––both the past of industrial production
and the past of deindustrial decline.
While many outsiders have created representations of deindustrialized
sites, some of the artists and writers whose work engages deindustrialization
occupy a middle space. They do not have their own memories of either industrial
work or widespread job loss, but they were born and raised during the decades
after major closings, and their families and communities experienced both
industrial labor and the displacement and disorientation of deindustrialization.4
Their parents or grandparents may have worked in the abandoned mills and
plants that they grew up with, but their own memories involve navigating
economically-challenged, crumbling physical and social landscapes. If we are
to understand the long-term legacy of deindustrialization, what we might
think of as the half-life of deindustrialization, we must take their representations
seriously, not for what they show us about the past but for what they reveal
about what the past means in the present.
As artistic representations, these texts make no pretense of being either
objective or documentary in their intent. While some forms of representation
seem focused on revealing the effects of deindustrialization, others emphasize
the continuing, often contested meaning of that history in the present. This
may be especially true of deindustrialization literature, imaginative texts that
explore the interactions of early twenty-ﬁrst-century characters with both the
memory of industrial work and, more often, the decaying landscapes and experiences
of struggle left behind by deindustrialization. While a number of workerwriters
produced poetry, essays, and ﬁction in the years immediately after their
factories or mines were closed, these works created in the midst of the closing
process often focus on documenting the work being lost. For example, most
of the stories in Detroit writer and autoworker Lolita Hernandez’s collection,
Narrating Past and Future 39
Autopsy of an Engine, and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant, are set in the
still-functioning plant. Such writing matters, but it is more about industrial
work than about the legacy of deindustrialization. Since the early 2000s,
American writers have used a variety of genres––novels, short stories, poetry,
and creative nonﬁction––to examine the lives and perspectives of younger
adults, people who were children when the plants, mines, and mills of their communities
closed. The genre is thus deﬁned temporally––produced after 2000––
and thematically––emphasizing its focus on the half-life of deindustrialization
rather than the immediate experience. Most deindustrialization literature is
set in the “rust belt,” not only in iconic industrial cities such as Detroit but
also in smaller industrial communities, such as the coal and steel towns of
western Pennsylvania. Many of these writers use the deindustrialized landscape
not merely as a setting but as a symbol or narrative element in their work, constructing
stories that are about memory, place, and how the complex relationship
between past and present shapes characters’ perspectives and choices. In
part because imaginative narratives tell stories, and in part because their
intent is not to analyze or document but to interpret people’s experiences,
these texts reveal the contemporary meanings, what we might think of as the
psychological and emotional landscapes, associated with deindustrialized
spaces.
Instead, or perhaps in addition to, evoking the kind of “smokestack nostalgia”
that Strangleman analyzes, some contemporary representations use deindustrialized
landscapes to construct the imagined past as a resource for the
present. We see this, for example, in Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit” ads,
featuring white male performers known for their tough personas (Eminem
and Clint Eastwood) offering a narrative that casts Detroit’s tough past as the
basis for its industrial rebirth against a video montage that intersperses
images of the deindustrialized landscape with images of renovated historical
sites.5
These ads reference the determination and grit of the working-class
people who once built cars and who continue to scrape by despite the hard
times. While they exploit the city’s struggles for commercial purposes, they
also point to an emerging variation on “smokestack nostalgia,” one in which
images of deindustrialization serve not only as representations of the past but
also as a resource for imagining the future. These images do not simply
lament the loss of good but hard work, strong communities, and economic
struggles; they also suggest the value of the city’s persistence, survival, and
hope. While Chrysler uses this narrative to sell cars, its use of deindustrial landscapes
to say something about the future is not unique.6
By juxtaposing images
that reﬂect the memory of industrial work with images of decay and images of
renovation and growth, these uses of deindustrialized landscapes represent the
era of decline as part of the past while highlighting how, in the present, people
are pursuing new, often creative ways of making a living and making a home in
these communities. Such representations don’t erase the struggles of deindustrialization,
nor do they suggest that everything is now perfectly ﬁne. Rather,
they suggest a shift from viewing deindustrialized places solely through the
40 ILWCH, 84, Fall 2013
lens of decline and base some of their optimism on strategies that link the past
with the future. Such representations reject the call made by some to “forget the
past.”7
The potential for future growth, they suggest, is based on remembering
the strengths of the past.
This tentative, complex reconciliation between past and future is a theme in
deindustrialization literature. For these writers and their characters, the past is
always present, shaping the physical and emotional landscape of today. The
deindustrialized landscape provides not only the setting but also signiﬁcant
plot elements, themes, and symbols through which these writers narrate
stories about young adults wrestling with their identities, afﬁliations, and opportunities
during a period of economic decline and social change. These narratives
complicate the relationship between the past and the present, often through
their characters’ observations of and interactions in the deindustrialized landscape.
As in the Chrysler ads, but with more ambivalence and complexity,
these writers reveal the possibility of some kind of revival for both communities
and individuals. Two works by Youngstown’s Christopher Barzak, a novel and a
collection of creative nonﬁction pieces, and the short stories of Detroit’s Michael
Zadoorian illustrate how representations of abandoned mills and decaying commercial
and residential sites can reveal the complex and persistent signiﬁcance
of deindustrialization, decades after closings began, while also pointing toward a
future that uses the past as a resource.
