Aimless Thoughts: Little Detroit
The first two people I had over to my new house were childhood friends, one of whom I’ve known since the first day of preschool. His name is Sean. He's got a website much cooler than mine and a way with words easily surpassing my own. Some notion of his, delivered in an unassuming, unconfident deadpan, inevitably ends up stuck in my head whenever he drops by.
When he saw my house for the first time, all he had to say was, “this place feels like the American Dream”. Thus began a much longer tirade and in turn an incredibly long conversation, which I desperately wish I could recall more clearly. By the end of it we were sitting out on my deck repeating the phrase, “I was out here last night with a gun in my hand, a gun in my other hand, a gun in my mouth and also a cigarette and a joint in my mouth”. On the path between Point A and Joint B were tangents about the novel House of Leaves and the mysterious crotch-height window in my den. The only clear connective tissue being, of course, that my new house is comfy and crappy.
My basement is four feet tall and came with a few unexplained scrawlings in black Sharpie. One on the far wall says, in big six-inch tall letters, “JUDGE”. Bible verses appear in the bathroom mirror when it fogs up, reminding me in the moments before I shave that the wages of sin are still death. If rain hits the roof at a certain angle the ceiling leaks in exactly one place, directly above my bed.
My living room is a gorgeous relic of the '70s, all wood grain paneling and stained glass light fixtures. A big bay window keeps my heating bills down and gets great views no matter the season. The carpet is about as soft and cozy as they come, and it sure has absorbed a lot of nicotine over the years. One wall produces a remarkable creak at anything over six miles of wind.
Most pressing is my plumbing situation. At some point between the attic and basement, the pipe connected to my toilet turns from the original metal to a do-it-yourself PVC job. Whoever did it himself neglected to fasten the two sides together. A little digging around led me to learn that a previous resident, an older man with bowel issues, had hastily installed a second toilet into the main bedroom’s closet. Which is less than two feet deep and way too close to anywhere a bed could feasibly go.
Thanks to his misadventure in DIY plumbing, my predecessor's bathroom issues live on in the form of a toilet that becomes stubborn in high winds and may eventually flood my walls with shit.
To Sean, and to myself, every one of these things is just as quintessential a piece of Americana as anything else. The rest of the puzzle is fine and dandy, I’ll take a good ball game or a slice of apple pie any day of the week. It just comes second when I think about why I love this country. First place will always belong to the world that built my house and every other town like it.
I spent most of my childhood in the twin cities of Neenah and Menasha, respectively the southernmost and central cities of Wisconsin’s Fox Cities area. Neither one is particularly interesting, especially Neenah. It’s never really had to develop an identity beyond its strong economy. Manholes produced in the Neenah Foundry can be seen throughout the United States. Paper manufacturer Kimberly-Clark and hotel chain Cobblestone have also done quite well for themselves. The Bergstrom family’s financial success is unignorable thanks to the innumerable bronze statues they’ve donated to the city.
Overwhelming success spanning the city’s entire history has left most of Neenah tame and upper-class. McMansions, overpriced modern apartments and cookie-cutter planned development abound here. They have real mansions, too, and I’ll admit they’re quite gorgeous. One has been converted into a museum primarily concerned with the display of historical paperweights. There’s an easy joke there, but I can’t find it in me to slight a weird niche museum.
Other attractions include ample public green space, most of which is pretty nice. Wilderness Park is scenic in every season, and most of the surrounding suburbs are pleasantly walkable if a little bland. Memorial Park down by the high school is another good short trail through the woods, and either Doty or Riverside are great options for nice easy riverside strolls. The most recently constructed of these trails, and by some distance the longest on offer, is the Loop the Lake Trail.
The Loop the Lake Trail is a three-mile loop around Little Lake Butte De Morts, a wide elbow of the Fox River with three cities on its shore: Neenah, Menasha and Fox Crossing (formerly the Town of Menasha). Presently it’s an uncontroversial community staple, affording residents easier commutes, expedited downtown access and easy exercise. You’d be hard pressed to find somebody who took issue with it. That’s now. Less than ten years ago it was beset with construction delays and came to symbolize government overreach as the city tore down homes to accommodate its arrival. A few decades before that, all there was was a pipe dream that started and ended blocks from Neenah city limits.
