Main Street USA
With an espresso brownie (labeled as chocolate) and an iced coffee beverage I took my seat outside Little City on Congress and 10th. It wasn't the wind that caused me to worry, though it rustled my papers. No, it was the buses. The last table at Little City is about one foot from the street, a street which many large vehicles travel down on a regular basis. Needless to say, it can create a fairly odd situation. I sat there for the duration of my coffee break though, and after a while the buses-- and the breezes that followed them-- faded out of my mind and all that was left was Austin's hometown Main Street.
I realized that, from Congress, Austin looks like Any Small Town. Wind blows through the leaves of trees above cars parked in angled spots all along the town's major artery. Office Ladies carry bagged lunches, people lounge on benches, and sunshine bathes the entire downtown. I am ignoring the neon and skyscrapers, of course, but those are just for show anyway. It's not much of a City. Austin has skyscrapers because it wants to be a big city, Austin has neon because it wants to make a lot of noise. For all of the effort though, and all of the continous construction, and the proposed light rail, and the insistence that it's a new media mecca, this is still a small town and will probably continue to be so for some time.
This is not a bad fate, but the sight of an entire town fooling itself is getting rather tiresome. The above judgement may be too harsh. Is it possible for a city to be non-urban? Architecturally Austin's downtown is more of a bonzai than a jungle. It's been carefully manicured, lit, and coordinated. At night the skyline is beautiful, and from the sky the entire city is aligned along one axis-- from the UT Tower, to the capital, to the handful of skyscrapers downtown. Austin has the warehouse district, traffic problems, and ghettos of a large city, but just a few minutes spent walking down the street will give one an idea of how non-urban this city is. Could it be coincidence that the most prominent building I see out my window is almost entirely glass? Austin's is quite an acheivement in some ways: the heft of big business (Dell, IBM, &c.) combined with the levity of a "relaxed atmosphere."
The beauty of levity, however, is its alternate definition-- inconstancy, changeableness-- which speaks to this town's rather quick transformation into (and possible regression from) a sort of self proclaimed sexy hi-tech city. Austin has long been a center for hardware manufacturing, chip making, and an assortment of other boring parts of the tech industry but has only recently, after much effort, garnered any attention from more sexy sectors. Jealousy inspires persistence, and Austin, if anything, has been tirelessly persistent in pushing its new image.
Recently, reading Pico Iyer's account of the Olympic games in Atlanta I couldnt help but see some similarities. Atlanta, according to Iyer, tried and tried to position itself as a global city. A real hub. Atlanta failed because it tried too hard, and in my estimation Austin is heading down the same path. When you think about it, though, it's appropriate. Austin is the perfect poster child-city for an industry built on inflated expectations, narcissistic hype, and forced-fun.
It's not until you see Main Street USA sprouting skyscrapers that this sort of schizophrenia becomes undeniable.
--Posted 09/07/00 04:57AM