Most of Barzak’s 2007 young adult fantasy novel, One for Sorrow, is set in
an unnamed rural community about an hour north of Youngstown.8
Barzak’s
adolescent working-class narrator and protagonist, Adam McCormick, spends
most of the book in the woods near his home. The story centers on his relationship
with a high school friend, Jamie Marks, who is murdered near the beginning
of the novel but who returns as a ghostly body, slowly fading away. Jamie
draws Adam into a strange symbiotic relationship in which the living boy
allows the dead one to hold on to life for as long as possible by sharing his
memories, his physical warmth and affection and ultimately, as Jamie begins
to forget language, his words. In the process, Adam is drawn towards death.
In a long section of the book, as Jamie is struggling to resist dying and
Adam is being pulled towards it, Jamie brings Adam to Youngstown, a
place Adam has been only once before but that he’s heard about from his
grandfather, who once worked in the steel mills there. Barzak uses images
of the deindustrialized landscape to cast Youngstown as a liminal way
station between life and death for the two boys. As Jamie and Adam
emerge from what Barzak calls “dead space,” a region outside of the physical
reality of everyday life, they see the Mahoning River valley, itself a kind of
dead space:
The valley itself was a wasteland. Vacant factories with smashed-up windows.
Black scars on the ground where steel mills had been demolished by their
owners years ago. Yellow-brown weeds and thorny bushes. Leftover machine
parts. Rotting car frames and engines. Rusty metal workings . . . .9
Narrating Past and Future 41
Signiﬁcantly, the past that Barzak uses here is not the idealized image of a thriving,
busy city that is evoked in some texts that look back with longing to the
industrial era. Rather, the scene focuses almost entirely on the evidence of deindustrialization,
which is itself now part of the past, depicting the presence of
weeds and bushes that have grown up around the vacant factories and the
rust on the abandoned car frames, engines, and parts. The industrial past is
present, however, in the ghosts of former workers, who “wandered the rubble
of the mills, leaving no footprints as they went. . . . Most were men wearing
grease-stained jumpsuits; others were young women wearing long tweed
skirts, carrying folders pressed to their chests.”10
The clothing evokes the
heyday of the steel industry in the 1950s, rather than the time when the mills
closed. The ghosts thus represent an idealized memory of steelwork, an iconic
image from an era of prosperity and growth, in contrast with the physical
setting in which they appear, which reﬂects the ravages of more than thirty
years of decay after deindustrialization.
Barzak emphasizes the continuing presence and connection of the ghostly
workers by showing how they respond to a whistle signaling a shift change:
“they poured from the abandoned factories, and others materialized to take
their places . . . even though it was clear that what they wanted didn’t want
them.”11
The scene captures the scale of the industry, which once employed
thousands of workers, and its importance to the people who once worked
there, presenting steelwork in an almost romantic way. Yet the image resists
and critiques nostalgia. While it refers to the way of life and the sense of
purpose the workers lost when the mills closed, it also suggests the community’s
attachment to an idealized, out-of-reach era of prosperity and its unwillingness
to let go of that vision. The juxtaposition of the ghost workers against the longempty
remains of their workplace suggests that “the past” is not a matter of historical
fact. Community memory, embodied in these displaced ghost workers, is
a selective narrative, one that is at once attentive to the signiﬁcance of lost work
and attached to an idealized version of history.
For the two boys, the decay of the local landscape, not only on the mill site
but around town, is attractive and symbolic. Like the dead who wander the mill,
the boys spend much of their time wandering through a “world of cracked concrete
. . . where the trees lining the streets rotted and buildings disappeared
every day.”12
What he sees seems to pull Adam closer to death. He loses
weight, he can’t sleep, and he no longer feels hunger or cold. He becomes ghostlike,
even though he is alive. As he walks, he remembers what his grandmother
used to say about his steelworker grandfather: “The mills broke his back when
they were open, and when they closed they broke his spirit.”13
That memory
helps him feel connected to Youngstown, but he focuses on evidence of the
city’s decline, evidence that, like his grandfather, the city has had its back
broken by deindustrialization. His initial impressions emphasize what have
become standard images of the abandoned, crumbling landscape. In that
setting, Jamie “feels stronger,” but Adam feels less and less connected with
his own life, even as he recalls details about his grandparents. The past is
42 ILWCH, 84, Fall 2013
available to him, but the present doesn’t offer a reason to cling to life, at least not
initially. He feels alone, uncared for, drawn to death because life offers so little.
After describing and engaging his characters with the deindustrialized
landscape, Barzak introduces other characters who are constructing new opportunities
using the remnants of the past. During their stay in Youngstown, Adam
and Jamie hide out in an old church, which at ﬁrst seems abandoned, yet another
symbol of the city’s decline. As they begin to explore the building, Adam notes
the stripped ﬂoorboards and smoke-stained walls, and he thinks that “there
were no signs of life anywhere at all,” apparently ignoring the sawhorses in
the chapel, a tool-strewn worktable in the basement, and carpenters’ lights
hanging from the rafters, all evidence of the renovation efforts.14
With his
focus on death, Adam describes these objects but cannot see them as “signs
of life.” This is highlighted when the members of the congregation show up to
work on repairs to the crumbling old building, under the supervision of the minister.
