PREFACE TO FALL TOWN
It’s more archive than book, in fact, it’s an archive in book form.
My preference is a tight edit, no fat, and leaden picks, but Fall Town is fat with pictures, and it’s because it’s probably more of an archive. If I have enough time, in the future, I’ll put a coffee table book together that is truly I purely photo book. On this site, Sullage I and II, Steel, Ice and Jersey Run are examples of the coffee table book edit.
I don’t think photography is necessarily built for a long form, in the sense it’s a one shot deal, usually trying to compress levels of symbolism into aphoristic sight. Nevertheless, these books began in 1978 and continue, but the long form gives more of an idea of both scale and length of time that occurred before this city and others like it, began to turn the corner on the Rust Belt moniker, which took place and began around 2010. It’s the scale of the unrelenting deindustrialization, that in and of itself is serious enough, without adding the social, political and cultural legacy of that, whether exploding into the populism most personified by Trump, leading to an international movement of nationalism by certain countries, but personified as well by religions and Christian Nationalism, or, the opioid devastation, often blamed on Mexico, the lack of a wall and Democrats, but actually entirely our responsibility, since we cleverly hide the actual truth that Americans consume eighty per cent of all the world’s opioids. Sometimes we are the enemy, not those who don’t live here, that we further define as an enemy with a wall. In 2021, we still set new records with over 108,00 overdose deaths, eighty per cent of which were opioids, and this city and the sate it’s in are leaders in this social ill.
Before all this and the presence of real towns and cities, not many people found the shores of Lake Erie, along the northeast quadrant of, what is now, Ohio, a good place to establish a town or culture, until the industrious folks of Connecticut, showed up. There weren’t any big Indian wars. The Erie, once the sole inhabitants had disappeared right before the Connecticut surveyors arrived, and Moses Cleaveland, moved easily to his target, the western boundary of Connecticut’s, Western Reserve, which stretched directly east from Connecticut.
The city became know as the Forest City, and, would, become more and more that, after 1980, until it became the Ingrown City. Before the Europeans not many inhabitants took hold here on Lake Erie, not the best place to live with lake-effect, and bad-ass winters, swampy shorelines, dense forests, but a single tribe called the Erie, found it a home for centuries, the vanished in the 1600s.
The Erie people (Eriechronon, Riquéronon, Erielhonan, Eriez, Nation du Chat) were indigenous people, historically, living on the south shore of Lake Erie. An Iroquoian group, they lived in what is now western New York, northwestern Pennsylvania, and northern Ohio before 1658.
In the document, Relation of 1653/54 stated: “They [the Iroquois] tell us . . . that the Eries have taken arms against them (we call the Eries the Cat Nation, because there is in their country a prodigious number of wildcat), referring to the eastern puma or panther no doubt, and it’s also said to mean “raccoon nation,” perhaps in reference to a totemic animal, but to anyone who has spent time in Ohio, the raccoon is extremely common, and, there were probably more raccoons in northeast Ohio than people up until the 1700s when the Europeans arrived in larger and larger quantities.
The thing about the Erie nation is that, by the time the Europeans showed up, with their ability to document, the tribe was gone. Thus, you had a long running ancient tribe who lived peacefully along the shores of Southern Lake Erie and in the forest south of there, until conflict arose in the 1600s with other tribes entangled with the French and British. Nothing is known really about the Eries, beyond the fact they were the only people who lived in an area where Fall Town now exists, and began as a city when Mr. Cleaveland reached the Cuyahoga River, checked it out and went back home, from, what was considered the western border of Connecticut.
The Forest City would live up to its name in the most humiliating and shameful ways possible. Lately it’s been a place that could easily answer the question what would happen, if a city that had grown significantly and swiftly, into a major metropolis, were left with no maintenance from lack of funds, untouched over a long period of time, and how it would look? It’s an organic descent, that went on way too long until they were too many pockets of death and stagnation, by being allowed to follow its own extremely tragic logic, to the end. In this city of loss, we see what happens when a city is let go, and how swiftly nature, rust, dissolution can take over the buildings, architecture and infrastructure, that stand near to their own disappearance, experiencing the social and historical depravity in a continual bottoming out, even twenty years after the fact that you had bottomed out already.