To make a long story short, the Neenah-Menasha area's rail infrastructure just isn't what it used to be. Passenger services had abandoned the area by the ‘70s, and two decades down the line most factories were switching over to trucks. This left the cities with a lot of abandoned rail infrastructure, including one very lucky old trestle bridge. Situated as it was between Menasha and Fox Crossing, this trestle was already how many young locals got from one to the other. Turning it into a trail made so much sense, and it almost couldn’t have been more conveniently located. The Fox Crossing trailhead was mostly unused land in the midst of a quiet neighborhood. Every scrap that didn’t belong to somebody was quickly developed into the sometimes absurdly picturesque Fritse Park.
Menasha’s trailhead was connected to the Menasha Lock, part of a system of historically important locks on the Fox. Taken in isolation I have to say the Lock is a fairly impressive site. A brick wall by the trailhead features impressive, detailed signage and a sizable art installation. It’s a little worse for wear, but honestly really nice if you ignore… literally every other feature of your surroundings. See, the Lock is in the part of town my friends and I used to call “Little Detroit”, a significant blemish on a city locals know as Metrasha.
Places like Little Detroit aren’t hard to get to. It begins in Neenah, about a block down from the YMCA and carries on across the same side of Commercial as it runs into Tayco. It's literally one turn off the main drag. On foot, even after the Loop the Lake project introduced a whole new bridge and trailhead sidestepping the Lock entirely, it’s not like they got rid of the old one. These days it’s almost vestigial, used only by the residents of its own neighborhood, but it’s still fully accessible to anybody who’s curious.
The new trailhead is also kind of a moot point, because it’s still firmly in LD territory. The neighborhood’s centerpiece is the bedraggled but stubbornly comfy Shepherd Park, directly bordering a waste treatment plant. The trail also wraps itself around the plant, and one side of that route is the prettiest bit of the entire Loop. An alternate route leads you through the neighborhoods and may even lead you through an alley between backyards and a foundry. People have driveways connecting to the alley, houses facing other streets. It’s a funky setup in a neighborhood full of funky setups, old garages, active industrial buildings and weird-ass yard decorations. When I was a kid some dude used to skewer doll’s heads on his fence. He’s long since gone but I’m happy to see the guy with the lighted PVC cross is still around.
In so many words, it’s not hard to figure out what this place is like. What's less straightforward is why it’s like that. Menasha’s got a complicated history, no part being less straightforward than its decline. Reasons vary, and vary in importance depending on who you ask.
Location’s a big one. Placed between Appleton and Neenah, it has nowhere to expand outwards, nowhere to put more modern suburbs or commercial areas. Nowhere for new people to go, which is very apparent looking at a population graph*. It’s stuck with the infrastructure it already has, infrastructure from a time when Menasha proudly called itself the Industrial City. When folks in Neenah owned factories in Menasha, staffed by both cities’ lower classes.
Funny then that, like Little Detroit, the factories are something the Industrial City seem to want to draw your attention away from. Almost every shot of the trestle bridge you'll find online is shot or cropped to obscure every factory you can see from it. Like almost all of industrial America, Menasha is stuck at a weird crossroads. Industry is moving from American cities to other countries with fewer labor laws, and vast swathes of this country have been left to find a suitable economic replacement. Oftentimes that comes in the form of half-hearted gentrification efforts at the expense of the working class, who made these cities what they were. In politics you often hear of the vanishing middle class, the vanishing working homeowner, touted in the abstract. Walking through Little Detroit made it feel real again. This is a place where you can watch the blue-collar homeowner lose opacity in real time.
Between homes in LD you’ll find a number of ex-industrial structures, mostly still finding work in other fields. The office building in the old Noffke Lumber yard now houses an RC racetrack. Another building, a little round-roofed warehouse, has been home to a dodgy boat repair service for as long as I can remember. Many of the neighborhood's decrepit garages and depots seem to be acting as garages for renters. One especially odd structure, two stories tall and built on a hill, has a semi dock on the second level and a garage door on the first. There’s a basketball hoop above it and a garbage can to the side, so it’s almost certainly in use. Gotta wonder what it looks like inside.