Adam notices how the minister sees only the building’s potential, not its
injuries: “You could tell that he didn’t even see the ﬁre stains, that the broken
stained glass window and empty bell tower didn’t register with him . . . he saw
nothing but crowds of believers ﬁlling his church with their voices.”15
The contrast
between these visions highlights the problematic relationship between past
and future. For some, like Adam, the past is entirely a matter of loss and decay,
while others, like the minister, can only envision an idealized future.
Adam’s story suggests a more moderate possibility: using the past to create
a different but far from perfect future, one built not on industry but on community,
a move that requires letting go of the fascination with what has been lost
and focusing instead on what remains. This is what enables Adam to begin to
return to life when Jamie ﬁnally “crosses over” into complete death. Very
weak, tired, and sick at this point, in part because he has not been eating,
Adam collapses in the church, and he is tended to by Tia, the minister’s daughter.
She brings him food and medicine, and she speaks to him kindly, assuring
him that “God believes in you.”16
She even persuades him to attend a Sunday
church service. While Adam is skeptical about the idea of God (and the novel
clearly does not suggest that religion is the answer), Tia’s kindness, together
with food, medicine, and rest, helps him begin to heal. On the one hand, she
acts as an individual caregiver but, at the same time, she is closely tied to the
efforts of her father and his congregants to renovate the church, an action
that rejects the notion that the decay of the past represents an inevitable
decline for the community.
Within a few days, Adam’s sense of where he is headed has changed. He no
longer believes that he is dying: “I had to give up that wish because in the end I
didn’t really want it. I wasn’t sure what I was on my way to now, but it wasn’t
dying.”17
As he recovers, Adam visits a used bookstore not far from the
church, in a neighborhood where homeless men wander the streets and “the
air fused with diesel and grit.”18
The bookstore “smelled like tea and cinnamon,”
and Adam realizes that he is “getting my senses back.”19
Like Tia, the bookstore’s
owner, Kurt, reaches out to Adam, giving him tea and asking about his
Narrating Past and Future 43
situation but also sharing his own experiences. Without prying into Adam’s life,
Kurt assures him that things will get better, and he both acknowledges Adam’s
problems and tries to offer advice. Even though Adam cuts off Kurt’s effort to
connect with him, it’s clear that he appreciates the older man’s kindness, and the
two relationships help him feel emotionally strong enough to return to his home,
his family, and his own life.
While it is the care and connection they offer that most affects Adam, Tia
and Kurt represent more than just human kindness. Both are directly engaged
with constructing a future built on the remains of the past: renovating the
church and running a business that ﬁnds value in things that have been abandoned.
Further, both offer examples of building new opportunities that emphasize
human rather than economic growth. Repairing a church will provide a
place for worship and community-building, not making money, and Kurt
explains that he started the bookstore to feed his soul, not for ﬁnancial gain.
By offering an alternative vision of Youngstown and of how to construct a satisfying
life, they start Adam toward recovery. While they are rooted in the city,
their examples and attention encourage Adam to return to his small town
home. The deindustrialized city has served its purpose by revealing both the
potential attraction of decay and death and the opportunities for modest,
human renewal that persist despite the city’s decline. The past provides physical
and social resources that feed small, local efforts for renewal, efforts that respect
the past and provide opportunities for connection and creativity but that make
only small promises.
Barzak further explores this connection between past and present in
Youngstown in a collection of creative nonﬁction pieces, Map for a Forgotten
Valley.20
Among the most evocative images of this relationship appears in
“The B&O, Crossroads of Time and Space.” Barzak imagines a “perforation”
that allows someone in the present to glimpse the scene Henry Miller saw
from the Youngstown train station in 1940 of “two girls, heads wrapped in
scarves, picking their way down the hill.” He describes the smoky, soot-dusted
immigrant neighborhood where they live, where “turkeys and chickens peck
at the ground of back yards” and “mothers stand on square front lawns, wringing
their hands in their aprons, waving to the girls as they approach.” Even more
signiﬁcant than this tiny window on the past is the view of the future that Barzak
imagines from the point of view of the mothers, a view that explicitly and imaginatively
connects past and present. The girls, he tells us, “are their mother’s
dreams, they are knots in a rope to the future,” which they climb, “hand over
hand, like sturdy athletes, until they see a man from the future looking
through Henry Miller’s spy-hole, and then the empty hillside behind him, the
abandoned tracks of the B&O.” In this image, Barzak challenges nostalgic
views of the past that might cast the girls’ lives in 1940 as ideal. In the eyes of
their mothers, that world was just a starting place, and their vision of an
always better future turned out to be a fantasy. In this way, Barzak also challenges
the progressive narrative in which the future is always better than the
present. As the glimpse of a deindustrialized future makes clear, what lies
44 ILWCH, 84, Fall 2013
ahead may not be what we desire. In addition, the image of the mothers looking
along a rope to the future reminds us that people’s lives are shaped by forces
much larger than themselves, their families, or their neighborhoods, as Barzak
suggests by framing the piece through a description of the site by Henry
Miller. The connection and tension between past and future are made concrete
in the ﬁnal lines of the piece: “My back is to the future, the wind blowing my hair
forward in waves toward the past. I dare not look over my shoulder.” 21
Like some of the photography books and exhibits that Strangleman examines,
Barzak provides clear, often beautiful descriptions of abandoned properties
in this collection, especially what he calls “the feral houses of
Youngstown.” However, his work draws our attention not only to the people
who lived and worked in those spaces but also to their historical context, to
the economic changes that led to their decline, and to the more recent
changes, including signs of rebirth, in the landscape. Barzak makes workers
and conﬂicts related to work, among workers and between workers and management,
visible in this collection. In “We Work Them Out,” he describes old
photos of steelworkers standing “with sledgehammers over their shoulders, as
if ready for battle.” While the image seems to idealize the workers of the
past, Barzak asks readers to recognize both their determination and their mistakes.
