Marquette

I spent this week traveling in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for work. You often hear how beautiful the U.P. is, and people usually mean the natural beauties. What startled me were the cities. Marquette is gorgeous.

Marquette was built on lumber and mining, specifically iron ore. There’s an abandoned ore dock that could look forlorn

but in Marquette it manages to appear historic. My colleague and I asked what it was as we sat in a fashionable little micro-brewery sampling the local whitefish with brie and apples as an appetizer. Our pert, (presumably)  Finnish-descended waitress explained how it used to operate and told us there was a working ore dock in town if we wanted to see one. Loading times are published in the paper.

After dinner we took a walk by the pristine shore. There was a green map of town by a new park. It outlined the best walking, hiking, snowshoeing and skiing paths through town.

The architecture is magnificent, creating landmarks in every direction: there’s the dome, there’s the library (FAB LIBRARY), there’s the courthouse, there’s the cathedral. Fabulous blue stained glass looking down over downtown. Charming shops and hip services for a town of only 20,000. Of course there’s a Starbucks.

They were cleaning the sidewalks and the streets of Marquette as we were leaving town for Houghton. I goggled.

I’m back now, in my sad, scrappy little town. With the acres of factory parking lots gone to dandelions, the factories torn up into mountains of rubble, trash gathering in the gutters. I jokingly compare the streets to Addis Ababa (although its not feeling very funny today). And street cleaning is not something Lansing pays for.

So, take a page from Marquette, and when you build factories and dig mines, keep going. Build theatres and civic centers and churches and libraries and flower gardens and playgrounds and beaches and endowments. Build a statue. One in every eleven automobiles built in North America was built in Lansing, Michigan and there’s not much here to show for that.