Neighborhoods, over half abandoned, were in places once alive with factories, that are now only brownfields, where the houses and homes are the last to go, many disappearing in organic descent and nature, over a very long period of time, others torched, scrapped and taken over for other purposes.
Few factories remain, just houses, left in organic descent until the era of mass demolition began in 2010 with federal funds, and, still, after, 12 years of continual chopping, cutting and trimming, a lot of abandoned homes are still here, although, significantly reduced by recent demolitions, so much so, that the empty spaces are piling up quicker than the abandonment.
The conclusions to selling out the working-class, and their city, a blue-collar one, if there ever was one – were devastating ones because of no money,no in-migration, much out-migration, stagnation, desecration, death humiliation and, in general, the Blue-Collar Holocaust, that has been playing out since the late 1970s. A great inventive culture, largely working-class, with amazing neighborhoods, whose architecture included great churches, ethnic halls, commercial districts comprised of beautifully built banks and shops, etc., and it falls into decay, even depravity, especially after crack, lit up an already dead city like napalm.
There is still industry today, But not much new industry. Because the land has already been developed and what’s available needs remediation,making it difficult to keep and attract manufacturers. Modern companies need wide-open spaces as well as low taxes and utilities, and clean land that doesn’t need remediation, and, the surrounding counties is where manufacturing often goes for low taxes, cheaper utilities, lower wages, and building costs. The massive Intel chip plant in Columbus, a city that still has large, clean open spaces due to its large size, in area, and square miles, is the perfect example of what’s happening with American industry.
There are very old companies left in the city, many, that eventually, simply shut down, either because the families are gone or most likely they have moved out and into a suburban or rural location.
Other old-line companies, like Parker-Hannifin or Sherwin Williams continue in growth and profitability, but the outrageous number of Fortune 500 companies that were headquartered here up until 1980, are gone.
Fall town is going under and much further down, after bottoming out, and then doing it again and again. To go that far down without war, naturaldisaster or famine, in that long of a decline is phenomenal, and for people my age, is the central theme from the experience of America’s oldest cities going from grandeur to ruin, and, into gentrification and redevelopment in our life times.
Everything would change in that historic social shift. There was a chaos that had never reached such levels. Take, for instance, the prevalence of dumps that rose through the roof, with all the vacant land and all those homes being simultaneously destroyed. On the surface, it made sense to send the chewed up remains of the city’s homes, to new fresh local dumps in neighborhoods where homes had given way to open spaces. Something that swiftly proved to be a huge mistake, often costing taxpayers, the county and city millions of dollars to clean up, because the city bought into the “recycling” myth of this sort of endeavor where 10 per cent might be recycled and the rest mounts up, until the owners, on the verge of arrest, disappear.
The eastern forests ending at the Cuyahoga where the Appalachians finally recede, gave this place the moniker, of the Forest City and when an already forested city goes belly up, the flora wastes no time in taking over, returning to its native composition.
Using Rust Belt math, if a city peaks at almost one million people, and, falls to 350,00 people with no one migrating into town, than homes abandon at similar rates, but linger, even with the big push with federal money to tear down every vacant structure in the city, as new abandoned structures are added. It ultimately adds up to a two-thirds reduction in population and an equal reduction in what that much larger, former population, called home, it’s neighborhoods, bars, churches, homes and shops, its downtown and infrastructure, where swaths of the city vanish.
Fall Town is a city that is just like many towns and cities, thus, the anonymity of the title. It’s a very specific place left unidentified. There are many like it, that went into a kind of flip and depravity that no cities in America have ever seen. Poverty drugs and violence are a few of the social consequences of no employment opportunities. If uneducated and broke, means working sixty hours a week and still not being able to pay bills in a struggle for a healthy life amid shrunken opportunity and shrunken cities, than the city will continue to sink, and, at best, become like many other cities like it, with a city of no middle or working-class, and mostly just the poor and the well-off.