The houses are just as odd. Here be monsters, and I think they ate any local home inspectors. This is a world of gnarled staircases to upper apartments with gravity-defying AC units. It’s a land of busted foundations and broken windows patched with whatever the landlord had lying around. Some homes have well-manicured grass, lovely little walkways and even a couple statues. Other yards are full of scrap metal, trash bags and crusty childrens’ toys.
Two homes, almost directly facing one another, have vending machines beside their driveways. One is a full-sized Ocean Spray machine with a Domino's car sign on it. The other, a comparatively diminutive Coke machine, pristine cherry-red paint sticking out loud and clear amid a backdrop of conifers and newly installed white fences - this house is fairly modern and currently for sale, if you’re in the market. It’s about the prettiest thing you’ll see in Little Detroit, and it sure as hell stands out next to its brother across the street. That place is old and scrubby with a big ol’ gravel driveway and a “Beware of Dog” sign. Those signs are pretty common around here. I pet one of the dogs I was meant to be wary of. He was a cute little guy, had a lot more bark than bite. Which could easily be said of Little Detroit on the whole, come to think of it.
Not far from the Lock, at the apex of the neighborhood’s two main roads, is Scanlon Park. It ain’t much to look at. There’s a slide, some swings, some grass. Couple nice big evergreens over a few benches and a bubbler. The place is comfy and crappy. On my second walk I even sat down and spent a little time with Kurt Vonnegut. Never did I feel threatened, in the Scanlon neighborhood or any other part of Little Detroit. At least not in the broad daylight. I know my parents taught me to avoid the Scanlon Park area at night for a reason. But I also know how complicated these places are. It runs a lot deeper than monsters coming out at night.
Growing up I had a neighbor who made meth, and down the road from him was a guy who made bombs. Both of them had beef with the guy who moved to Milwaukee fleeing gambling debts. At least one was a sex offender with a son less than ten years old following suit. You wouldn’t know any of that if you’d never lived here. Without the context long-term residency brings, Little Detroit was the platonic ideal of the working middle class. Kids were always playing out in the streets. Between every lunatic were a couple of the sweetest old couples you'd ever meet, folks who'd been together since high school and spent their twilight years on the porches of LD’s biggest, coziest homes. When the sun's up, Little Detroit is just a little scuzzier than any other middle-class white neighborhood. Even at night, hey, I used to check my mail with headphones on.
Crime, like labor, was almost always an export to us. We took our drugs and violence elsewhere or kept it behind closed doors. A couple members of my family were prone to violent outbursts. We never called the cops, just learned to pick up our own messes and pretend nothing was wrong until the next outburst. We might not have had any money or any jobs worth keeping but damn it, we had reputations to maintain (it’s worth noting my surname has earned me a fair few side-eyes from older Menasha residents…). Little Detroit is defined above all else by the endless struggle between white trash and white respectability. Those of us with money got it by breaking our bodies. The few who owned businesses were bar owners, people who presented bougie but everyone knew they’d ended more fights than just about anyone.
To be white trash, or any other kind of white working class, means living your life as a paradox. It means having money or privilege, but never both. It means you can afford a fixer-upper you can’t afford to fix up. It means you can pay for the medical treatment you'll need to keep working long enough to retire. It means a lower sentence if you get caught selling or producing this month's mortgage payment. It means not everyone believes when you say you're from a crappy neighborhood.
It never means upward mobility, at least not these days, because just about every locally-owned factory has skipped town or been bought out. The family-owned businesses small-town America was built on exist no more, subsidiaries at best in one of many ever-expanding global conglomerates. We just haven’t caught up yet, so many are still working like being white in an industrial town means you retire in management. Maybe we’d do well to admit our societal rigor mortis, move on our move out from these broken places. Still, it’s hard not to feel some kind of impressed by such stubborn resilience.