He points out that, “They ﬁght their brothers because their skins are
different,” rather than uniting to ﬁght those who were exploiting them all.
Meanwhile, the mill owners brag about how “we work them out . . . and then
get in a new batch.”22
Ultimately, Barzak reminds us, the companies treated
Youngstown the same way, pursuing a “new batch” of places in Central
America and Asia, and the displaced workers either left or became stuck.
They remain forever, sitting at their kitchen tables, but “their portraits fade a
little more each year, no matter how I try to keep them.”23
Even when these
pieces focus entirely on the past, Barzak highlights the tensions of the past,
not an idealized image, and suggests the continuing signiﬁcance of memory.
Perhaps the most romantic vision in the collection appears when Barzak
turns his attention to abandoned homes and calls on readers to recognize the
beauty in decay, beauty that is rooted in memory. He describes “the Feral
Houses of Youngstown,” long abandoned, with broken windows and stolen
aluminum siding “leaving silver insulation wrap to ﬂicker in the sunlight.”24
He invites us to pay attention to the memories these houses contain, the families
that once lived there, the life represented by an old piano with useless wires
coiling out of the lid. He highlights the connection between loss and memory:
“In their disintegration these abandoned houses have been found: we
measure love by its absence. We see what we have by what we have lost.”25
In framing his description of feral houses in this way, Barzak presents the signiﬁcance
of memory without directly evoking an image of the past. He invites us to
think about “what we have lost” without suggesting that we can or should return
to the way things were. Indeed, he spends almost no time describing the way
things once were. The point is not to compare an imagined perfect past with
an ugly or hopeless present. He writes that he has “learned how to ﬁnd decay
Narrating Past and Future 45
and disintegration, the coming apart of what was once composed, a beautiful
process, a return rather than a disappearance.”26
Decay, he suggests, can be a
resource for coming to terms with loss, and we should appreciate what it reveals.
Memory of what this place once was, of the people who lived and worked
here, resonates throughout Map of a Forgotten Valley, but the collection is not
just about remembering the past, nor even about documenting the decay of
the present. Even as Barzak describes Youngstown as “an emptied-out place,
a hollowed place,” he suggests the possibility that the city is “becoming itself”
as “we walk away from everything we’ve been and everything we’ve been
told we are, or will be, or should be.”27
In the context of the collection as a
whole, however, it’s clear that Barzak does not mean that the city can or
should forget its past. Rather, he seems to suggest that members of the community
can, like Tia and Kurt in his novel, ﬁnd beauty and potential in the deindustrialized
landscape. Barzak thus seems to be addressing those who deplore the
condition of the deindustrialized landscape, even as he acknowledges the grim
conditions within the city. He describes the community’s gestures toward creative
renewal:
What used to be a city is disappearing, and in its place are backyards with vegetable
gardens, and down the street a new farmer’s market, and across the way,
a ragtag community theater is going to do Shakespeare in the park, even if the
park has been abandoned by the city, and there are women now, three or sometimes
four of them, who stand on corners singing spirituals, and a group of
African American teenage boys, who tap dance down the main street of downtown,
where no bowling ball will ever touch them.28
Barzak’s reading of this more hopeful landscape, much like his use in the novel
of characters who are involved in revitalizing Youngstown by valuing what has
been abandoned, highlights the difference between depopulated images of deindustrialized
places and those that feature not just the shadows of earlier inhabitants
but also the living presence of those who are here now. He also implicitly
rejects models of economic development that focus solely on attracting new
business to the area or that celebrate the renewal of the business district
while ignoring conditions in the neighborhoods––narratives of renewal that
have had signiﬁcant play in Youngstown over the past decade.29
In both the
novel and the creative nonﬁction, Barzak shows how the past shapes the
present in ways that highlight both loss and possibility, and he ﬁnds hope in
the creative new efforts by the city’s working class to design its own future
within the city’s ruins.
Detroit writer Michael Zadoorian offers a more skeptical vision of how the
past and the present connect. In his 2009 collection The Lost Tiki Palaces of
Detroit, the city’s landscape, famously marked by a few exquisitely restored
landmarks standing amidst the empty lots and decaying buildings that photographer
Lowell Boileau has dubbed “the fabulous ruins of Detroit,”30
provides the
structure for the title story and for the book as a whole, which is divided into
46 ILWCH, 84, Fall 2013
sections referencing parts of the city. For Zadoorian and his characters, the era
of prosperity and productivity is out of reach; instead of focusing on the industrial
past, as Barzak does, Zadoorian presents the remembered city more as a
site for play, both in its heyday and in the present, three decades into the
city’s decline. Equally important, while Barzak, like most rust belt writers, ties
the decaying landscape to the loss of industry, Zadoorian emphasizes the role
of racial conﬂict in urban decline. Neither Zadoorian nor his characters
connect the race riots of 1967 to the auto industry’s move to suburban plants
starting in the 1950s but, as Thomas Sugrue has shown, the economic losses
of that process of urban deindustrialization was a primary cause of the 1967
riots.31
That history also explains why many of Zadoorian’s young white characters
view the city’s history as less about work than about entertainment. They
comment more on abandoned movie theaters and nightclubs than on empty factories,
and several use the deindustrialized landscape as their own playground,
defacing or breaking into empty buildings for their own entertainment. They are
fascinated with the decaying city, though they approach its history with varying
degrees of understanding and complexity. Through their eyes, Zadoorian challenges
us to consider not only the signiﬁcance of urban decay but also the problems
inherent in clinging to a naı¨ve and idealized vision of the past. For him, the
past is both a tool for deﬁning oneself and a potential trap, even as its legacy
persists.
