The Things You Carry

I like Spam

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome.

Yeah, that’s four links to the same thing. Who cares? It’s awesome.

The links are to BigBoxReuse.com, a project documenting what becomes of those megastore and big box companies that swore, swore, swore to municipal planning officials that the stores would be bringing in jobs and sales tax revenues forever and ever and ever. A couple are churches now. Some are schools. One’s an indoor racetrack. One’s a Spam Museum.

Now this appeals to me personally for a couple reasons. Mainly, it’s because I’m from Rockford, Illinois - home of Cheap Trick, the replacement Destiny’s Child and the Sock Monkey. At one point it was a major factory town, sometimes called “Screw City” because it was a major producer of nuts, bolts and other fasteners. Now that’s the name of a local roller derby team.

If you go to that link, click on Teams and Players to see the Screw City Slammers.

Most of the industry died away and my hometown became a hole. It was the worst place in the country to live, according to Money Magazine. We beat Flint, Michigan. In fact, Michael Moore came to visit us for his film The Big One just because we beat Flint. He interviewed my boss.

Now, Rockford has come a long way since I was in high school in the 90s, but there are still problems. The nearby Chrysler plant in Belvidere is planning massive layoffs. The industrial center is very well demolished, but boy can we flip burgers for each other! My hometown became a massive sprawl-monster of big box stores and burger joints. We can no longer make things, but we sure can buy them.

As for me, college in Missouri. Sprawl. A job in the Chicago suburbs. Sprawl. Aside from a few years spent in Chicago itself (which has its own mess of problems), I’ve always been around sprawl, sprawl, sprawl.

One thing I noticed from my constant, Midwestern exposure to sprawl is that it doesn’t last. In Rockford, the booming sprawl areas of my youth are now the older, seedier areas with second-tier stores, vacant megastore fronts and strip clubs. As Rockford keeps expanding eastward, the big, profitable stores keep moving east. It’s easier to move to where the business is rather than bring the business to you, it seems.

Or, to put it another way, when the need a store fills is perceived, not real, it’s easier for people to ignore it when something perceived as better comes along.

So I was happy when I saw BigBoxReuse.com. I’m happy that someone is getting use out of the empty husks large corporations leave behind when they find an area no longer profitable. As a kid who grew up among those coprolites, I gotta say, I wish they were never there, but I’m glad they’re being used.