"When public spaces are no longer inviting and people feel uncomfortable going there or even avoid looking as they drive by, the spaces have become uncivil."

Superior's Palace Theater demolished: Image from the Perfect Duluth Day blog.

Via The Political Environment, as posted at The Daily Telegram of Superior, Wisconsin:

COMMENTARY: Palace demolition has rendered downtown Superior flat, lifeless

BY KRIS FISHER

Flat is beautiful…. I think not. I remember going through puberty in the 60s: though my mother tried to convince me otherwise, nobody thought that flat was beautiful. Many years later I bought a building with a flat roof. Uh-oh! There’s nothing worse than a flat roof, I was told. That made me feel deflated. Deflated like a flat tire. Just my luck when I was flat broke anyway. That left me singing the blues — not really singing — because I’d never be able to do that without hitting a flat note.

Webster’s defines “flat” as “lifeless, dull, spiritless; having lost its flavor” (like a flat beer). If that’s the case, why are we spending so much of taxpayers’ money making Superior flat? One year ago, our city leaders spent hundreds of thousands of our tax dollars to flatten the Palace Theater and its neighbors to the north. A few years before that, it was Central High School. Today, we have flat.

Unfortunately, our flat now coincides with a flat real estate market. I personally own a piece of land that would have sold in a nanosecond two years ago; today it sits … and sits. No Sale.

The city of Superior seems to be in the same pickle. It has created building sites – flat sites in a flat market. And the citizens of Superior collectively own these flat parcels. Lifeless, dull places in the middle of our public realm that make us feel that our town has lost its flavor, its spirit. And that affects us all.

James Howard Kunstler, in his award-winning book “Home from Nowhere,” writes about what we are experiencing. “When you degrade the public realm, as we have, you degrade the common good,” he said. And when that happens, you actually damage civic life. When public spaces are no longer inviting and people feel uncomfortable going there or even avoid looking as they drive by, the spaces have become uncivil. His theory is that such spaces impoverish and diminish our communities and our civilization.

Superior doesn’t have the corner on this kind of devastation. Chills went down my spine when I read in Kunstler’s book: “While nothing lasts forever, it was tragic that this magnificent building was destroyed less than a hundred years after it was built…. The town demolished it with a kind of mad glee.” He wasn’t writing about the Palace, but he could have been. Typically, these magnificent buildings are replaced by strip malls, single-story bank and office buildings, laundromats or fast food joints, creating a kind of “anti-place” that makes a once-unique city into Nowhere, USA -- or everywhere USA. Many of us have had the experience of traveling thousands of miles from home only to land in the same mall with the same shops that we drive to in our own neighborhood.

So what is the next step? To ensure that something good happens here. To put a stop to senseless flattening. To reject flat and embrace sharp. How greatly civilization’s vision sharpened when we became aware that the Earth was not flat and we could not travel to its end. Journeys became continuous. Culture is continuous as well; the past is inexorably connected to the present and to the future. When we destroy important remnants of our past, we destroy part of our present culture, we destroy part of our future — leaving our lives with less spirit, leaving our lives flat.

We cannot replace the architectural treasure we lost a year ago. But the Palace Theater has a strong spirit that no wrecking ball can eradicate. So while its physical presence has been demolished, its spirit still resides with the citizens of Superior – perhaps giving us the strength to keep our remaining buildings standing in face of the destructive forces in our city. The next time I hear the flatulent rhetoric of local politicians trying to persuade me that the hasty action against the Palace was wise, I think my stomach will begin to rumble and force me to explode with my own … petulance.

Kris Fisher is president of Friends of Superior.