Managing decline

Though we North Americans tend to think of cities as permanent and expanding features on our landscape, it is a fact of life that, like everything else in the world, they wax and wane and may even die. Timbuktu was once a great centre of culture and learning, but is now a shadow of what it was half a millennium ago. There is no reason to think that our own cities are exempt from this process.

Indeed there are a number of American cities that have not fared well with the shift from an industrial to a service economy. The one with which I am most familiar is just over the border: Detroit. Now there is a co-operative effort by more than one level of government to manage the decline of such urban centres: US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive. Given my deep familial roots in southeastern Michigan, I am saddened at the decline of urban life in the region.

Yet all periods of mourning must end, and life must go on. For the city of Flint, Michigan, 60 miles north of Detroit, this means effectively abandoning up to 40 percent of the city's built-up land in a necessary downsizing effort.

Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000. Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent and the total population has almost halved to 110,000. The exodus – particularly of young people – coupled with the consequent collapse in property prices, has left street after street in sections of the city almost entirely abandoned.

Durant Hotel
In the city centre, the once grand Durant Hotel – named after William Durant, GM's founder – is a symbol of the city's decline, said Mr [Dan] Kildee [Genesee County Treasurer]. The large building has been empty since 1973, roughly when Flint's decline began. Regarded as a model city in the motor industry's boom years, Flint may once again be emulated, though for very different reasons.

But Mr Kildee, who has lived there nearly all his life, said he had first to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that "big is good" and that cities should sprawl – Flint covers 34 square miles. . . . But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said. If the city didn't downsize it will eventually go bankrupt, he added. . . .

The local authority has restored the city's attractive but formerly deserted centre but has pulled down 1,100 abandoned homes in outlying areas. Mr Kildee estimated another 3,000 needed to be demolished, although the city boundaries will remain the same. Already, some streets peter out into woods or meadows, no trace remaining of the homes that once stood there.

Choosing which areas to knock down will be delicate but many of them were already obvious, he said. The city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people in neighbourhoods it wants to demolish. Nobody will be forced to move, said Mr Kildee. "Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow," he said.

Mr Kildee acknowledged that some fellow Americans considered his solution "defeatist" but he insisted it was "no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can bear fruit again".

Given that growth and decline are facts of life, and given that political authorities are under a divine mandate to do public justice, how do they manage decline in a just fashion? It is easy to distribute the pieces of an ever-expanding pie, but what happens when the pie is contracting? The corporate private sector has had to face these sorts of issues for decades, but now municipal governments are having to make similar tough decisions. Are there equitable ways to do so?

America's future

Fareed Zakaria writes for Foreign Affairs: The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest. One paragraph stands out for me:

Learning from the rest is no longer a matter of morality or politics. Increasingly, it is about competitiveness. Consider the automobile industry. For more than a century after 1894, most of the cars manufactured in North America were made in Michigan. Since 2004, Michigan has been replaced by Ontario, Canada. The reason is simple: health care. In the United States, car manufacturers have to pay $6,500 in medical and insurance costs for every worker. If they move a plant to Canada, which has a government-run health-care system, the cost to them is around $800 per worker. This is not necessarily an advertisement for the Canadian health-care system, but it does make clear that the costs of the U.S. health-care system have risen to a point where there is a significant competitive disadvantage to hiring American workers. Jobs are going not to low-wage countries but to places where well-trained and educated workers can be found: it is smart benefits, not low wages, that employers are looking for.

Michiana holiday

Last week Nancy and I took a brief holiday in southwestern Michigan and northern Indiana. I spent nearly 7 years in the Michiana region while a graduate student at Notre Dame, so this was a return to familiar territory. Moreover I have deep familial roots in both peninsulas of Michigan, the one state in the US with which I tend most to identify.

