There is no replacement for local knowledge.
Recently a YouTuber—one of us whose “You” is intimately involved with a “Tube”—meandered down to God’s Own Steubenville, Ohio, my home, to film a contribution to a genre of reporting that laps up the sights and sounds of American decay. Popularized by the documentary series Dead Malls, produced by filmmaker Dan Bell, the genre invites people to peek in on the abandoned, the foreclosed, the given-up-on infrastructure of America, especially the stuff—like malls—that, when alive, lived on America’s hope to be a country of retail, rather than production.
The genre is popular for a few reasons. One, I think, is the profound need to remember the futility of all human endeavor—could the people of the eighties ever have imagined that their food courts would become home to bats, frogs, and ghosts? “Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!” The other is the—less profound—need to smirk. Most people who enjoy gaping at decay don’t live in it, and the sight of some apocalyptic Toys R’ Us soothes whatever stinks about their own life—at least I’m not there. Another is the—least profound—pride of youth that sees, in all that decay, the waning of an older generation and so the rising star of his own: “Can you imagine investing in a physical location? Thank goodness I’m younger and wiser and committed to selling mail-order burritos through successful TikTok engagement.”
And allow me to confess my own feeling of joy at the sight of some caving-in box store, the same, somewhat vindictive pleasure involved in watching the stock market take a nosedive.
As Americans we are subject to much fakery, forced to listen to and gawk at a hundred-thousand institutions, products, and pieces of real estate that seem to be loved, guarded, cared for, cleaned, and kept as much as we love and care for our own homes, gardens, and small businesses. In this way massive, multinational corporations and interests appear to be a part of our world—just like us, a part of the community.
But the difference between us and them is that our families and homes and our presence to our communities are irrevocable commitments of love—theirs ain’t. Haunting this bank, asterisked to this grocery chain’s “commitment to our community,” stuffed in the fine print of Dunkin’ Donuts’ sign—“Steubenville Runs On Dunkin”—there’s a little word—“if.” We’ll stay—if the money stays good. We’ll take care—if it’s worth the investment. We’re “like a good neighbor”—if the algorithm continues to determine that you’re worth it. And the horrifying part of this conditional love is how convincing it is—until it isn’t. Our mayor begged the corporate offices of Rite-Aid not to move out of our downtown, because our seniors still relied on the pharmacy. Didn’t they mean their slogan: “With us it’s personal”?
A husband who says “I’ll love you no matter what” is not just a relatively better deal than a husband who says “I’ll love you if you continue to benefit me.” Between the two lies all the infinite distance between good and evil, virtue and vice, marriage and divorce. The “dead mall” is the truth of the living mall; the abandoned office park clarifies the spiritual reality of the busy office park. What keeps them there and keeps them neat is not any love of place, family, or God, but love of money. We are being used—local managers and all—by people who don’t love us. The satisfaction of seeing a retail behemoth fallen to ruins is that it somehow concludes the vague sense of malice we’ve all experienced at this box-store or that Verizon. Conditional love is not a lesser form of love but a masked form of hate—and ruin unmasks it.
So it is not out of any dislike of the genre that I must protest against the, I am sure, very good, very kind-hearted YouTube Man, DarkExplorations, who explored the great darkness of downtown Steubenville. I do not think he is a madman—Steubenville is, by all accounts, a city that has been used up and wrung dry by steel companies whose executives, when it came to it, valued profits over Americans and “inevitable market forces” uber alles and sold us to, yes, China. The urban decay is real. As the mills closed, the population declined, and the city was left with more infrastructure than people to make use of it.
But what I want to say is something like that opening song of The Music Man: “You’ve gotta know the territory.” The film takes us on a sweeping tour of two blocks of the downtown, one which seems to confirm what the video’s title prepares everyone to expect: “Exploring the Ruins of an American Ghost City.”
“I am the only soul on the street,” says our man. “This entire business downtown is completely vacant,” he reiterates. And indeed, the silence is as eerie as the royalty-free synth music—no cars, no people. “I feel like I’m in the episode of Twilight Zone where the man wakes up and everybody’s gone ... there’s cars going through here but there’s no humans walking around but me.”
Now this is a perfectly sensible way for the buildings and streets of Steubenville, Ohio to appear, if the two premises by which reality is interpreted are first, that Steubenville is economically depressed, and second, that nobody is on the street. From these two filters a vision appears: the city has been abandoned. Outside knowledge is used to interpret reality for an outside audience, who can’t help but see the same conclusion: “Looks like a movie set. Strange how clean it is,” commented one. “Wonderful to see that it's still kept up. Sad it's so abandoned,” echoed another.
But there are things about Steubenville, Ohio that you can’t know from the outside—that Capri’s makes the best meatball sandwich, for instance. That, if you sit outside the coffeehouse at 9:15 AM, a guy named Tracy will approach you and loudly tell you which celebrity recently died. And you certainly won’t know what Sunday is like in Steubenville—the day our man shot his shots.
In downtown Steubenville, everything is closed on Sunday. Our man walked past a pottery studio—closed on Sunday—a cigar shop—closed for the Lord’s Day, obviously—our world-famous Bookmarx Bookstore—forget it, the Kuhners are at Mass—past my grocery store—whose single employee would rightfully quit were we to compromise her Sunday obligation—past our artisanal coffee shop—who would make a killing on Sunday and absolutely do not. He walked past a bar run by Catholic school kids who aren’t going to open on Sunday any more than the burrito place, or the Greek diner, or the optometrist, or the various office spaces which he confidently declared “vacant,” exploring the ghost city of his fruitful imagination.
