The Suburban Promise of Sanded-Off Edges
It would be easier to believe suburban disdain for major cities if they didn't keep using cities as templates for their desires.
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Other writing:
The Best Small Coffeemakers and Espresso Machines at Serious Eats
Why A Small Fine-Mesh Strainer Is Incredible Versatile at Serious Eats
The not-quite-grown-up Madison of Filthy Animals at Tone Madison
You Can’t Go Home Again, But Also, I Just Did
I spent this last week visiting my parent’s house where I grew up in Lakeville, Minnesota. Or technically near where I grew up: I lived the first 15 years of my life at a house in an unincorporated township just outside of Lakeville. We moved further in town when I got to high school. Back then, Lakeville was a sleepy suburb at the edge of farmland with a population of around 32,000 people, most of whom moved out to the small city because they enjoyed its proximity to nature (namely, lakes), and the bang-for-your-buck plots of land still available. But something else started happening just before I left for college: those empty swaths of land were being bought up by developers, razed, and turned into grazing prairies for gigantic white flight McMansions. The population of Lakeville is now 72,812, and the 2020 Census data shows the extreme lack of diversity in the city, which is 86.3% white.
Just before I made the trip, my brother (who lives in Tokyo) sent me this article about a revitalized downtown Lakeville. While the Lakeville I grew up in was mostly defined by houses butting up against patches of forest, the city was originally founded in 1853 at an intersection of two large roads that had just been built. When the train stop came shortly after, Lakeville began to grow, centered around a downtown strip of businesses (you can see a photo above). As the years passed, that downtown remained but was mostly shunned like a dying mall: there was a grocery store (the only one in Lakeville proper), a hardware store, an ice cream stand, a biker bar, and a variety of offices for travel agents and insurance brokers.
The revitalized downtown instead offers itself up as a new entertainment district: there are multiple craft beer breweries with extensive gourmet burger menus, and there are multiple gourmet burger restaurants with extensive craft beer menus. I wish that was a joke, but each of the area’s five new restaurants all fit specifically into one of those categories or the other. Oh, and most have cocktails and tacos, too.
There’s also a new coffee shop that’s run by some nice, young people and I enjoyed having a coffee there. But while I was sipping my espresso, I saw this post from Michael Tae Sweeney on Bluesky (apologies if you don’t have an account there yet and can’t click through):
“most conservatives have a strong suspicion that the sterile exurban communities they've chosen to live in suck and America's cities are full of people doing fun, exciting and sexy stuff, so there's naturally an enormous appetite among them for stories about city dwellers being violently punished”
Something else we should bring up about Lakeville’s new bar boom is the story of Alibi Drinkery, who refused to shut down operations during the COVID-19 lockdown, citing increasingly disturbing right-wing talking points. As Lakeville’s population has exploded with people building big houses in the sticks, its general political spectrum has shifted conservative. That’s not to say that most people in Lakeville are bloodthirsty for more stories about shootings in Minneapolis—what applied to my hometown from Sweeney’s post was the more direct envy of urban lifestyle without having to exist in an actual urban environment.
Every new eating and drinking establishment in Lakeville is modeled after a big-city trend that died 10 to 15 years ago: craft beer, gourmet burgers, and fancy cocktails all had their heyday in major metropolitan areas in the mid-2010s. That isn’t to say these concepts are entirely passé—who doesn’t love a good burger and a stiff drink—it’s just interesting to see how Lakeville’s downtown has reimagined itself as the ghost of everything people move out there to avoid.
At the same time, downtown Lakeville’s only grocery store is now a curling club. About a mile and a half down the road (which is a busy highway) is a new Cub Foods supermarket, which suggests that if one needs groceries they simply can hop in their car to pick them up. One issue with that, of course, is that the once-downtrodden downtown Lakeville is also the location of the city’s lower-income residents who might not have easy access to a vehicle. The small city blocks surrounding the main strip of Holyoke Ave are dotted with modest pre-war single-family homes and some of the city’s only apartment buildings. As much as downtown Lakeville’s revitalization has been praised, it’s become more of a commuter’s playground more than anything: drive your big trucks to main street for dinner, then drive home again. Nuts to walkability.