In the title story, the narrator rides a bus along Woodward Avenue, the
primary artery through Detroit that is also, according to the Woodward
Avenue Action Association, “the birthplace of the automobile industry, incredible
music, world-class attractions and the sites of countless events.”32
On his
way to an unidentiﬁed job, he passes and comments on the histories of three
long-abandoned Polynesian-style restaurants “nestled among the cathedrals of
twentieth-century V-8 Hydraulic Commerce.”33
He describes how the ﬁrst
“tiki palace” was built at a moment of economic expectation in the late
1960s, “to be the largest South Seas supper club of its kind in the Midwest,”
with a “lavish . . . Lucite bar-top with 1,250 Chinese coins embedded in it and
bar tables made from brass hatch covers from trading schooners . . . a mountainette
of volcanic lava . . . a grotto lush with palm trees and ﬂaming tikis.” But, he
notes, it opened “barely a month after the worst race riot in Detroit’s history. It
lasted not quite two years.”34
As the bus continues down Woodward, it passes
the famously-restored Fox Theater, and the narrator notes how he “should
not be able to see three blocks behind a major building to spot another, but
behind the Fox, save for a ﬁre station and an abandoned party store, there
are mostly empty ﬁelds.”35
He also passes a block where loft condos are being
built in old buildings across the street from “a giant new skyscraper built by a
software billionaire” and a building that has been painted with polka dots as
part of a public art project. Zadoorian’s mini-tour of Detroit highlights the contradictions
of contemporary economic development efforts there. Renovations
of classic structures that represent the city’s automaking history, which once
Narrating Past and Future 47
made it one of the most prosperous in the US, contrast with new construction
funded by a new, less labor-intensive industry. Both share the landscape with
a project initiated by an African-American Detroit native and former autoworker,
Tyree Guyton, whose work, according to his website, “has drawn attention
to the plight of Detroit’s forgotten neighborhoods and spurred discussion and
action.”36
The description emphasizes the limitations of contemporary efforts
to rebuild the city amid persistent economic struggles. A few new buildings or
upscale renovations cannot erase decades of poverty and decline from the landscape,
nor are such efforts disconnected from a more grassroots, alternative
approach, one that, like Barzak’s church renovation or farmer’s market, is at
least as much about emotional recovery as it is about economic opportunity.
The narrator is clearly both knowledgeable about and interested in
Detroit’s history, though his own relationship with the city’s past is complicated.
After noting the failure of several tiki palaces, he tells how, as part of a “drunken
tiki frenzy” with friends one night, he pried a terra-cotta tile off the fac¸ade of
Trader Vic’s. That building is scheduled to be demolished soon, he tells us,
“but it’s been a ghost for decades.” The memory of his “offense to the tiki
gods” is just one of what he calls “these agonies of all our pasts,” which will
“soon be ground into dust in the middle of the night, the preferred time to
start the demolition of historic buildings here in Detroit.” While the narrator
regrets the loss of these structures, he also sees the change as inevitable, a reﬂection
of the city’s racial and economic tensions. He notes how the demise of the
tiki palaces was tied to the 1967 race riots and to white ﬂight: “When the white
folks disappeared from downtown Detroit at the end of the workday in the seventies,
the clubs and restaurants foundered.” He also notes signs of change:
“New buildings push out the grand old ones, like bullies in a big rush. When
you go downtown at night there are people there now, suburban people,
city people, doing things, spending money.”37
In these two sentences,
Zadoorian highlights the narrator’s ambivalence. The new buildings are
“bullies,” but there’s also new economic activity as people return to the city.
But Detroit’s economic and racial tensions are not entirely part of the past.
Interspersed with the description and backstory of the deindustrialized landscape
is the narrator’s experience with an African-American man on the bus.
Soon after the man, whom the narrator describes as “homeless,” boards the
bus, he begins to say, repeatedly, “I’m invisible,” a claim that gains validity as
the other bus riders do their best to ignore him. Even as the narrator avoids
making eye contact with the man, he reﬂects that the statement is “strange
and existential––an awl to the heart,” and he thinks that the homeless man
“understands his condition.”38
The moment is ironic as the narrator’s interpretation
of the man’s behavior highlights his own education and allows him to distance
himself, even as he reassures himself that he understands and is
sympathetic with the homeless man’s situation. As the bus continues along
Woodward, the homeless man begins to focus his attention on the narrator,
who is the only white person on board, announcing that there’s a “motherfucker
on our bus” and demands, “Why don’t you go back to Livonia?”39
While other
48 ILWCH, 84, Fall 2013
riders sigh in exasperation at the man’s taunts, and one woman scolds him, no
one takes action until he drops his pants and waves his penis around, at which
point the bus driver kicks him off. The story closes with everyone on the bus
laughing together about the incident, and while that may defuse the tension
on the bus, it does not erase the signiﬁcance of the racial and economic
tension in the story.
