Cape's violent paradox

April 16, 2009

Dear Leslie,

Two of their old friends from Denmark visited our friends Frank and Robyn last week. Neither had ever been to America before. Lotte and Soren began their stay in Memphis, Tenn., watching soul line dancers on Beale Street sway on a warm spring day. Once here they went canoeing on the Current River and sampled the local wineries, shopped at Penney's, and danced to Bruce Zimmerman and the Water Street Band at Port Cape before heading off to listen to country and gospel music in Nashville.

This place we call home is a "voldsom paradoks" -- "violent paradox," Soren said one night. He and Lotte had just toured the former church our artist friend Charlie has filled with the curious goods he has collected over the years. Charlie hosts outrageous Halloween parties in the church. Lotte and Soren said they could imagine.

Soren doesn't mean we are violent in the Genghis Khan sense. He means the mid-South conservatism they expected to find here is here but seems to be dramatically offset by progressiveness and open-mindedness.

We are wild, and we are polite. We elect conservative politicians, and we love Oprah. We like real men and real women but not necessarily real butter anymore. We don't expect a handout, but we'll stand in line to help someone else.

Cape Girardeau and the surrounding area can fill the Bedell Performance Hall at the River Campus for a performance of the Saint Louis Symphony or "Hairspray" and pack the Show Me Center for a night of wrestling dramas. We can't imagine living somewhere that has one without the other.

Lotte and Soren and many of the nearly 2 million other people in Copenhagen ride bicycles most everywhere they go. Here they stayed and walked in downtown in Cape Girardeau, one of the city's major paradoxes. The soul of Cape Girardeau resides in our relationship with the Mississippi River and the old architecture downtown and yet in recent decades the city has paid most of its attention to westward development, neglecting the downtown in pursuit of its own manifest destiny.

Slowly the focus has begun shifting back, in part because private individuals resolved to preserve some historic buildings. Another example of historic preservation, the university's new River Campus on the grounds of a former Catholic seminary has redrawn the city. The locus of cultural activity is now in a part of the city that barely had a pulse.

Proposals just unveiled to redevelop Cape Girardeau's downtown recognize the need to stop the neglect. The needs include a downtown hotel; an amphitheater and plaza area along the riverfront; a streetscape along Broadway, which once channeled most of the city's business downtown and now is chock-a-block with deteriorating buildings; more housing downtown; an arts district; more green space; and an attraction like an aquarium.

In the morning and at night, DC and I hear the riverboats pushing barges up and down the Mississippi and trains bearing freight through downtown. We walk downtown every day. We love those rare nights and days when people surge through the downtown streets. Fifty years ago it happened all the time.

What took so long to figure out how to make this happen again? That's part of our violent paradox. We know what we should do. We don't always do it. We know who we are. We have to love ourselves and each other enough to be willing to change.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.