El Paso, Sunset Heights, and Ain't That America

We did some exploring in El Paso. This building has always caught my eye---you can see it from the highway as I-10 smashes its way through central El Paso. The reality of El Paso is a rugged 25-mile sprawl along the interstate, with a huge military installation--Fort Bliss--and raw suburban neighborhoods clawing their way out into the desert. EP is the 19th largest city in the US and that doesn't include the one-million plus population of Juarez, across the Rio Grande. 

For all our talk about homeland, patriotism, etc. it's remarkable how we Americans as a civilization care so little for the actual country we live upon. I mean America, the land. America, the ground. Because it's hard not to see in those 25 miles of hideous and wasteful sprawl along the I-10 a set of deep injuries and wounds we have inflicted on our own country. Waste of land, waste of resources. A pattern of destroying, using up, a landscape--then moving on. Ain't that America, as John Mellencamp might say.

      Anyway I'll stop ranting and focus on the desolate beauties of older neighborhoods in central El Paso which have a kind of dignity and charm that the sprawl land/mall-land wholly lacks. The old neighborhoods in the urban core made sense; you could see how a sense of community could develop within their human scale. The Sunset Apartments were built in 1913, in the Sunset Heights neighborhood, a short walk uphill from downtown and close to where the railroad depot was. Probably used to be railroad men who rented the apartments. A bit further up the hill there are some great streets of early 20th century houses. The neighborhood as been neglected for most of the last 50 years but maybe that will begin to change now that we start to really see that building further and further out into the desert is something we can not afford to do. I plan to post some photos of commercial downtown El Paso on a later post. The old town has shown some signs of revival in the last few years, and there are some wonderful streets and buildings there. So the next time you're blasting through West Texas on I-10, give yourself a break, hop off the freeway and have a look at downtown El Paso. This used to be a real civitas, and could be again one day. 

        Maybe the above sounds uselessly romantic, as though I have a trope for picturesque urban decay. No. It just seems to me that the way we once organized our cities to satisfy the needs of the citizens made sense, and those old townscapes and cityscapes established before everything rolled over to serve the automobile and the real estate & banking industries are a useful model--a way of living on the American land we need be finding our way back to.