The Mineral Palace, Heidi Julavits, & Pueblo

Went down to Pueblo for a look around. Heidi Julavits' The Mineral Palace is a wonder works of a novel to read on that road trip. Or any road trip. For one thing, the original female road warrior, Bonnie Parker, turns up in Julavits' story.

The mineral palace in Pueblo didn't last long, but the gardens are a public park

Walking around downtown early one weekday morning, I was the only flaneur in town. Pedestrians are an odd enough sight that people in passing cars slow and stare--they seem...stunned. Downtown Pueblo has some great buildings but like so many once-urban centers it is essentially a dead zone. What life there is, commercially, happens out in the sprawl-malls. We've let the real estate industry decide where we live and work and how we organize space in America and this is the result, all over the country. It's hard to feel any dignity attached to the human condition in a shopping mall, isn't it? Whereas downtowns used to be lively & unpredictable spaces--anything can happen.
Apart from malls and big-box cantonments, the only other hives of activity  in ex-industrial towns like Pueblo (or Bangor ME, or hundreds of others) are, typically, hospital medical centers which have evolved/swollen to engross significant acreage. In Pueblo the med center is the only zone that feels like it belongs to the economy of the 21st century. Lots of large people in pastels on those sidewalks. Lots of snazzy doctor Audis-and-up in the parking lots. Diabetes, and all the other horrors that are outcomes of our way of life, are a growth industry in the heartland, or kidney-land, or dialysis-land, or whatever you want to call it. The urban sequence in once-urban midsize America seems to be a)downtown decay, b)collapse of manufacturing, c)growth of enormous mega-medical center, d) a casino to sweep up any surplus nickels from the embattled population.
There are some glorious buildings in Pueblo: the Thatcher Building (1914) is one:

And the (former) Federal Building:

Pueblo used to be a hardworking steel mill town and, this being the West,  the mills probably relied to a considerable extent on transient single males for labor. So in the older neighborhoods you see a variety of apartment buildings and rooming houses. The Fitch Terrace Apartments (below) were built in 1902. Reminded me of similar blocks same era, same function, in Montreal and, oddly, in Windsor, Vermont.  In most of New England such building would be clapboard, and in any NE mill town the three-deckah would be ubiquitous. These buildings have dignity, don't they? Hard edges work well with that sharp Western light and big sky.

Below, a small part  of the metastasizing Parkview Medical Center complex, the happening economic activity in downtown Pueblo. Check out any old mill town you choose, starting with Pittsburgh, PA--partly due to the horrendous health problems the 19th and 20th factories left in their wake, med centers are the job engines of otherwise economically defunct towns and cities all across America. No so many jobs for young males, though. Hell, they can join the army.

When Pueblo was prospering. some 'grand' houses were built in the neighborhood just north of downtown. You get the feeling that most of the money made here didn't stick around for long. The coal and steel barons didn't live in Pueblo. The real money built mansions on Fifth Avenue or the North Shore of Long Island.

                                           

I was lucky to find my way to Burrito Betty's for a breakfast burrito, which was 300% better than any I've ever had in New England.