Throughout the story, Zadoorian juxtaposes the deindustrialized landscape
and the story of its decline, including its difﬁcult history of racial conﬂict, with
evidence of both change and persistence. New buildings and restorations, the
return of economic activity, even the white narrator’s presence on the bus as
he rides to work, all suggest a city that is beginning to recover, while empty
lots, abandoned buildings, and the tension between the African-American
homeless man and the white narrator, who seems to be on his way to a
low-wage job, make clear that the city’s past is still very much present.
Change may well be coming, but the racial conﬂict and economic challenges
of the city’s history threaten the efforts to create a bright new future. On the
other hand, as the narrator makes clear, much of the city’s history deserves to
be preserved. Demolition and erasure will not make the past invisible here.
The past, like the homeless man on the bus and the narrator’s stories about
the tiki palaces and the city’s racial divides, will persist no matter how many
big skyscrapers replace fondly-remembered old buildings.
Zadoorian’s stories also suggest the possibility of misreading and even
exploiting the past. The narrator of “The World of Things,” a middle-class professional
in his late thirties, collects early 1960s furniture and decorative objects,
from the period before the Detroit riots of 1967, the year he was born. His family
stayed in their “good white middle-class Detroit neighborhood” after the riots,
and he is at once puzzled and proud that his parents remained in their home,
“even after it became a neighborhood of crack houses––main streets lined
with the faded exoskeletons of burned-out mom-and-pop stores and boarded-up
car dealerships with weeds growing between the concrete slabs where bright
Chryslers once stood.”40
While he understands the signiﬁcance of Detroit’s
history, noting that “the American dream changed in Detroit after the ’67
riots,”41
he is ﬁxated on the period before the riots, viewing the late ‘50s and
early ‘60s as an innocent era before conﬂict and struggle.
The story follows him as he cleans out his mother’s home after she dies. He
is excited to inherit her belongings, especially the items she’d kept in the basement––an
old couch, old lamps––all things her son had desired for his collection.
The narrator viewed these items as ideal examples of ‘60s style, which for him
and his friends is the ultimate in cool, but his mother had always refused to
even let him look in the basement. When he ﬁnally goes down the stairs after
her death, he ﬁnds the unusable, rotting, mildew covered, and moth-eaten
decaying remains of his family’s former life. His mother has left him a note,
asking whether all these things he wanted so badly are really “everything you
wanted? Is it all as amusing as you hoped?”42
The note seems aimed not only
at the narrator but also at the reader, inviting us to rethink any nostalgia we
Narrating Past and Future 49
may have for the heyday of industrial cities or the prosperous postwar era. The
past, Zadoorian suggests here, is not something to collect or idealize, even
though the present may seem dull or difﬁcult in comparison. At the end of
the story, the narrator gives away or sells his once-prized collection, preparing
to create his own middle-class suburban life, complete with “a beige plaid
couch, an entertainment center, wall-to-wall carpeting.” His closing prediction,
“we will be happy,”43
is not entirely persuasive, however, and Zadoorian invites
us to question the narrator’s vision of a new future entirely detached from the
past. His fascination with the past has, after all, deﬁned this character. As the
reference to the “beige-plaid couch” suggests, without that idealized version
of his past, it’s difﬁcult to imagine an interesting future for him. His version
may have been a fabrication, but the real history of his family, with all its rot
and dust, cannot just be tossed aside. The image remains with the reader as a
reminder of the problematic persistence of the past.
A similar shift from a hipster ﬁxation on the past to embracing a modest but
potentially promising future occurs in “Spelunkers,” narrated by a freelance
photographer who runs a website called “The Paris of the Midwest Is
Crumbling,”44
featuring photographs of the insides of abandoned but signiﬁcant
Detroit buildings, which he describes as “fucked-up shit,” along with comments
and stories about their history. The site is, as he describes it, “uber-urban,
echt-industrial, proto-apocalyptic, rustbelt cool, or whatever the underground
magazines who worship Detroit are calling us these days.”45
Like the narrator
of “The World of Things,” he’s interested in the past because it’s cool, even as
he disdains the very idea that the past has become cool. He also thinks about
both the original and the current uses of the buildings, seeing in both evidence
of human emotions and interactions. Standing in an abandoned movie theater,
he thinks, “you can tell that people laughed and cried and applauded here,
smiled at each other. They threw popcorn and drank Pepsi and broke their
teeth on Jujubes.” He goes on, offering a comment on the building that might
apply to the entire city: “It’s awful that this would even happen to a building.
This should never happen anywhere. But I see something like this and I want
to try to ﬁnd the beauty in it, make some sense of it, give it a reason, ﬁll it
with something.”46
Even as he feels the impulse to make the decaying landscape
meaningful, if not by repurposing it then at least by making its presence visible
through his website, he is confused by other people’s efforts to make their presence
known within the abandoned structures. He understands that the grafﬁti
covering the walls shows that people in the present “wanted to be heard, to
offer proof that they existed,” but his ambivalence is revealed when he adds
that he doesn’t quite understand why they would come to “a deserted, broken
place to do it.”47
He doesn’t recognize that his own work might function in
the same way, as a means of making himself visible and expressing his own perspective
rather than as a way of preserving and engaging with local history.