If you look at the work of Charles Cushman, where he shot ghettos and abandonment in Chicago with color film, Kodachrome 25, in the 1930s through the 1950s. What I found is the the abandonment and ghetto sections of an American cities through time, all look like they could have been taken in the same year. A Victorian era building, decayed in 1935, looks about the same as the same sort of structure shot today, or yesterday.
So too, with this trilogy, begun in 1977, and continuing today.
THE INTRO’S INTRO
The same introduction is used for all three books of the trilogy, beginning in 1977. Fall Town is the third volume of the trilogy of books that began with the birth of the Rust Belt and has never quit. Since the starting point was, the golden age of American cities is disappearing, never to return, including the general Blue Collar Holocuast. It wasn’t necessary to change anything, as everything assumed came true, as prediction through experience. It’s part of America’s first Rust Belt book, begun in 1977 with Dirty Old Town.
Rust Belt cities turn ther corners at different times, and, although this city really never got there, until around 2009-2010, it began to finally head elsewhere. The service economy did take over from manufacturing. It just took particualrly long in many blue-collar cities, that are now divided between the professional and the working broke. The staggering population losses for industrial cities bottomed out now, left little of the large middle who left.
The same introduction is used throughout the 44 years of shooting this place, and it works for all the books.. Since the starting point was, the golden age of American cities is disappearing, never to return, as well as, the very beginnings of the ongoing Blue Collar Holocuast.
INTRODUCTION
“It’s never safe to be nostalgic about something until you’re absolutely certain there’s no chance of it coming back.” Bill Vaughn
“This city has as much charm as an automobile cemetery or the inside of a dynamo.” John Günter, INSIDE U.S.A., 1947
When I began to shoot pictures around 1978 the camera quite naturally became the ideal machine to capture the rapidly disappearing world of the American industrial city. Thirty-four years ago an economic sea change was beginning as an impending manufacturing divestiture gained steam. It soon became clear that the era of industrial growth that generated the golden age of American cities was coming to a halt, not to return. Back in 1978 a long Industrial Age conclusion was taking shape and I had a camera, a will-to-represent the inevitable and maybe an intractable place on this subject of old and lost American cities.
Fall Town (2003-2022) is a VIEW on one hell of a blue-collar city. A place (not Detroit) particularly emblematic of what has evolved into a decades long transformation in hundreds of towns and cities whose shape and fate was largely determined by the rise and fall of basic industry and manufacturing.
Regardless of economic changes up or down or during any time period, what used to be called the Industrial Heartland always had an endemic quality worthy of documentation. Since Rust Belt conditions kept returning (at least up until 2010) the regional qualities became more pronounced, especially in comparison to cities that ignored or jettisoned the old dominant manufacturing economy and prospered. Places like Fall Town have been negatively endowed with a rareness, originality and character that a lot of the made over consumer driven cities just don’t have. The old deeply rooted, (if snaggletoothed) industrial cities have the highest rates of nativity (lack of in-migration? lack of resources to leave?) feeding a core sense of place. The photographic draw is the endemic city geography, its bare nativity – the home factor.
Fall Town is a deliberate full frontal VIEW into the ebbing yet continued existence of a city whose roots were born in a revolution of industry 200 years ago. Fall Town looks into a lot of this lost geography over a long time. “To the bitter end”, you could say.
With no apologies, particularly during the time (1978-1998) when Rust Belt photography was not so appreciated, Fall Town concentrates almost exclusively on the old sections of the city, which, essentially was and still is the city. Although antique, if not worn-looking and overgrown with ornamental flora, the old city is not dead and it functions even while wearing away. Shooting was structured around what seemed most immediately endangered. My priorities for each site were to show it 1.) operational, 2.) occupied, 3.) closed 4.) abandoned 5.) ruined. Shooting the closed, abandoned or ruined sites was done by default. Always compelled to provide any evidence of things made of this mostly anonymous but righteous toil – particularly if I wasn’t quick enough for the predictive moment, when the subject was there in full distinction.
