Looking south from the 11th floor of the Graduate Hotel in downtown Eugene, Oregon. Spencer’s Butte (Background) rises to an elevation of over 2,000’ asl, on the southern edge of the city.
It has often been said that college students exist in the university bubble. Technically this is a figure of speech, but recent observations have me wondering if our post-modern urban world has given this phrase a new, more literal meaning. Last week I was down in Eugene, Oregon for a professional conference. Our family enjoys going to Eugene, it is from a 1000’ above, a beautiful city, and my wife and her family are there. So whenever I have to go down to Eugene, we all migrate down and make it a family affair.
In it’s own right Eugene has always had a bit of an edge, yes the hippie edge, but also a much harder, more heroin/meth type edge. Even growing up in the 1990s, when we would go down to Eugene, you would see those types of people who had gotten lost in the 60s and 70s and never managed to escape. They were ostensibly hippies, but not the grass smoking ones, more the ones who had gotten onto the harder drugs and never been able to escape.
So beneath the easy going, come as you are groovy vibes, had always run a harder, darker current, but all in all Eugene has always been one of my favorite cities anywhere. There is nothing like attending a game at Autzen Stadium on a sunny late autumn afternoon as the sun glints off the distant Cascade Mountains, and the cottonwoods and maple explode in color along the blue McKenzie River and sparkling Willamette. Aside from the college, it always had a fairly vibrant downtown, plenty to do, and a close to nature feel. If one got down there early enough for a game, or just had some time to kill while attending a professional conference, there were plenty of opportunities, for fishing, hiking, biking, and enjoying a craft beer.
Not to say you cannot still do all those things in Eugene. There are still great bars and restaurants downtown, the river still flows through the heart of the city, and that is also not to say there were never the homeless and drug addicts hanging around. There were, maybe not quite at Portland levels, but it was always visible, always part of that hard edge. But the past few years have not been kind to Eugene, in a way that those who do not frequently visit probably do not realize. We go down to Eugene a lot and in the past several years, the city’s open air drug scene and homelessness has exploded. My wife recently told me of a homeless man becoming aggressive towards our four year old daughter because as they were walking past his tent, he overheard our daughter ask her mother why people were camping there. It is ugly, it is a problem.
However, we are not the kind of people afraid to walk a public street, and not the kind to hole up in our hotel room just because there are people panhandling within view. So during our stay last week at the “Graduate” hotel, a nicely remodeled, 12 story, former downtown Hilton, we decided to walk over to Hayward Field. The iconic track and field stadium which has recently undergone a $270,000,000 (I just had to write out all the zeroes for effect…), in anticipation of the 2022 World Track and Field Championship. We were curious to see this testament to vapid excess, and it made a good goal for our evening stroll.
Our route took us through downtown, an adjoining neighborhood of mixed residential and off campus housing, a row of bars and restaurants, and then the campus, before finally reaching the new Mecca of the track and field world. As with any downtown these days, there is a notable excess of the “unhoused” and graffiti scrawled across many of the buildings, however, the downtown core does seem to escape the worse of the corrosive urban grime of other cities such as Portland or Seattle. Sure if you accidently wander down a back street there may be a couple people sleeping or passed out in doorways, but the streets are not lined by tents. There is a large police presence downtown, at least enough to keep the campers more dispersed in the urban core, they are more concentrated along the city’s once glorious greenways and in more industrial areas.
At one point we stumble onto a group of “street-kids” (Homeless teens/young adults.) telling loud incomprehensible jokes and shouting excitedly at a dice game. Few of the drug addled youngsters even noticed to look up as we passed. Several blocks away a group of haggard mostly white 30somethings waited in line outside the McDonald Theater. I made the mistake of initially thinking they were queuing for the Korean Taco restaurant next door, and my wife chortled as upon closer inspection we realized it was the doorline to a “Tech Nine” concert. Our daughter kept repeatedly calling out “what’s going on?” As we walked passed the line, mostly blank pale pocked, and sometimes tattooed face stared back at her. We passed on under a highway overpass, a woman in pajamas ran past us on the corner, a stricken look on her face. As we wait for the light she walks back past us, this time her face is pulled tight and expressionless, there are two men who do not have appeared to have bathed in weeks, walking on either side of her. As she passes us the walk sign flashes to go, and we mercifully from the shadows into the light of a fading late spring day.
We move through mixed residential neighborhoods now as we draw closer to the campus and away from the downtown core. The neighborhood is of corner markets and rows of modest, but well made houses from a time long passed. Some of them have now fallen into disrepair and some have been turned into duplexes or small apartments. A few have lawns and yards that are well maintained, but some appear as if they have not been mowed yet this spring, and others are muddied as it appears the tenants are parking extra cars on the lawn.
My wife noted that when visiting a friend in this neighborhood back in January, there had been a large number of homeless people camping on the grass medians between the sidewalk and the street. She speculated allowed on where they had gone. “Perhaps,” She wondered aloud. “They have moved back down towards the river with the coming of spring.” How quaint.