The limitations of his engagement with the past become clear as the story
unfolds. As he becomes involved with Jenna, a grad student who’s studying grafﬁti
as art, he stops visiting abandoned buildings. Like the minister’s daughter
50 ILWCH, 84, Fall 2013
and the bookstore owner in Barzak’s One for Sorrow, she represents a different
way of thinking about things, and he begins to rethink his life. At the end of the
story, after having largely given up his spelunking habit, he goes on one last
expedition, and in the closing scene, as he looks out over the city from the
roof of the Fine Arts Building, which is slated to be torn down soon, his observations
of the landscape clearly reﬂect the direction of his own life:
Before long, I started to relax. First by focusing on the horizon, velvet black and
studded with golden light; then on the darkened carcasses of the empty buildings I
had explored –all that history soon to be gone. Finally, my eyes settled on the new
buildings going up, their shiny exteriors, work sites mercury bright even in the
nighttime, the cranes and other leviathans that move earth and girders from one
place to another. I saw that the old city was going away.48
While his vision of a new future focuses on light and movement, images that
suggest new energy, in the context of this collection, and given the muchdiscussed
reality of Detroit’s ongoing struggle to redeﬁne itself and create
new economic opportunity, it’s difﬁcult not to read this closing comment as
somewhat ironic. Like the “beige-plaid couch” in “The World of Things,” the
image of the building sites invokes a future that may not fulﬁll the characters’
vision. The “shiny exteriors” and “mercury bright” work sites offer an illusion
of signiﬁcant economic change, but the disappearance of the old city is not
necessarily desirable, as several stories in the collection suggest. The narrator
may be ready to focus his life more toward the future than the past, but it is
the past that has made this new life possible. The deindustrialized landscape
of Detroit, after all, led him into the relationship that is now drawing him
away from his fascination with the past.
As in Barzak’s novel and creative nonﬁction pieces, the industrial past
has multiple potential meanings in Zadoorian’s stories. It can function as a
kind of restraint, holding back a character’s growth, as with the narrator of
“Spelunkers,” or even draw someone into depression and inertia, as it does
for Adam in One for Sorrow. At the same time, the past can provide a resource
for creating something new––fulﬁlling work, as in the used bookstore; the creative
uses of abandoned spaces we see in Map of a Forgotten Valley, and new
relationships, as in “Spelunkers.” For Barzak and Zadoorian, the past is never
simple, and their texts warn readers against investing in idealized versions of
history while also making clear that it cannot be easily discarded.
Barzak and Zadoorian use images of deindustrialized landscapes that have
become familiar in photography and the media, but as writers they have the
advantage of imaginative narrative. Because they present these landscapes in
the context of stories, using landscape as the setting rather than the focal
point of the text, their narratives show how people draw upon memory––their
own and those inherited from their communities––to construct complex meanings
about places and their history. When they invite us to look at deindustrialized
spaces, the echoes of the past and the beauty of decay are not the whole the
Narrating Past and Future 51
story. Barzak can thus describe an old photograph or an empty lot, inviting us to
recognize everything that it tells us about the past but, unlike a photographer, he
also shows how characters respond to what they see. He connects multiple
images, not simply by placing them side-by-side but by showing how a character
or narrator moves through them. Such moves make the past dynamic and
complex in ways that many of the more static visual representations cannot.
Zadoorian highlights the contrast between the imagined version of the past
and all of the ways that the present both changes and perpetuates the way
things were. He imagines how the spelunker views an abandoned building as
both a representation of history and a site for expression and exploitation. In
this way, these texts offer a retort to the cliche´ that a picture is worth a thousand
words. In a thousand words, they demonstrate, a writer can offer multiple ways
of looking at the deindustrialized landscape.
By setting their stories in the deindustrialized landscapes of Youngstown
and Detroit and, even more importantly, by tracing their characters’ interactions
with those landscapes, Barzak and Zadoorian make visible the contested and
productive relationship between the past and the present. The very physical
presence of the landscape, and in Detroit, especially, the way that landscape
combines old and new elements, highlights the interdependency of decline
and renewal. These landscapes contain more than economic loss, more than
the evocative decay that makes them such appealing images to photographers
and media producers, more than the memories of past lives that make them
meaningful to those who remember the good old days before the mills closed.
They also provide a framework for thinking about how those who have inherited
these places, both individuals and communities, imagine their own lives.
Through deindustrialized landscapes, writers, their characters, and their
readers are challenged to consider not only how the past has inﬂuenced them
and their communities, but also how the past shapes contemporary ideas
about and strategies for economic change. Their work critiques idealized
visions of these cities in their industrial heyday, highlighting the way those
ideals ignore the problems of the past, but they also challenge visions of the
future that promise a new prosperity––one that leaves most of the working
class behind––through the erasure of the past. They offer, instead, a more
modest vision of a future that uses the past as a resource for survival, adaptation,
and the development of human connections that, they suggest, may be as valuable
as economic opportunities. In other words, they offer a distinctly workingclass
representation of the continuing inﬂuence of deindustrialization.