It’s hard to pretend this isn’t intentional: Lakeville’s current mayor is Luke Hellier, an enormous piece of shit that I went to high school with. His version of strongly held Republican beliefs are truly repugnant to the core (if you name search and are reading this, Luke, hey buddy—fuck you!), and he’s also a massive loser who ran unsuccessful campaigns for wannabe state legislators and lost the Lakeville mayor’s race multiple times until finally, the city’s demographics agreed with his vision. Like Nixon. As a side note, his previous opponent (and the former mayor, who sports a very JFK bouffant) also made headlines for revitalizing the city’s dining options:
I ate a salad from that Chipotle on Wednesday.
But I digress. The cookie-cutter landscape of a new downtown Lakeville is an intentional policy decision that’s designed to make an adult playground out of what should be a central district that has services for its residents. In 2000, Lakeville built a new library and city center, you guessed it, about a mile and a half down the road from Holyoke Ave, across a big highway, where that new Cub Foods is. I try to imagine what could have been if city planners had the foresight back then to place it on main street.
That isn’t to say that this is all a bad thing. My parents are nice, thoughtful people who deserve to have good-quality, locally-owned eating establishments nearby instead of just chains dotting the freeway. But as the immediate city suburbs have begun to diversify and trend blue all across the country, it’s hard to ignore the new version of a conservative template town: the outline of rural, small-town life colored in by the castoffs of major city centers that the right despises.
At least I can get a good cup of coffee now when I visit home.
Read
This Defector piece from Chris Thompson is great. The Internet in general has been abuzz about DeSantis’ platform-lift cowboy boots, and this piece breaks down the situation better than any other article I’ve seen. It’s truly depraved to see the lengths GOP politicians go to in order to preserve some semblance of masculine gender identity, but it also gives me even more hope that if I ever run into Ron DeSantis in the wild one day I can just pick him up and punt him over the fence like a beach ball.
Watch
“God, this idiot can’t stop writing about Michael Mann.” You’re right, I can’t. On this trip home I was lucky enough to spend time with two wonderful friends who agreed to watch Heat with me because they hadn’t seen it in a long time and I won’t shut up about it. But the reason I can’t shut up about Michael Mann movies is that there is so much to talk about with a Michael Mann movie—the same reason his films don’t reach massive mainstream success is the same reason that they’re so interesting: he doesn’t hold your hand through the plot, and key details are often tossed off in side conversations without much weight. That’s why they’re so rewarding on rewatch: characters make decisions that don’t always make sense until you see the rest of the movie. And Heat is so perfectly orchestrated. Watch it again if you haven’t seen it in a long time, and also, watch it again even if you have.
Listen
I went out crate digging in Minneapolis this last weekend and lucked out an import version of Zuma by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Young’s albums with Crazy Horse are entirely distinct from his solo work—even when members of the band play on those solo albums. When he works with the band, Young gets back to playing his electric guitar and shredding a bit while the song structures are always looser and a bit shaggy. Zuma was his first album after coming out of a depression in the early 1970s, and it’s a jangly mess of chords and rock and roll and also hey why not a seven-minute song about the brutality of Spanish conquistadors? I’m excited to get it into rotation my turntable at home.
Consume
My Grandma’s Caramel Rolls
My grandma passed away a few years ago at 98, but when she was alive, she’d make trays of caramel rolls to bring over whenever I was back in town. Now that she’s passed, my aunt has taken up the tradition, and this Saturday she brought some over and came to visit. We all sat around a fire in my parent’s backyard and caught up, it being the first time I’d seen her and my cousin in years. While her caramel rolls will never quite be the same as my grandma’s, it’s nice having the tradition continue, and it’s especially more powerful now in my grandma’s memory.
Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.
Enjoyed this! Spot-on about suburbs!