Moving through the neighborhood the hallmarks of “low impact” property crime and vandalism are everywhere. Painted over graffiti on a fence, bars on a window, a pit bull lounging in a fenced front yard, an abandoned RV parked on the grass between the street and sidewalk. Presently we came to a row of bars and restaurant on the blocks adjoining campus. A number of the buildings were pocked by graffiti and homeless men were stretching out in doorways and in front of ground level window sills to bed down for the night as the sun began to set. A few students wandered in and out of the establishments, several holding beers or hard ice teas, talking excitedly as they walked obliviously towards whatever house/frat party they were attending for the evening. On the last corner before campus sat the remnants of the old Taylor’s bar, once the hottest spot in the city, it has been shut down after having it’s liquor license revoked.
Once the most popular bar in the city, Taylor’s now stands abandoned and in disrepair.
We stood for a moment and took stock of the once vibrant nightclub, abandoned covered in graffiti, windows broken, and grass beginning to grow up between its patio bricks. In a way it seemed the perfect metaphor for much of Eugene, and many West Coast cities. A place which once pulsed with life, now in decay and largely forgotten. Then we stepped across the street and into an other world.
The world of the University of Oregon campus is much different than the one that exists a block away. There are no abandoned RV’s on it’s wide boulevards, no homeless camps springing up on its grassy manicured lawns. The campus is shockingly nice, impossibly nice. Crowds of young people purposely walking all moving at a crisp pace, all going somewhere, and for that they surely are. For theirs is all the opportunity in the world, or at least so they are told, and why would they not believe it? They do not have to live or operate in the world beyond, or beneath, but they live in the light of possibility. Such a fine existence paid by those who have come before, the taxpayer, and their parents. It must be nice to exist on such a plane of reality, one which becomes more elite, manicured, and privileged with the passage of time, while the world around decays and rots.
In a way strolling the campus was like visiting a museum, a time capsule of a world gone by, when we had nice public places, not overrun by crime and despair. In a way it was nice to know such realms still exist, that somewhere there is the will and means to keep the rest of the rotting world at bay. A cocoon wrapped around our most elite minds, or the minds of those who make it into those spaces. What hopes and dreams they must have, what realm of possibility must exist in their own minds.
I am not old, but scenes such as this make me feel as such. Seeing in them the callous optimism of my youth, and wondering if I was ever like that, ever so sheltered. I decide I was not like them, I was somehow more wise, and world aware. Though this is likely a fallacy created in my mind.
Hayward Field recently underwent a $270 million dollar renovation in preparation for the 2022 World Track and Field Championships. It sits on the University of Oregon campus in Eugene, Oregon. Less than two blocks away drug addicted men sleep in storefronts.
We visit Hayward field. It looks like a space ship, bequeathed by NIKE onto the world. It is beautiful, modern, and strange. All the more strange that $270 million dollars would be invested in this monument to excess, while several blocks away dying drug addicts stretch out for the night in storefronts and fade into an oblivion from which they may never wake. And if they do not wake, the ambulance will drive by a testament to excess, on its way to picking up yet another victim of the streets. For as you know, we are a multi-tiered society, and there are those who matter, and those who do not.
And if you are lucky enough to make the five mile round trip from your hotel, through the bubble, and back you will see it all. The tents, the street kids, the forgotten souls in line to hear music no respectable person has heard of, the hangers on, the youthful ambition, and the denizens of the dark, who emerge on the streets as the sun fades. To pimp their wears, and shoot their drugs, in full view of God, Man, and your children. If you navigate through this you will be struck with the absurdity of it all. How protected those on the campus really are, the safety they now enjoy, and the different world in which they live. Perhaps like many of us they will graduate and enter back into the world of the rest of us, replete with all the noxious experiences of our day to day. If they do there is a good chance they will grow bitter about their fate, for their debt, and the idea they are too good to live among the rest of us. Yet others will grow old never living among us with the full drudgery of the human experience, they may give us platitudes from their lofty perches in the halls of power. They may wax eloquently about the suffering of the masses and give themselves to pious self-serving advocacy. But they will forever remain in the bubble of the elite, to their core unaware, or unwilling to take the time to fully understand the deterioration of our society, and our current state of unravelling.
For them it is of no importance, our state of unbecoming, just a nuisance they may sometimes have to drive past or be forced to acknowledge on their way to somewhere important. Because they are more important, they pity not the fools and peasants, except when saying so serves them. It is for us to be living in a world among the undead, or so sometimes it seems, how the haves and have nots can co-exist in such proximity, but be so utterly disconnected is a mystery of our time. And as each day, year, and pandemic passes, the stratosphere of the haves grows smaller, more unattainable, and distant from the that of the clamoring masses, as the bubble slowly detaches and floats away. Eugene sure does look beautiful from 1000 feet above, let them pray their bubble never pops.