Keith Gessen - City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis

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KEITH GESSEN AND STEPHEN SQUIBB

When we began this project just after the start of the Great Recession, our working title was City by City: The New American Poverty . Struck by the intensity of the financial crisis, and inspired by Emily Witts ingenious description of Miamis road to hell during the boom, we imagined a series of essays that illuminated the political and economic fallout of the financial collapse in cities across the country. In numerous books and articles, we had learned the view of the crisis from the office towers of Manhattan; we wanted a view that was a little more from below.

Many of the early essays, written in the immediate aftermath of the banking collapses, accomplished exactly this. They described the socialists of Milwaukee, the Walmart of banks in Seattle, and what it was like to work as a security guard in one of the last remaining denim plants in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Then, two years into the project, the cities themselves erupted. The various city-centric iterations of OccupyOccupy Boston, Occupy Philadelphia, Occupy Oaklandseemed to both validate our idea and move beyond it. When Occupy was done, we felt that the project, and our curiosity about the cities of our country, could expand. We learned how different resources are managed in this country, from the Arkansas River to shale oil in North Dakota. We became interested in how gentrifying cities like Boise and Fresno are different from collapsing ones like Detroit and Cleveland. And how the process was taking place, or wasnt, in Atlanta; Reading, Pennsylvania; and New Orleans. Police violence anticipated in Cincinnati and Baltimore reappeared in Palm Coast, Florida, went missing in Boston right when we most expected it, and exploded again, dramatically, in an impoverished suburb of St. Louis called Ferguson.

Outside the project, we were encouraged by a huge increase in the amount of intense, intelligent reporting on American poverty, both in and out of the city, which freed our curiosity still further. Questions like How do we reconstruct the urban economy? and How have the superhighway and the office impacted the city, really? took place alongside ones like Whats it like to have Lil Kims brother as a landlord? and Where did Thomas Mann get his hair cut in Los Angeles? Reality TV in Alaska. The invisible economies of San Diego. A mysterious disappearance in Duluth, Georgia. The intimate relationship between a mall and a lake in Syracuse. Mobsters in Providence, Germans in Los Angeles, marriages in Fresno, border crossings in El Paso, fires in Phoenix, running a brothel in our nations capital, barely getting by in Kentucky, mapping the geography of Lehigh Acres, Florida, moving apartments in Hyde Park, growing up among the Dallas superrich, looking for health insurance in Florida, writing Las Vegaswhat an incredible, confusing, prolific, and terrifying country we live in.

These essays were all written between 2008 and 2014, and they are all about the same thingthe way in which cities (and towns) have changed in the last five, ten, twenty years. Their methods of telling these stories are extraordinarily varied: Some of the essays are personal, others historical, others polemical. Several of the essays have clashing or contradictory attitudes toward the changes going on in the cities they describe. But overall this book is clearly the work of a generation of writers (and some of their forebears) for whom the city is, as it was not for their parents, a definite and final home, and who want to understand the forces that are shaping it.

Eduardo Galeano closes his epic three-volume history of the Americas by saying, Forgive me if it came out too long. Writing it was a joy for my hand, and now I feel more than ever proud of having been born in America, in this shit, in this marvel, during the century of the wind. We dont know what the twenty-first century will be made of, but without minimizing the difference between his stories and the ones in this bookor the difference between writing and editing!we know how he feels.

There are cities that did not make it and also broader themes that we missed, which we hope readers of the book will think about and adumbrate in future editions of City by City . In the meantime, we offer this collection to our contemporaries and to the future so they can know how it was here, between the day of the Lehman bankruptcy and the shooting of Michael Brown.

Brooklyn, New York, 2014

JORDAN KISNER

San Diego is famously mild, sunny, seasonlessand quietly extreme. A surf haven by reputation, it is also the largest and most important military outpost in the West, a leading national center of biotech research and development, and an exceptionally high-traffic site of smuggling contraband across the border, mainly weapons, human slaves, and stupendous amounts of meth. It is on the edge in the most basic geographic sense, all jammed up against the border and the ocean; the end of America or, depending on which way youre driving, the beginning. San Diego is as far as you can go. Its not just a military town; its the most military. Its meth problem isnt just bad; its the worst . The wealthy there arent simply wealthy; theyre Mitt Romney with his $12 million house expansion and his car elevator. The wretched, farther south, are so unwanted and voiceless they functionally, civically, do not exist. The weather is perfect until the city burns.

You can see this, if you know what youre looking for, from the roads.

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The most important roads in the county are its northsouth arteriesthe I-5 and the 805and its no accident that they extend between the countys two largest military bases: Pendleton in the north and Coronado down by the border. San Diegos self-styling as a military town began around the turn of the twentieth century, when politicians began vying for marine and naval contracts, hoping to use the money to expand the city. The existing army artillery base at Fort Rosecrans was joined quickly by the navy and the air force, and by World War II, San Diego was the countrys biggest military town west of the Mississippi. The region swarmed with people and industry, and the city grew to accommodate them. Today, San Diego is still funded by the military and surrounded by the military: at its southernmost point lies Coronado Naval Base, the West Coasts primary center for warfare and Special Forces training. The naval base, which remains the largest single employer in the county, has fifty-seven thousand acres spread from Coronado Island back to the La Posta Mountain Warfare Training Facility fifty miles east into the desert. On the northern edge, forty minutes up the 5, theres Camp Pendleton, the largest West Coast expeditionary training facility for the Marine Corps. In between is Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, former home of Topgun. Many neighborhoods were once barracks. Fully a quarter of county residents work for the military and defense industries.