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Lessons from the Heartland

By Ed Weintrob, Paper founder
The Brooklyn Paper

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DUBUQUE, IOWA — The deli man in Des Moines said that when he was in Brooklyn a few years ago for a family wedding, he pulled into a gas station, got out of his minivan, put the hose in his tank and … nothing.

From out of nowhere, a scruffy-looking youngster approached and grunted, “Gimme $10, Gimme $10.”

Now, the deli man’s a lifelong Midwesterner and this was his first trip to New York. And he needed gas, badly. When the pump wouldn’t pump, he turned over the cash, figuring the boy was shaking him down, something he’d been conditioned to expect in the Big Apple.

At last, the hose filled with gas; but when the pump read $10, the flow stopped and the minivan, whose tank normally would swallow $30 or so at a clip, was not fully satisfied. That’s when the deli man realized it wasn’t a shakedown — he had just prepaid for his gasoline.

Yesterday, on the road from Lacrosse, Wisc., to Dubuque, I handed my credit card to the clerk at a gas station and asked for $20 on pump No. 3. The lady punched some buttons behind her counter, then returned my card. “I don’t know how to do this,” she said. “You can’t pay before you pump.”

So I’m not in New York anymore. Actually, the hours-long rides through fields of corn and soybean had already made that clear.

Other things I’m encountering in my Midwest trip — an atypical family vacation with Celia and our three children, two weeks mostly in Iowa, with a few days in Minnesota and Wisconsin — remind me of home, and of possibilities lost and found.

The last couple of days we’ve been here in Dubuque, a Mississippi waterfront community very much a part of Iowa’s history and of America’s. Dubuque’s civic leaders clearly have pride in their community and a vision for its resurrection; but it’s obvious that the currents they are battling aren’t only in the river.

The city’s compact downtown district is filled with nicely maintained historic houses and low-rise commercial structures, but the dominant business theme is “Space to Lease.” A couple of blocks away — past the divide of a freeway — is a waterfront being remade as the Port of Dubuque, with a delightful promenade, convention center, casino, waterpark hotel and, most satisfying, the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium (a recently expanded interactive experience that reminds us just how dated is the aquarium in Coney Island).

In Downtown Dubuque there is business going on; office workers fill a few attractive cafes on Main Street for lunch, and the streets are clean and safe, but there’s not a lot of life out there. What there is are parking garages, on a strip where department stores once thrived. Main Street, which had been made into a pedestrian mall, was reopened to auto traffic a few years ago because the pedestrians stopped coming; now, even the cars are scarce.

Business has shifted to the west end of town, a five-minute car ride from downtown, where strip malls and an enclosed mall bustle day and night (although nighttime in Dubuque clearly comes earlier than in New York).

Dubuque is a beautiful city with hope, but its downtown — like most of the small-town downtowns I’ve seen on this trip — may be beyond repair, slain mostly by the malls but also by schizophrenic urban planners who find it difficult to reconcile historic values with modern functionality (the lead story in this morning’s Telegraph Herald deals with plans to demolish two historic blocks to build an elementary school).

Is the convenience of one-stop shopping at Wal-Mart, or Target, or the latest strip-mall, worth a city’s soul? It’s not too far fetched to ask if Brooklyn, just now getting its first real taste of big box America, will avoid Dubuque’s fate.


©2004 The Brooklyn Paper

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