Vanished Kalamazoo collects photographs and reminiscences of parts of Kalamazoo, Mich.--my hometown---that time and the vicissitudes of economics and public taste have driven into nonexistence. The site memorializes some of the economic and physical landmarks of the city, such as Checker Motors, the paper mills, the open-air downtown mall, but many more--small shops, restaurants, gas stations, bars and--that were of no great consequence. Unless of course, you happened to grow up around and in them.
Surfing through the site gives me the impression of riding around town with my parents in our Plymouth Valiant or LTD station wagon, past the Koffee Kup or the Reid (on the site, Rickman) Hotel, the Chocolate Shop, R.M. Jones Gifts (a 19th century brick box standing monolithically amid multilane arteries slicing in and out of downtown), and any number of small and obscure or large and historic places. For the first time in decades, I see the Valley Inn, where my family stayed after we first move to Kalamazoo, and Schensul's cafeteria, where we ate a few times during that encampment. I remember the sticky floor, the ripped seats, and the popcorn machine encrusted with burned grease in the Capitol (Majestic) Theatre, where I went to see Song of the South just before the place closed. I also caught one of the last shows (I think it was The Thing with Kurt Russel) at the Douglas Drive In.
Greater cultural losses, at least in my eyes, were Flipside and Boogie records, where I explored the world of music beyond Top 40 radio. Boogie's phone number was one digit off from my family's so we often got calls for them.
Certain establishments furnished legend and rumor that reliably titillated our respectable citizens, and the contemporary, gentrified city likely has no equivalents. Club Zorba, a bar on the north edge of downtown, was reputedly a den of all sorts of vices that my preteen mind couldn't quite grasp, though my sisters and I always traded dark innuendos about it if we drove past. A murder actually happened there once. The building that housed it was knocked down some years back, and the spot now hosts a community college branch. Gone too are some of the dive bars where I whiled away too much of the extremely unhappy year after I turned 21.
Any other city could engender a similar repository of images and memories. This just happens to be mine. And in a way, what I see at Vanished Kalamazoo happens to be me. In the book I'm reading by Melissa Holbrook Pierson, which I mentioned below, she discusses the notion of "cognitive maps," the mental picture of the world that we all construct. These, according to the psychologists and cultural geographers who developed the concept, help us define who we are since they position us in relation to our surrounding: there has to be an "us" to connect with the world surrounding us. When something is wiped off our cognitive map, our sense of self is altered and diminished. This allegedly explains why people mourn losing familiar landscapes, or parts of them.
I don't think what I feel looking at the site is nostalgia, at least in the technical sense. I don't particularly wish I could return to the time when I lived in Kalamazoo. But the photos and stories do bring back that time in a surprisingly vivid way. This includes not only defining moments, but the everyday textures and settings of it; the routines and all feelings attending them. Put simply, going there made me feel a little bigger, returning to consciousness a base layer of my life. Maybe we can't go home again, though home sometimes comes back to us.
So where would you go, what would you have to see, to bring another time in your life into the now?
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