My Hometown

Writing about my hometown, Roanoke, is akin to drafting an obituary. To make it tougher, the expected recap of the deceased's life lacks examples of greatness. There are no towering achievements around which to build a tribute. There are a few crumbs of honest effort in the city's past but looking at the sweep of a life it is as non-descript as a Southern Plains landscape. The city's core is abandoned and boarded. The infrastructure is rusting, eroding, peeling and crumbling. Surviving residents are old, sour, and dispirited or young, lost, and hopeless. Decades of low-ball-cheap-seats-less-is-less expectations have produced exactly those results. Yard sales, flea markets, payday loans, and pawn shops are growth industries here. Even the Wal-Mart is a scaled-down version that closes at midnight. Roanoke is Blanche DuBois depending on the kindness of strangers.

I drove through town last night on the way home after dinner. Two physical things sum the picture. The first was the olfactory fact of mold. Think of the smell you sense when you open a closet in an elderly aunt's house. Unmistakably, it is decay. The second was the visual look of the place. Empty. Dead.

During my forty year absence, the Skinner Furniture building burned. It was on a prominent corner of Main Street, across from the First Baptist Church -- which, ironically, also burned but was rebuilt exactly as it had been but without the squeaking floors. From what I learned the charred ribs and bones of the Skinner Furniture buiding haunted the community to the point that the owners of the property razed the remains. On the spot where the building once stood the owners planted grass. Today, that spot is a flat, green, manicured lawn. It is pretty. The City should consider doing the same with the rest of the so-called downtown. A truly green downtown with empty land on which to build would be more of an invitation to entrepreneurs than Alabama's version of Dresden. When I was in grad school, we used to refer to this apocalyptic rememdy for challenging case studies as "D-9 therapy" as in a Catapiller D-9 bull-dozer. Crank those suckers up and let 'em rip.

Across and down the street from the Skinner Furniture building is the Martin Theater. It burned before I left Roanoke. The hulk still looms over Main Street. Next door, the old bank building was recently purchased by an aspiring revivalist lawyer with ambitions of restoration and rejuvenation. Good luck.

Is the fat lady singing for Roanoke? Worse, has she done her business, packed her rags and moved on to the next small town exhibiting a death rattle? I suspect the latter. The autopsy will show that lack of vision, weak leadership, civic deficiency, and dedication to minimalism conspired to rob the body of vitality and extinguished the future.

Rest in peace.