Walk all the way from the Lock to Tayco Street and you've hit the weirder end of downtown, the centerpiece of which is also the capstone of the Lock neighborhood and the ugliest damn thing in the whole Little Detroit region. The whole block is dominated by a row of historical bars looking every moment of their age, a far cry from the well-preserved structures mere minutes away down Main. I’ve spent my whole life walking or driving past this block and because of that I’ve got about twenty years of specific resentments I’ll spare you from. Such details could easily double this post’s word count. All you really need to know is that it’s a block of working-class bars between the houses and factories, the town’s number one destination for dive bars destined to fall off in unremembered silence.
Until that stopped happening. At the time of writing this there are two bars on this block that have each been thriving for years: Tayco Tap and Crazy Donkey. They’re both popular with locals and, surprisingly, both seem to be fairly well furnished. Comparisons with immediate, abandoned neighbors R&R and Scoreboard are night and day; only the former shows any signs of life with its window inexplicably full of potted plants.
The establishment of multiple successful, presentable businesses on this block still surprises me. It was a running joke among family and friends in Menasha, a cursed building, a blight on a blight, one of few commercial properties that would actually benefit from being turned into a parking lot. Situated right between the factories and the neighborhoods, its fate was sealed from the moment it was built. They’re right down the road from a bunch of bars of Main that are all more walkable, drivable and habitable. These were bars for the workers in an industry that would quickly move away from small towns. This whole block should’ve been out the door the moment the local economy started going global.
I think about what these bars might’ve been like in their prime a lot. It’s easy to glorify the past, even as somebody who’s far too queer to find a place within it. I picture laborers dropping by on the walk home from work, grabbing a burger and a beer, chatting with the boys for an hour. Then they’d all just stumble a couple blocks down the road and be home. I picture whole generations of men raising families on single salaries earned producing essential products like paper and steel, who never had to question what they were doing or why it had to be done. There was a time before bullshit jobs existed, when you lived where you worked and worked for a cause that made sense.
Grandpa worked in the factories and raised eight kids on the money he made. He barely ever saw them. Didn’t even take a day off when he broke his foot. Never went to the hospital, never reported the injury. He had eight kids to feed and their mother was a gambling addict. When the kids got old enough to work, every cent funded her addiction. This all came decades after grandpa’s time fighting in World War Two. It happened in the sixties and seventies, which culture remembers as a prosperous time for America. We remember the hippies, the peace and love, the carefree spirit. Hardly remembered are the workers who made such prosperity possible, the backs broken to allow the hippies their spinelessness. The struggling working class is too often forgotten, poverty perceived as a product of one’s ability to witness it. History has a way of sweeping people like my family under the rug.
Even then, well, the present situation is undeniably a different beast. To its credit, safety standards have risen substantially. Decades of struggle on the part of union workers has all but ended the world that broke grandpa’s foot. What hasn't changed is the nature of work itself, because it can’t change. Labor is, and always will be, a necessary sacrifice. One dedicates a quarter of all their weeks to a company, providing goods to the public and profit to their superiors. In return those superiors fork some of their profits over to that worker. It's sure not the worst system we could've come up with. Leaves a lot to be desired, though, especially when you look at the bigger picture - what companies have done with the money they didn’t fork over.
The company grandpa worked for was Banta, a business proudly run in Menasha until it was unceremoniously purchased and gutted in 2006. That story is hardly unique to Banta or Menasha. When your business reaches a certain size it starts to make more sense than anything else to just buy out the competition. It started happening more as time went on, companies got bigger and looser restrictions on competition and global trade made it easier and easier. The same set of changes meant it became advantageous for American companies to outsource labor to countries without safety standards or a somewhat reasonable minimum wage. Pretty much every job that built the industrial heart of this country isn't done here anymore. A lot of Americans lost jobs. A lot of poor desperate suckers in poor desperate countries got stuck with tough jobs for shit pay. Small-town economic juggernauts like Banta died. Everyone lost but the biggest conglomerates.