The two of us had a wonderfully restful time in this quiet part of the world. We stayed at a bed and breakfast near Jones, Michigan, called the Sanctuary at Wildwood, which I would enthusiastically recommend as a vacation spot for anyone, especially first or second honeymooners. It's set on a large, forested property with hiking trails and a stocked pond for fishing, among other things. Here are some photographs of our stay:



This is the main house, where the owners live and where we were served breakfast:



We tried our hand at rowing. (Well, I'm the one who did the actual rowing!) This was the first time I had done so, and I caught on fairly quickly. Nevertheless, in trying to photograph some turtles sitting on the water lilies, I managed to frighten them into diving back into the water.



On wednesday we drove to Three Rivers, where we discovered a marvellous used bookstore called Lowry's Books. It's definitely worth a visit if you're in the vicinity. It's located on Main Street, which can be seen below:



On thursday we drove to Shipshewana, in the middle of the northern Indiana Amish country. It's a tourist town, not unlike St. Jacob's, Ontario. But rather than hitting the shops, Nancy and I visited Menno-hof, an information centre and museum devoted to Anabaptist history. Anyone with an interest in Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites, or who claim this heritage as their own, will find Menno-hof fascinating. I had heard about Shipshewana while living in South Bend, but I never got round to visiting it until now.





We saw a lot of these during our visit. Special lanes are reserved for horse-drawn buggies along the roads, but in my estimation they are not sufficiently removed from the danger of fast-moving automobiles, which should be required to drive much more slowly while passing through these communities.



On friday we drove back east towards Ontario and found "the longest of Michigan's few remaining covered bridges." It's located north of Centreville and it spans the St. Joseph River.





We're home again. Back to preparing for the coming academic year.

A positive turn for Acton

Ever since I came into contact with the Acton Institute of Grand Rapids, Michigan, I have been disturbed by its apparent tendency to view the free market as a panacea and to overextend its validity beyond its proper sphere, especially in its approach to education and the environment. However, this recent commentary by Kevin Schmiesing represents an encouraging development and could prompt a rethink on my part: The Baby Market. Writes Schmiesing:

The market is a wondrous thing. There is no better instrument for the calibration of human productivity and ingenuity to human needs and wants. But its advantages turn pernicious when it encompasses human goods that should never be reduced to monetary values.

Excellent. I hope Acton as a whole will follow Schmiesing's line of argument as it tackles other issues as well.

A scenic upper-peninsular Michigan drive

On this Labour Day a trip along Brockway Mountain Drive, in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan, would be a beautiful way to pass the time. Take the Brockway Mountain Drive Web Tour and see for yourself. My maternal grandfather, who was born not too far from there, took two of my sisters, a cousin and me to see it four decades ago. I was back in Copper Country with another sister 16 years ago, but for some reason we managed to miss this sight, which I forgot about until recently. At some point I may write in more detail about this lovely part of the world, nestled between the shores of Lake Superior.


Anam Cara at Spruce Lake, Michigan

Brockway Mountain Drive

Chicago and back again

Earlier in the week we returned from a visit to the Chicago area and Michigan where we visited family on both sides. Here are some highlights and observations:

The Chicago area contains some 9 million people as compared to the 12 million living in Ontario, Canada’s largest province. Consequently, the 10-county metropolitan area is a huge sprawling mass of urban-suburban settlement, with not enough open spaces in between. One of these spaces is the Morton Arboretum, which is not dissimilar to Hamilton’s Royal Botanical Gardens. We didn’t get there this time, but perhaps we will during our next visit.

The Chicago area is crisscrossed with wide thoroughfares with sometimes as many as 20 lanes pouring into a single intersection. Now imagine a power outage in which an absence of traffic lights turns such an intersection into an impromptu four-way stop. Yes, we did find ourselves at one of these.

Everything in the Chicago area seems to have two-tier pricing, with lower prices for locals and higher for outsiders. This includes the supermarkets and the toll roads.

A highlight of our trip was a visit to the Field Museum of Natural History, downtown Chicago. With Theresa’s recent interest in dinosaurs, we decided to indulge this with a tour through its special exhibit, Dinosaur Dynasty: Discoveries from China. A permanent part of the museum’s collection is a complete tyrannosaurus rex (or perhaps tyrannosaura regina) skeleton called Sue.

