Lost In Time

George Simandan, Time

Among other things, I happen to be an amateur photographer and I’ve been involved for the past few years in documenting the development and decline of this city. The town of Chillicothe, Ohio, was formerly not only the State Capital but also capital of the entire Northwest Territory which encompassed all of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota. In short, it has its historical significance.

A hundred years ago this place was a hub of commerce and travel. Today I “joke” about its future as perhaps the only “ghost town east of the Rockies.” I’ve lived here all my life and have seen the population remain static that whole time. I’ve witnessed first-hand the more rapid and heartbreaking phases of this city’s deterioration. Through the photographs I’ve collected, I see that this was a city of incredible beauty – geographically and architecturally – from about 1800 until the late 1940’s. In recent years the Chamber of Commerce has loudly bemoaned the “dying downtown”. Not “ghetto-ized,” just dying.

As special as this place is to me, I feel it’s most likely not an isolated case. To draw focus on the undeniable slow death of the city’s downtown business section, the first thing one has to notice as cause is the huge shopping mall built just across the river in the mid 1960’s to the north of town, which sprang up like a mushroom, gobbling up acres and acres of prime farm and pastureland and effecting an “arid wilderness of steel and stone.” If you have seen one of these, you’ve seen them all. So much for personality and local charm. Enter the big chains like Sears and out with the local businesses.

But the downtown was already in trouble before that mall was built. Why was that when no real competition as yet existed? I found the answer buried deep and out of sight in the dusty files of the Historical Society. Left alone for hours, days, weeks and months on end with photographic files unavailable to the public, I was able to totally familiarize myself with the changing face of the city over a period of a century-and-a-half. We won’t have the five-hundred-year wait in the United States as they had in Rome for advance decay to wipe away everything of beauty and value. At this rate, it’ll be over with easily in another 100 years. Racially, yes, of course, we’re all familiar with the statistics on North America. But before we got into hot water racially and genetically, we began letting our architecture slide. As in Egypt, Greece and Rome, the architecture may be all that’s left now – a very few poor, tumbledown wrecks as reminders of a glorious past – but I feel it was probably the same there as well. People stopped giving a damn and wattle began replacing granite. (Cheaper and easier of course.) You can drive down Main Street here and see a marvelous old edifice, a parking lot next to it, then a structural and architectural piece of crap next to that. And the latter two are gaining ground all the time.

The city is at this point thoroughly bastardized architecturally. Nothing fits. There is no harmony. An occasional pet project of the Historical Society will stand out amidst the desolation but I’ve seen these streets a hundred years ago when every block, in all directions, was picture perfect – a fairy tale setting, a Showplace. And I saw it all change.
At first, still during the 19th Century, when any building was razed or otherwise had to be replaced, a bigger and truly better one went up in its place. Parking lots, of course, were unheard of. The time of the wonderful buildings stopped at about the time of the First World War. (Chillicothe was the site of one of the largest troop training centers in the United States. Camp Sherman was erected in 1917 in a matter of weeks just north of the city, across the river opposite the site of the mall I spoke of earlier, contained over three thousand well-constructed barracks, and then was almost totally eradicated by the end of the Twenties. While it existed, it was bigger than the city itself.) It seems that no really decent building went up after the time of the First World War. Things got static until the Forties and Fifties when destruction and demolition began to really take their toll.

Fires and floods had their effect on original structures which had been built to stand the centuries. Renovation and the creation of parking space took care of the rest. As for the rolling beauty of the outlying area, condominiums and other such ready-made slums (literally for welfare cases), not to mention super-highways and beltways, have pushed out in all directions. As with the replacements for the great buildings of the 1800’sinside the city, these “condos” have a serviceable lifespan of approximately forty years. They are frail, ugly and inhuman.
Furthermore, as I’ve witnessed it up close quite a few times, the biggest effort when any modern contractor sets about the job of erecting one of these glorified huts is involved in the TEARING DOWN of the existing structure! The fact – terrible and terrifying – is that these modern engineers and laborer’s CANNOT themselves build the kind of buildings that they have such great difficulty in demolishing! For one, we today as a nation are too POOR to afford to erect such palaces, and, worse, the craftsmanship and the materials for it NO LONGER EXIST! (They don’t make good brick anymore.)

But the question I had centered upon was the mystification over the death of the downtown. Also in these thousands of photographs I’ve studied were many interiors of the various stores and shops of the downtown. They resembled the insides of jewelry boxes. Specialty shops, family-owned and operated where people took pride. Local industries producing furniture, automobiles, tires, canned goods, our own dairy, mill, pottery, paper (the only one still remaining), and everything that was necessary to sustain the town and profit by export to other areas. (This city was a major stop along the Ohio and Erie Canal from the 1830’s until about 1913 when the canal was finally destroyed by flood.)

Today Chillicothe is as dependent as any other area on trucking, etc., for its basic needs. The marvelous shops were taken over by first one and then another succeeding business, remodeled and refurbished until the effect was one of ugliness. Great tracts of floor were parceled and divided until the effect was that of a bunch of Middle Ages shepherds squatting in the shadows of the pillars of the Parthenon. From temple to brothel. The four-by-eight panel, the drop- ceiling and the interior-exterior carpet. They couldn’t keep up the old standards of decor and appearance so it appeared logical to chuck it all and go across the river into virgin territory and build afresh. This is precisely what Eisenhower ‘had advised the Germans to do after the War: Abandon their cities, their culture, their heritage. The Germans didn’t take him up on it but REBUILT everything just as it was before, brick by brick. A classic example of how different peoples handle a lost war and a lost peace.

What’s the answer? It has to be a matter of bad values or no values at all to have allowed a situation like this to come about within sixty years. And note well this took place years ahead of any of the more overt signs of racial deterioration. When one is no longer reminded of beauty and worth and order in what he sees around him, naturally he’s going to think less of himself, what his mate should be, or what his children should be, if indeed he bothers about children at all. Those without a past seldom worry about a future.
[Vol. XII, #10 – Oct., 1983]