Historians may be tempted to dismiss these creative texts as trivial. As a
historian once told me, as far as she was concerned, literature was “dessert,”
something entertaining and enjoyable but not substantive. However, as
another historian, David Roediger, has argued, literary texts can provide
unique insight into complex historical themes.49
As imaginative narratives of
present-day characters who have inherited the memory of industrial work and
deindustrialization, these texts reveal the way contemporary people––the
writers as well as their characters––make sense of the past. Like all
52 ILWCH, 84, Fall 2013
representations, these texts are valuable not as documentary evidence of what
happened but as interpretive evidence of why what happened matters today.
Especially because of the way Barzak and Zadoorian construct the past as a
resource, their work asks us to engage critically and creatively with the
meaning of history. The historical event of deindustrialization matters today
not only because of what happened when plants closed but also because it continues
to affect people and places. Those who have inherited the economic
struggles and blighted landscapes of deindustrialization have the opportunity
to use the complicated past and the often conﬂicted present for their own purposes.
The best literary efforts, like the work of Barzak and Zadoorian, treat
the past as a problematic resource that both shapes and highlights the contradictions
of the present and the future.
NOTES
1. As John Russo and I argue in Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown
(Lawrence, KS, 2002), after the major wave of steel mill closings in the late ‘70s and early
‘80s, we can identify several distinct phases in the representations of Youngstown, ﬁrst as a
site of loss, then as a site of failure, and ultimately as a site of corruption.
2. As James Rhodes and John Russo note in a forthcoming article, “Shrinking Smart?
Urban Redevelopment and Shrinkage in Youngstown, Ohio”(Urban Geography (2013)
34(3):305–326), however, this narrative does not adequately describe what is happening in
Youngstown. But the accuracy of these images is almost beside the point. Regardless of what
is really happening in Detroit and Youngstown, they are deﬁned in public discourse as sites
of deindustrialization.
3. See Tim Strangleman’s piece in this issue.
4. See Ch. 3 of Steeltown, which examines the difﬁculty many Youngstown residents felt in
simply deﬁning who they and their city were without steelwork.
5. Both of the ads, which ran during the Super Bowl (the most watched and most hyped
television advertising event in the US each year), are available on Chrysler’s YouTube
channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/chrysler?feature=watch, which ads new videos regularly.
6. The Chrysler ads, together with similar marketing efforts focused on Braddock, PA, no
doubt deserve their own examination, and I plan to include this in the larger project on twentyﬁrst
century representations of deindustrialization.
7. See Steeltown, Epilogue.
8. A ﬁlm based on the novel is due out in 2014 from Hunting Lane Films.
9. Christopher Barzak, One for Sorrow (New York, 2007), 227.
10. Ibid, 227.
11. Ibid, 227.
12. Ibid, 236.
13. Ibid, 228.
14. Ibid, 232.
15. Ibid, 246.
16. Ibid, 276.
17. Ibid, 277.
18. Ibid, 276.
19. Ibid, 277.
20. Christopher Barzak, “Map of a Forgotten Valley,” New Haven Review 7 (November,
2010), online.
21. Christopher Barzak, “The B&O: Crossroads of Time and Space,” Muse 12 (January
2011), 5.
22. Barzak, “Map,” 18. The line quotes Dr. William Hudnut, pastor of the First
Presbyterian Church. The story of Hudnut’s visit to the mill is told on a Mahoning Valley
Narrating Past and Future 53
Historical Society webpage, http://www.mahoninghistory.org/wdyk27-millwork.htm, and is
depicted in a poster created by the Bread and Roses project of SEIU/1199, as part of the
union’s series on labor and art.
23. Ibid, 18.
24. Ibid, 22.
25. Ibid, 21.
26. Ibid, 22.
27. Ibid, 13, 15.
28. Ibid, 14.
29. See Rhodes and Russo.
30. In the mid-1990s, as artists’ fascination with deindustrialized landscapes was still a
fairly new phenomenon, Boileau created a website called “The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit”
that combined images of decaying and repurposed old buildings with narratives about their
history and a very active discussion forum focused on remembering the city’s past and advocating
for preservation. http://www.detroityes.com/home.htm.
31. Sugrue, Thomas J., “From Motor City to Motor Metropolis: How the Automobile
Industry Reshaped Urban America.” Automobile in American Life and Society, online.
32. Woodward Avenue Action Association, http://www.woodwardavenue.org/.
33. Zadoorian, Michael, The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit (Detroit, 2009), 193.
34. Ibid, 193–194.
35. Ibid, 196.
36. The Art of Tyree Guyton, http://www.tyreeguyton.com.
37. Ibid, 199.
38. Ibid, 195, italics original.
39. Ibid, 197, 199.
40. Ibid, 48.
41. Ibid, 46.
42. Ibid, 56, italics original.
43. Ibid, 60.
44. Ibid, 169, italics original.
45. Ibid, 170, italics original.
46. Ibid, 179, italics original.
47. Ibid, 177.
48. Ibid, 192.
49. David Roediger, “‘More Than Two Things’: The State of the Art of Labor History,” in
New Working-Class Studies, eds. John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, (Ithaca, NY, 2005), 32–41.
54 ILWCH, 84, Fall 2013
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permission.