Michigan’s unofficial motto is “Great lakes, bad roads.” Detroit, in particular, appears to be exceedingly poorly run in this respect. For those attempting to cross the Ambassador Bridge into Canada, Interstate 94 is currently closed for construction at the exit to Interstate 96, with “helpful” signs vaguely advising drivers to “Use alternate route.” Strangers are left to figure out for themselves what such a route might be. (How many returning Canadians have met a cruel fate wandering through the side streets of this dangerous city?) We decided to get off at Livernois Avenue (also in poor shape) and head north to 96. Yet the entrance to 96 is not clearly marked either, so we nearly missed it. Then there was the driver who kept running red lights in front of us. And the car which cut us off in full sight of one of Detroit’s finest, who did absolutely nothing. And. . . well, you get the picture.

Next time maybe we’ll try the Blue Water Bridge at Sarnia-Port Huron.

In the US a pocket full of change is likely to add up to a dollar or two and includes lots and lots of pennies. In Canada a pocket full of change could total ten dollars or more, but with fewer pennies. American bills are harder to tell apart. You need to keep alert to be sure you’re receiving the correct denominations.

If you’re ever in Hillsdale, Michigan, a quite pleasant place to stay is the Dow Center on the Hillsdale College campus. Very impressive. Nicely run with friendly staff. The walls are covered with pictures of eagles, to which people there seem to have a curious devotion.

Hillsdale, Michigan’s motto: “It’s the people.” To which one is tempted to respond: What’s the people?

Two more weeks before classes start. Back to work.

Hillsdale Academy

As I wrote earlier, Nancy and I visited the Hillsdale Academy in Hillsdale, Michigan, four days ago. It was started in 1990 and is associated with Hillsdale College.



We were favourably impressed by the facilities, which were built as recently as 1998 and still have something of a new feel to them. The curriculum is, however, utterly traditional, focussing on three objectives:

one, to teach children the skills to be productive citizens; two, to nurture in them the moral qualities and habits of mind to be good citizens; and three, to provide America with an educational model that can be useful nationwide.

The academy is devoted to passing down to students the best in western civilization, a commitment to which underlies the mission of the school:

The time-honored liberal arts curriculum and pedagogy direct student achievement toward mastery of the basics, exploration of the arts and sciences, and understanding of the foundational tenets of our Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman heritage. The curriculum by purpose and design is a survey of the best spiritual, intellectual, and cultural traditions of the West as they have been developed and refined over countless generations.

Notably, each classroom has a large copy of the Ten Commandments posted on the wall by the door. A chapel is held every wednesday, and its contents are christian, we were told. The Hillsdale Academy has become something of a model for similar schools which have sprung up across primarily the United States. A map in my brother-in-law's office shows hundreds of such institutions -- most seemingly in the so-called "blue" states, remarkably enough. There are even two in Canada and one in the Bahamas.

The Academy's approach certainly has much to recommend it. I rather like the fact that all children learn Latin, once a staple of a solid education. More generally, and in contrast to the contemporary focus on building self-esteem for its own sake, teachers at the school do not fear to assign low grades for poor work and to reward concrete academic achievements, however inegalitarian this may seem.

Of course, some questions might also be raised. Christianity's origins are, of course, nonwestern, although it certainly contributed to the subsequent formation of the west. Yet the worldviews underlying the "Judeo-Christian" and "Greco-Roman" elements are quite different, even if they were brought into a kind of unstable synthesis by subsequent generations. How does the Academy sort out the tensions between these two when they arise? Which heritage takes priority? Does commitment to the kingdom of God come first and order everything else? Or is the Judeo-Christian heritage a cultural artefact which is part of a larger civilizational legacy? My suspicion, based on a perusal of its website, is that the Academy leans towards the latter approach, at least in its official documents. However, as my brother-in-law and his family are serious Christians, his decisive influence over the past few years may in some fashion serve to tip the balance in the other direction. I wish him well in his work there.