Seventy years ago Walter Benjamin wrote, economic and technical developments…”can reduce the wish symbols of the previous century to rubble even before the monuments representing them have crumbled.” The chosen locations, once bustling symbols of emerging modernity and opportunity in their time (and mine), may now appear archaic but still powerful in their persistence.
These former industry towns move on, perhaps a bit nostalgically confounded by becoming so different from their historic foundations, while still tied emotionally and physically to them. Forged in blue-collar ways, bound by the adversity of depopulation and poverty, they are now defined by a gnawing desire to revitalize themselves, a real inner-city demeanor and a profound sense of home. The hominess factor is particularly striking (in both occupation and dilapidation).
The work breaks down an industrial age city into its basics – factories, homes, churches, bars, machinery, bridges and shops. It’s is a catalogue of details, landscapes, and architecture of all sorts, imbued with a now faded illusion of permanence. The work will bear this out, as most places are gone or on the cusp. Not largely ruins, but mainly things near their end, but still alive. And, finally,
the work is an inventory of sites meant to investigate and preserve a specific time, and metropolitan geography as if it were a guide to the Rust Belt and a map to an immediate past that seems gone even while persisting in our presence.
After all, who believes in industry anymore?
If Fall Town illuminates the deindustrialized prelude to the technological age by recording the remnants of industrial expansion precisely at the time of their disappearance, then that’s good. The actual job was a bit more elemental. Like the city itself, my first goal was to stay alive, and then produce a document, with the best depiction I could conjure, of a city that was always in my lifetime, going, going, and never gone.
Memory is nothing if not an image. And history is theatre. A camera can be a memory machine, particularly if one’s intuition becomes fine-tuned enough to predict an object’s disappearance. I would try to aim the camera machine during moments that provided a soulful rendition. As the operator of my machine it was my decision to gather light and atmosphere without which there’s less to realize.
I’ve often asked myself, will any shot of an extinct thing have an intrinsic value? Would its value increase if it were made memorable?
And what about books of largely last things?
My thinking is that if I can make such a picture book it might have a life representing both what’s left and what’s not. It would be a FRAME on a place that was incredible and sublime both when it grew and prospered and when it fell and survived.
A period of stability beginning around 1995 almost tricked me into thinking I could finally end the declination saga, rid myself of a perceived responsibility. But classic recessions took hold in 2001 and 2008, with yet more plant closings, corporate headquarters flight, highest poverty rates, foreclosure on top of massive abandonment – the whole Rust Belt scenario piled on again. The city’s present mayor in December 2008 declared his primary objective is “to see that the city survives.”
As a Picture Man I’ve tried to keep the same city from disappearing. And in this particular sense it’s been a complete success.
The changes wrought by financial cycles in a mobile economy are quicker than ever. So sudden that many ask, even in our lives, “where have all those times gone?” One place they have gone is in my archive.
In this version of phantom city syndrome, maybe something important even vital is dismembered, but not forgotten at all. These towns still sustain, despite multiple injuries, that’s what these pictures reveal. Occupied and operational, abandoned and ruined before during and after its demise, the frame is wholesome, and it literally captures the Rust Belt dynamic in action. Accuracy and art not thought very much of as requisitely allied, important in Fall Town.
This mix, done in a cycle of constant return over many years was not the opportunity that photos are supposed to be. An oblationally challenging tour of duty, Fall Town continues to be motivated by the thought there might be some value in keeping a VIEW open to a noteworthy phase in our old industrial cities. Some are turning corners now, and becoming what they never could, others continue to fade, and there are many old and lost streets.
Put in another way, if the Mayans had cameras there’d be little debate about the rise and fall of their cities. (There would also be a record of their cities).
Speaking of – do cities die? I doubt it; at least it’s very rare. They do go through periodic sometimes-dramatic transformations. This city i shoot got ingrown, probably too much for its own good. Over time, even while shrinking, some parts redevelop, other sections cannibalize themselves and much can disappear entirely, even to the point of being replaced by the nature it originally thwarted by its growth as a city.
Maybe the notion of a city as a completely settled or stable place has died. But within the city’s inexorable transformations something essential survives – the sense of place, if only as an image.
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