Menasha certainly still has a blue-collar demographic, of course. But the factory work just ain’t worth it for many people. Pay and benefits don’t seem that much better than what you’d get working at the higher end of retail jobs, to say nothing of the trades. Factory work, if it is to continue in America, can’t afford to be just a little better than the alternative. Unfortunately that’s exactly where it’s headed.
Of course, there’s something to be said about walking to work. Downtown Menasha has precious few stable, non-industrial work opportunities and downtown Neenah is a bit of a jaunt. Factory work saves you some gas money. Or, it did, back when the world made a little more sense, when a small city was a cohesive unit. Nowadays cheaper apartments certainly exist within walking distance of the factories, but Menasha’s been turning its back to such conveniences as of late. Where the old Banta building once stood there’s now a block of truly embarrassing high-rent apartments. Another one is going in right across the river from Sonoco, probably the ugliest damn factory in town (more on that later). The sights and sounds of a factory are exactly what people of decent means are looking for in a home, I’m sure.
I worry one day affordable housing will exist completely divorced from the industrial world. It’s already happened for retail workers like me; I’ve long since accepted my thirty-minute commute and work with people who drive more than an hour. The complete segregation of our homes and our work is killing the Industrial City’s big saving grace. Menasha’s even helping history along, making some pretty impressive strides to expedite the process.
'Cause, like, those two bars from earlier are there for a reason. It's the same reason the Banta building was replaced with apartments, the linking thread I've been dancing around for about a thousand words now: Menasha's downtown is in the midst of revitalization.
It's actually been creeping in for a while. There's a big concrete ship's hull built into the sidewalk by the marina, laughably christened the Ark II. The marina itself is certainly less dodgy than I remember it being when I was a kid, and that stretch of road even hosts a decent farmer’s market. Curtis Reed Square, a presentable public space in its own right, has become surrounded with office buildings. Down on the corner of Tayco, the same corner that can take you to the Lock, is a rectangular fountain I remember thinking was quite sleek and modern when I was a kid. Between two buildings on Main is an alley festooned with sleek metal furniture, polished rock benches and copious blue lighting. Further down the way from the main drag of downtown is UW Oshkosh's Fox Valley campus, a respectable enough institution featuring an excellent museum and planetarium**.
All of it pales in comparison to - literally stands in the shadow of - the worst thing that happened to this country in 2016. One Menasha Center, located at the corner of Main and lit up so bright you can see it from the other side of Lake Winnebago, is a complete travesty. It’s the city’s little red sports car, the first unignorable sign the Fox Cities’ middle child had hit middle age.
On paper, it makes sense. Menasha's twin city Neenah has its three Neenah Centers, a trio of brightly-lit riverside office buildings. Why shouldn't Menasha have at least one of its own? Why shouldn't the Fox Valley's economically flaccid industrial center plop a big, hyper-modern, aggressively angular glass chode down right across the street from Club Liquor?
In their defense they gave about a quarter of the first story a false brick facade to make the transition less awkward. Except it cuts off just a little short of the building right next door. If anything that achieves the opposite effect, more like skin growing over a metal splinter. It's an intrusion, an alien protuberance, a monument to a local government that doesn't seem to remember Menasha wasn't built on office jobs.
And as of 2018, it's not alone. There used to be a commercial complex on the corner of Tayco and Main, across the river from Sonoco. It was called the Brin building. Six years ago it burned down and everyone in the world with Menasha relatives simultaneously learnt its entire history. There was a bowling alley, a theater, a great restaurant… I own a brick from the wreckage and the guy I got it from could tell you exactly where it would’ve gone. Those are the apartments across from Sonoco.
I only ever knew it as the fire hazard where I used to buy comic books and Yogos around 2008 - they closed a couple issues before Skaar: Son of Hulk ended. Still haven’t finished that one. The store also sold D&D products and even had a tiny little gaming area, just a couple folding tables in the corner. It wasn't an amazing store; the dual focus on games and comics meant neither one ended up with a great deal of space. It never had an identity beyond general geek ephemera, never used its limited space effectively and never seemed to know what it actually wanted to be.
