Not the Marilyn Kind

"Decaying industrial cities" are no longer a blot on the American landscape. What we have now is decayed industrial cities. From a certain vantage point—the consumerist one—the empty shells of these places are more pleasant than the actual, living cities were. Factories, tanneries, and high schools have been refitted to serve the people who survived them, whether as malls or as assisted-living facilities. The firehouse is now the Firehouse Pub. Stan’s Muffler Shop has become Melissa’s Muffin Shop. It is not urban planning so much as taxidermy.

Photo Credit: Darren Gygi

I am writing this in an exceptionally pleasant place in such a city—a coffee shop with high-speed Internet. The people who run it are Albanians. How the place is decorated probably has a lot to do with when it opened: in the years just after September 11, 2001, when the distrust of newcomers that is usual in blighted cities was running high. What Americans know about Albania is easily summed up, and some of it may even be true: It’s full of Muslims. It once had a king named Zog who was 7 feet tall and sailed away with its national treasury. Bill Clinton bombed Serbia to smithereens in order to enlarge it. Its economy is dominated by what you might call, if you were being polite, an impressive stolen-car sector. 

Aside from a couple of photos of the owners’ native village, this place is a shrine to American culture. There are photographs of American haystacks, American country lanes, and the New York skyline. There is one of those “old-fashioned” pressed-tin ceilings that materialized simultaneously in every yuppie eatery in the country around 1998. The Weather Channel plays all day long on a flat-screen TV. This is immigrant assimilation of the more-Catholic-than-the-pope variety. If a native doesn’t feel comfortable here, there is something wrong with him.