Introducing the family: Niilo and Anna Juntunen

My great-great-grandparents were born in the village of Puolanka, in the north central part of Finland. Niilo Juntunen (1860-1934) brought his family over to the US from Russian-controlled Finland in 1882, when his eldest daughter, Anna Liisa (1881-1967), my great-grandmother, was less than a year old. Family tradition said that he came to escape conscription into the Russian army.

Apparently Niilo came over first and then sent for his wife, Anna Moilanen Juntunen (1859-1933), and little Anna Liisa. They settled near Oskar, Michigan, in the midst of the beautiful "Copper Country" in the Keweenaw Peninsula. Eleven daughters were born to Niilo and Anna, ten of whom survived into adulthood. Thus the family surname did not pass to any of their descendants

A quite nice account of Niilo and Anna Juntunen's immigration and life in upper Michigan is contained in an essay, "Journey to America," written by a distant cousin, Valerie Tuomi, as part of a project during her years at Houghton High School, Houghton, Michigan. The only significant error in her account is her assertion that, when the head of a family became a citizen in those years, so did the entire family. This is undoubtedly what Niilo and Anna themselves thought, and it seems to have been passed down the generations to Valerie. In fact, when, as an elderly woman, Anna Liisa applied for social security, she discovered, to her horror, that she had never been an American citizen. (All of her sisters, recall, were born in the US and were thus citizens from birth.) Somewhat implausibly, she feared deportation.

In any event, she died at the ripe old age of eighty-five in 1967 and was buried in Hancock, Michigan, near the final resting place of her husband, Jacob Korpinen, and their son Wesley, who had lost his life in the Pacific during the second World War.



The Juntunen Family, 1905

In the photograph shown above, Anna and Niilo are seated in the centre. Seated to Niilo's left is his son-in-law Jacob, or Jaakko (looking rather like a young Theodore Roosevelt). Anna Liisa stands to the far right of the photo. Three of their children, Jennie, Bill and Esther, are with them, with the latter two on their father's lap. Judging from the apparent ages of the children, Anna Liisa is almost certainly carrying my grandfather, Eino Justus, who was born in December 1905.

Niilo and Anna died more than two decades before my birth, but I recall seeing their daughter (my great-grandmother), Anna Liisa, on at least one occasion -- in either 1963 or '64, by which time she was nearly deaf, suffering from advanced diabetes and living in a nursing home near Detroit.

In July 1988 a huge family reunion was held at Suomi College (now Finlandia University) in Hancock, Michigan, of the descendants of Niilo and Anna. I and my immediate birth family were privileged to attend this event, along with some 300 other relatives.

Visit to the States

Nancy and Theresa and I just got back from our annual visit to family in Michigan and Illinois. We had a great time. I will not bore readers with every little thing we did. But there were a few highlights worth mentioning:

- A personal tour of my uncle's collection of antique tractors at his farm near Dundee, Michigan.

- A visit to the recently refurbished Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. My favourite exhibits here were the Great Train Story and the Pioneer Zephyr. (I am a railfan, after all.) Theresa liked Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle and the Idea Factory.

- A visit to the Fox River Trolley Museum, where they've extended their trackage south to the Blackhawk Forest Preserve. Afterwards we stopped for Tastee Freez ice cream, something I remember fondly from my childhood.

- A big fat Greek dinner at my aunt and uncle's house, including two kinds of souvlakia, string beans and kolokithia (zuchini), kidney bean salad, tsatsiki, and what is arguably the world's greatest beer, Pilsner Urquell, brewed in the Czech Republic. The highlight of the evening had us all dancing to nostalgic Greek songs I had last listened to some 30 or 35 years ago. (Theresa loved this part. "I'm having a wonderful time," she beamed to her great aunt in the middle of a two-step.)

- Several violent storms passing through the area, making for heavy downpours, high standing water, downed tree branches, but cooler than normal temperatures.

- Patio seating at a restaurant, which we enjoyed due to the mild temperature.

- Arriving back home again after ten days on the road.