It’s still not half as on-the-nose a symbol of identity crisis as the thing that’s taken its place. Another tangible sign Menasha has lost sight of itself in trying to be more like Neenah, whose new apartment blocks are doing quite well for themselves. Menasha can never be Neenah, no matter how hard it tries. They spent most of their existences as inseparable sister cities because until recently they mutually benefited one another. Neenah had money, Menasha had workers. In a global economy that order of operations has taken some hits and Menasha’s been looking for another way forward. It’s trying to be Neenah, trying to force itself onto the opposite end of the class structure.
Menasha's downtown struggles to sustain anything that doesn’t appeal to alcoholics or the elderly. They’re there, don’t get me wrong - a couple coffee shops and hair salons and things like that have managed. Board game cafe The Sweet Lair is still kicking after a few years. I already mentioned the marina and the farmer’s market, and hey, it’s also important to remember this is Wisconsin - every city is built to appeal to drinkers. Menasha actually might have fewer notable bars than the Wisconsin average. A more important indicator of character is looking at who manages to keep their doors open. There’s a reason Jitter’s and Club Tavern have outlived Becher Lighting. It’s the same reason the city’s most popular local joint is Mihm’s, who proudly serve up burgers so greasy they’ll clog your great-grandson’s arteries. Also look at the chain restaurants in Menasha: Taco Bell’s drive through is packed right up ‘til two in the morning and right next door is Topper’s, which nobody has ever eaten sober.
Menasha's greatest struggle is a failure to ever fully comprehend what it is and why it’s struggling. It's an industrial city slowly drifting from relevance in a global market. It's stuck between a rich city and a college town. It's got the trashy reputation even if Neenah seems to churn out more criminals (a recent stabbing, the fatal armed robbery, the bike shop hostage situation, the old gyro shop, Alex Kraus...). With few tangible efforts at changing its fate, the city’s future seems set in stone. Approaching the sesquicentennial celebration and hot of the heels of electing its youngest mayor ever, I worry any optimism in the air might be misplaced.
Yet that's far from the full picture. Menasha's a town of decent people playing bad hands as well as they can. Decades into the onset of decay, they carry on with at least some sense of pride still intact. It can be scary, and you bet your ass it can be pitiable. But between all the laughable revitalization efforts there are also a couple genuinely good attempts at modernization.
They've done a lot of work lately on improving their public parks, and that's only one side of the city's green space. The Conservancy and Heckrodt both offer nice, decently accessible hiking trails. Smith Park's Memorial Building is neat, on the rare cases it's open to the public. The same park is also home to a historical train caboose, kept in decent condition and occasionally open to the public. This place has a tenacity, a stubborn need to be more than rotting yesteryear, that I will always respect.
Not to mention, well, chaotic neighborhoods like Little Detroit aren't inherently awful. Driving through some of the new-construction planned developments in Neenah and Appleton, then coming back to Menasha, brought me to a realization. The suburbs are a trap built to catch mediocre success. They promise order and safety at the cost of handing freedom off to the homeowners' association. Here you can walk at night, here there aren’t any dogs to beware. Here there are no yards full of scrap metal, no idiosyncratic political signage, no personal vending machines in driveways. All those freedoms were waived away to Dayne and Karen down the road.
True freedom, all but lost to the churning tides of America's obsessive collectivism, lies somewhere between extremes. Freedom is oddness, it's obscurity. The ability to do what one wishes with one's home, not bowing to HOAs or landlords. To own a home shaped nothing like the one to either side of it, and to paint the fucker hot pink. To have a lawn of moss or a tree that drops apples wherever it pleases. Little Detroit ain’t that, not exactly. Still, it offers visitors a glimpse of the lost, rotting freedom that would’ve allowed such a world once upon a time. I can't help but respect it, to feel like the choice between its ratty, chaotic freedom and suburbia's neutered safety is no choice at all.
*My friend Jason put together a great little graph of the two cities’ population data! It’s interesting to look at and contradicts a few assumptions I’d made - namely, I assumed Menasha’s population would’ve started growing again more recently than the 1990s and would’ve started plateauing closer to the time the train station or factories started shutting down.
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