This weekend I planes-trains-and-automobiled it from Bloomington to Woodstock, my hometown. The occasion is sad — the death of my friend\’s father — but I also looked forward to reconnecting with my oldest friends and my former community. It turns out, not much of the former actually exists.
Woodstock was home to Orson Welles at one point, and my family once rented a floor of his old boarding school for about eight months until our home was finished being built. It is where the movie Groundhog Day was filmed. Geraldo Rivera came to town in an undercover expose of illegal immigrant workers at a local restaurant. And Woodstock was my home from age 5 months through college.
Woodstock was a place with quaint Victorian houses and a small-town atmosphere that was protected to an extreme from the expansion on the northwest corridor from Chicago up toward Madison. The No-Growth, Anti-Sprawl leadership said no to everything, even things that would have helped Woodstock in a positive way, like Sun City. The thinking was that growth = chain stores = end to local business. Of course, no-growth = attrition and gentrification = businesses moving out. As I was leaving in the late \’90s, leadership changed and corporations started coming in. The historic fairgounds were paved to make way for an Osco or some such, when a perfectly usable building stood empty across the street. Our farmland along the two largest highways coming into town are now replaced with strip malls and relocated stores. Worst of all, my father\’s company is completely gone, replaced by the symbol of small-town angst: Morton Chemical was replaced with a Wal-Mart.
Not just the building, which was being torn down during my last visit (Morton was bought out several times over). The hill upon which it sat, too. To have the hook that brought me to Woodstock replaced with the Deliverer of Evil for mom-and-pop shops is just depressing.
