2 Times a Gentrifier

by Willy Blackmore

One grade-school summer, I wore a rust-orange jersey with the words “Iowa Malleable” printed across the chest while standing in left, center or right field, being generally terrible at baseball. The foundry was one of a handful of manufacturers in town that sponsored Little League teams: There was a brush plant, a washing-machine manufacture, a subsidiary of Rockwell International that fabricated truck and trailer parts.

Other years, I also played for McDonald’s and Taco John’s, culinary mainstays of Burlington Ave. But none were as deeply rooted in Fairfield’s economy as Iowa Malleable Iron Company, which opened in 1900. The plant supplied local companies with parts for farming tools and equipment like hay carriers and tractors; it was only the second iron foundry west of the Mississippi.

Nearly a century later, not long after I played on the team — when 200 workers were employed at the massive six-acre campus that sat on the west edge of town — Iowa Malleable closed after a drawn-out bankruptcy.

During our middle and high school summers, we’d ride bikes over to the abandoned factory, two or three bodies on each set of two wheels, doubling or tripling on pegs and handle bars, to sneak through holes in the cyclone fence and wander through the hastily abandoned site. Depending on the year and the crowd assembled for any given trespassing, we would smoke Newports and break windows; smoke Swisher Sweets and write graffiti; or smoke Gauloises and shoot black-and-white photographs of the slouching buildings. When I took a photo of my friend Aaron standing by the factory gates, the weeds reaching halfway up his JNCOs, I probably thought it looked post-apocalyptic. What it was, of course, was post-industrial; a symptom and a symbol of an economic sea change in the Midwest.

It was around that time that the telecommunications company my dad worked for went public. For a brief day or two, thanks to an employee stock option he took during a contract renegotiation, he was a millionaire. But this was the late ’90s, and the same story you can tell about so many short-lived fortunes applies here too. Today, the callback technology that the company was built around, which allowed for cheap international rates, is more obsolete than domestic small-scale manufacturing.

In a post titled “The 20 Best Small Towns to Visit in 2013,” Smithsonian Magazine’s Susan Spano wrote that Fairfield, Iowa (#7), my hometown, “could stand as a case study from The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida’s book on the link between educated populations and economic development.”

Some of those educated residents that led Smithsonian to draw the Florida comparison were responsible for starting the company my dad worked for. There was another local telecom company, a competitor, that also made a handful of people small fortunes before it folded as well, the market taking most of that money back in the end.

The founders of both firms came to Fairfield because of Transcendental Mediation. You know: The Beatles in India and Across the Universe, Russell Brand talking about meditating, anything David Lynch has ever said about fish and creativity. What lured them to seemingly undesirable southeastern Iowa in the 1970s was real estate — specifically the campus of the Parson’s College, a defunct institution where they would start a school devoted to consciousness-based education.

They came from the coasts, they came from careers and money, and when they came to town, the foundry and the surrounding farms didn’t exactly offer the kind of employment opportunities they were accustomed to. So they started companies, co-op grocery stores, coffee shops, a synagogue, and private schools. I knew all of this growing up, but I didn’t see it for what it was until recently: My parents and their meditating friends were classic gentrifiers. Fairfield was basically Park Slope on the prairie.

My girlfriend and I bought our first house this year, in a small neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles called Hermon. In real estate speak, we’re Highland Park-adjacent. Back in January, the online brokerage firm Red Fin put Highland Park at the top of its annual ranking of the “hottest” housing markets in the country. York Boulevard, one of the two main drags that cut through the neighborhood, is increasingly populated with the kind of stores that have an impressively expensive inventory and yet, it’s impossible to pin down what exactly they sell. I may live on the opposite side of the 110 freeway, but this is a case of guilt by association — and borders. For the second time in my life, I’m a gentrifier.

“We’ve lived here for fifteen years,” is the second thing the woman across the street said to me after I introduced myself, only somewhat defensively.

“I’m glad to see white people moving into the neighborhood,” our Latino plumber, who used to drag race down our street twenty years ago, said to my girlfriend.

Another neighbor, who’s lived on the street since 1984, told me he tried to sell his house a couple of times, in the ’90s, but that things are better now; the Los Angeles Police Department says Hermon is one of the safest neighborhoods in its local jurisdiction.

Reading Smithsonian’s bucolic description of Fairfield, with it’s new music center, Quiet Zone railroad crossings (which they failed to note that my dad was instrumental in putting together), and soon-to-open art house movie theater, I couldn’t help but wonder if the wave of meditator migration in the 1970s could really be summed up so neatly — as such an unqualified success. Didn’t the entrepreneurs bring the boom-and-bust cycle of the information economy? A cyclical system that turns over every couple of years — not every century? After the telecom boom, a book-sales company become Fairfield’s dominant cash cow. If Readers’ Digest hadn’t bought it for $380 million in 1999, the titanic shifts in the publishing and book retail industries would no doubt have taken a hit. That the division was off-loaded for $17.5 million in 2008 seems to suggest that the company would indeed have been another burst bubble for the southeastern Iowa economy.

Similarly, I wonder if the price fluctuations of the past 28 years may put my neighbor, who planted the fig tree I can see over the fence the year I was born, in a more precarious position. Salvador owns his house, a bungalow not unlike the one we live in with our infant daughter, so the rebound of housing prices may mean he could cash out, but I doubt he would want to leave behind the dense orchard of fruit trees that are packed into his sloping back yard.

Miguel, who lives on the other side of our house with his disabled wife, isn’t due for any economic windfall. He sells recyclables and cardboard to pay the rent. Miguel told me he dropped 20 pounds during a recent four-day long hospital visit related to a prostate problem. When I asked if the doctors said he was doing better, he grimaced and shook his head, saying it was too expensive to stay longer.

He, along with other low- and working-class renters in Hermon and Highland Park — where there are far more apartment buildings than my bungalow-heavy neighborhood — may end up being the collateral damage of families like mine moving into the neighborhood. And he welcomed us with a bag of loquats picked from the tree in his front yard; Miguel said he’d give me a seedling so I could have my own fruit too.

A mural painted on the side of a hair salon in Echo Park was recently tagged with the words “Development = gentrification = displacement of the poor = economic violence.” It’s a grievance laid against people not unlike myself, who have pushed out Latino residents over the course of the past 10 or 15 years. And yet, we were displaced from renting in nearby Silver Lake too. The two-bedroom apartment we moved out of now pulls in more each month than the mortgage we pay on a three-bedroom house less than 10 miles away. Luckily, with two salaries and Jennifer’s book advance money, ours is not a story of economic violence.

The door to our new house was painted red when we moved in, a color I’ve heard is the signature of a certain group of developers who are buying up properties in northeast Los Angeles. I’ve counted four other such red doors on the surrounding blocks, the paint job, the horizontal-slatted fencing, the sparse, drought-tolerant landscape all signs of flips. Another such house was just rehabbed one street over. There’s a charter high school at the top of the hill, a grocery store with an extensive craft beer selection on the corner, a hipster tequila bar over on Figueroa, a mile or so away.

The brick hull of Iowa Malleable was torn down in 2005, the soil under the denuded blocks still containing traces of PCBs, even after years of EPA-led cleanup efforts. A year later, a proposal to construct a biofuel plant on the site was floated — a modern factory that would feed off of the agricultural industry instead of feed into it. It was never built.

Willy Blackmore lives in northeast Los Angeles. photo by kevystew

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