Brockton: Planned or Accidental?

Driving west from Plymouth on route 14/27 on New Year’s Day, searching for the Fall River Expressway, we are compelled through the rotting downtown around the T station, bus depot, and juvenile court house.  In Brockton the trains are elevated on a stone viaduct that guarantees that you will never get run over.  As a result there are no lines of sight in the center of town, plenty of places to wait for passerbyes for muggings, throwing trash at passing cars, and defecating in public.  And the traffic cannot see around the stops, corners, and imposing blackened stone viaducts...imagine the Newcastle of Get Carter, the original with Michael Caine.

The MBTA and Commonwealth DOT have grand plans for Brockton and the roadways near Taunton, US 44, that they and other proponent of public works projects as a salve for unemployment like vertical housing structures cure social problems.  If you build it, put the shovel in the ground, you cannot be stopped.  This Robert Moses mentality has its inherent truth in the nature of such projects.  To say that it will stimulate the economy and keep the people from becoming restless is a misunderstanding of the work policies of Franklin Roosevelt.  Try stacking a court with judges, forcing millions into cheap labor, and making hillbillies brush their teeth, Obama.  If Michael Caine were President things would get done, the bloody door would get blown off.

Is Brockton in managed decline or managed growth?  Regional and Urban planners are often under the impression that growth can exists anywhere despite the economic and geographical realities.  Brockton was an accident, the industrial town that the city fathers envisioned and named after a canadian industrialist(an oxymoron), did not survive.  Brockton has been in decline for a century, although plateau may be more accurate in a technical definition.  Let Michael Caine, in a Charles Bronson way, bring Brockton back from the meta-ghetto to a new foxborough or newcastle instead of waiting for the half-assed throw money at it stimilus transportation/employment plan. 

Brockton: Hipster Colonies

In my last post I mentioned that there are no hipster colonies in Brockton.  The reader of this blog may ask what constitutes a hipster colony.  In my delusional understanding, a hipster colony is a neighborhood or community of pretentious pseudo-adults that are not natives to the urban centers where they have settled.  They stand out based on behavior and ignorance to their surroundings in regards to the realities of crime, culture, and environment.  The hipster, believing that they live in a society without class, violence, and racism, will leave their doors unlocked, go out all hours at night as they at home amid crackheads, gang-bangers and overeager cops, and instruct their neighbors to improve the community.  These colonies exist in places like New Orleans, see Treme or the Wire, for Baltimore.  David Simon's shows are a perfect reference here, think about it as is the Steve Zahn character in Treme.  Other places such as these exist in most American cities.

When urban crimes happen to these colonists, they always seem amazed that these things can happen in this day and age and plead ignorance.  There is no explanation beyond stupidity or arrogance.  The world is not how you envision it, it is how it is and has been...hard.  Hipsters do not think about these things, especially with Obama in office, he cured all social problems with his shatneresque diction.

Thankfully Brockton is not attractive to hipsters, who are busy turning once hard neighborhoods in Brooklyn into safe places deviod of their culture for one that values specialness, irony, plaid, and holden caulfield.   

Brockton: City of Champions

It is not hard to imagine the life of this city’s native son, Rocky Marciano, probably the toughest boxer to ever live and the one who was never defeated in the ring.  He defeated a 75 to 137 years old Joe Louis according to the barbershop in Coming to America.

Brockton has its champion of the Ring and is a champ when it comes to gerrymandering, its 9th Congressional district is a stunning achievement.  It is an archipelago of noncontigious spaces that would make a corrupt southern legislature blush.  I will not mention the party that it favors, but it is not a difficult guess who benefits from high-concentrated urban decline. 

Urban decline is not romantic in a place like Brockton, a place that time forgot.  There are no hipster colonies here, no one here chooses to live in poverty.  The factories are gone, likely away to cheaper labor, thanks NAFTA.  It is the real manifestation of my fictional Cranbury, Connecticut if Dickens, Conrad and Lovecraft teamed up on a project.  Think the Who, Led Zeppelin, and the Stones.  In New England the sad mill towns that immigrant labor fueled have become museums and the new nearly inescapable ghettoes.  None of this is said to be ironic in the hipster manner and insult those of us who want more out of life than self-indulgent smugness.

Brockton: The Flint, Michigan of Massachusetts

Brockton is the Flint, Michigan of Massachusetts.  Let’s get Tropical!  This is of course is in reference to the Will Ferrell basketball movie, Semi-Pro (2008) set in the 1970s where is he is the owner of a terrible ABA franchise.  He trades the club’s only washing machine for Woody Harrelson.  Never a good move.  The Flint of the High 70s is a city of industry, providing countless auto-parts to the land yachts of the Big Three car makers of nearby Detroit.  Whether the setting is homage to the hockey version of this film, SLAP SHOT, or merely a lovely coincidence is unclear. 

                Brockton is not known for its motoring history, but it is the city of champions.  The city is as about as unromantic as Flint or its neighbor Taunton, another island of industry in a sea of cranberry bogs and pilgrim towns.  Mini-ghettos that could stand in for Baltimore or Flint as mirrors or representations of certain aspects of modern urban barrios in post-industrial American cities.

I admit that this argument is flimsy at best and that the conclusion is unmet.  This is a blog and these rules of a persuasive essay, grammar, and punctuation need not apply.  I could write almost anything without consequences or ridicule, so I will.  This has become as meta as Ricky Gervais exploring the nature of humor, why are jokes funny.  He is single-handedly destroying comedy faster than Dane Cook could ever dream.