No one with a half-pound of piety or a half-ounce of business acumen would open a storefront on a Sunday in downtown Steubenville, because you’re either at church—or all your customers are. And it’ll do no good to simply skip the 8 am-1 pm Mass Time—there are too many Catholic families who would feel roughly the same about skipping brunch to shop as they would church. Done right, brunch brings you up to 5 pm—quitting time, anyhow.
I am not saying that, had an exploration been made on a Friday or Saturday, there would not be a good deal to concern a guy with a heart for small town America—vacant properties, accidentally demolished buildings, strange smells. We can even forgive our fellow for not knowing about the construction going on in some of the storefronts he shot (and if anyone reading this has the misfortune of half a million dollars that they would like to invest in a new brewery (which will also be closed on Sunday) do shoot me an email, marc@newpolity.com). But you would have been laughed off whatever online pedestal you’d managed to construct to call it a “ghost city”—watching a mom look in vain for a parking spot, watching us bustle around like so many idiots to host markets and festivals and all the rest. It’s the Holy Ghost’s city.
Still, there is no point in correcting what has been filmed with what has the misfortune of merely being true. To learn, to be edified—that’s the only thing to do with error. The video, and the commentary it provoked, is a study in the art of interpretation, a lesson in the lengths we poor mortals will go to make something make sense, to conform our outside to whatever theory we’ve concocted inside. For it obviously does not make sense to anyone who is not a member of (or a dearly beloved apostate, heretic, or pagan within) a Christian community that a commercial district might forsake being commercial for the Lord’s Day; and it would probably make even less sense to know that most of the proprietors of said district view the haunting emptiness of Fourth Street, Sunday, 10:00AM, with pride and joy—and not just because it means you can run all the red lights if you’re late for Mass at St. Pete’s.
When the camera soaked in our silent streets, thousands of online denizens—bless them, keep them, Lord, in your goodness—all marveled that an abandoned city was kept so free of trash, of vandalism, of looting—“Why, it looks like people were there just yesterday!” (They were.) The possibility that a closed storefront was just, well, closed, because its owner wanted to speak with God at least a little more than he wanted to make money—this had not been presented as a possibility. Yearning to confirm what bias had been given to them, people got creative. One opined that our city had “staged” its downtown like a drive-through stop along Route 66—maintaining it, I suppose, to get a slice of that Southeastern Ohioan tourist industry.
To be fair, there was the difficulty of small town nostalgia to deal with. If you expect that a town is “stuck in the 1940s,” and then see an old, painted “Coca-Cola for 5 cents!” mural, you’re not exactly primed to realize that the thing was painted twenty years ago, by neighbors who enjoy such memorabilia. (Less forgivable was the moment our man filmed a reproduced Gentry Bros. Circus poster (circa 1890) and declared it “vintage.” (We wheat-pasted it to decorate an alley for a cocktail bar at one of our “First Friday” street festivals last year.)) At our “abandoned game store”—again, just closed, bro—you could feel him almost realizing that something was amiss: “I think it has to be abandoned... there’s PS2 games in there... Xbox 360s on the shelf.” (It just sells old games.) This puzzled viewers. Why hadn’t such a “time capsule” been looted? Political ideologies furnished the missing explanations: “No blacks!” several racists imagined. “No democrats!” joked a Republican. Each had their reason why America the Great has fallen, and supplied it with gusto.
Narratives of decline are always troubled by whatever Christians are doing. I don’t mean this triumphantly—actual, baptized Christians are largely jerks. I simply mean that the proper reason for Christian action is invisible—Christians are supposed to do things for the sake of love. You can reliably predict that a man in a town with no available jobs will move—unless he loves his town. Where the economist’s parameters for population density are “access to goods and services,” he can reliably predict the movement of populations toward successful centers of consumption. But the parameters of the people that make up that population might be Christian; might include the need to save their souls by giving alms and loving neighbors, and so tend them in the exact opposite direction—to the periphery, where the needs are. Good schools predict population except for those for whom getting away with no school is a spiritual need.
When our man walked past the grocery store that my friends and I run (though not on Sunday) he interpreted it as vacant (and not as merely closed). Within the logic of self-interest, it should be vacant. Neither I nor any of the owners of the store pull any salary. If businesses are only ever begun for the sake of self-interest, which only subsequently serves the common good, downtown Steubenville would not have a grocery store any more than it would have a monthly street festival or a trades college—the math wouldn’t work out. But, within Christianity, a man is supposed to act for the common good first, and to receive what benefits he receives as a member of that common. I benefit, not because I make money, but because I can now walk to a grocery store with my friends and family. Within a world which is constrained to imagine all business as an effort of maximizing one’s own interest, rather than of service to the common good, it is impossible to imagine the revitalization of a broken city, except, perhaps, as some long-game investment, some “bet” on a successful future, at which point those who “got in early” will cash in—and then get out. Without the active suspicion that, here, someone might be acting for the sake of love, it is impossible to not to imagine that everyone is just a micro-for-profit-corporation, sticking it out only “if” and insofar as they will get a good return for their efforts. The video simply literalized this problem: it could not see the open businesses, closed for Sunday. It saw what it had the eyes to see.
Who knows what else we are missing?
Image by Kai Yep.