Rustbelt Adolescence or Natasha Stagg’s Grand Rapids
It ended with us. How long it went on is debatable. By my accounting though, the working class teen begins with James Dean and ends with the 2008 financial crisis. The working class teen is a figure of postwar affluence and the freedom, anxiety, and creativity that came with it. The working class teen emerges in a society where young people can afford to stay in school past eighth grade, where even those from modest backgrounds can afford a car.
In the era of the working class teen, the awkward gap between childhood and adulthood is between around 13 and 21. Unlike today, where adolescent experimentation lasts long into your twenties. The working class teen came out of a world of high wages and blue-collar employment. In that sense, things were easier. Working class teen rebellion against the norms of stable employment can seem incomprehensible in the face of our current youth unemployment crisis.
But that rebellion was what gave us the golden age of subcultures: greasers, punks, mods, goths, hippies, hipsters, scenesters. When people ask why subcultures no longer exist, one good answer is that the working class teens who created them no longer really exist.
This occurred to me while I was reading Natasha Stagg’s new novel Grand Rapids. The protagonist Tess has recently arrived in the Michigan city of the same name, moving in with a megachurch-attending, McMansion-dwelling aunt after the death of her mother. Towards the end of the working class teen era, in the early 2000s, McMansions were inhabited by those who would soon be formerly working class. While the gutted Rustbelt cities sank, affluent suburbs learned to swim. For every Detroit, there was a Grosse Point.
This was all apparent before the economy cratered. The period between September 11th and the Great Recession was an interregnum. An era had ended. We were waiting for a new one to begin. The mood was dark and paranoid.
Like Tess, these were my teen years. Also like her, I grew up at the edge of a dilapidated de-industrializing city—Rochester, not Grand Rapids. And every year it felt like people’s parents were doing worse. Every year another factory left for Mexico or North Carolina, another family member moved to Florida or Texas. The conventional wisdom was to leave.
When my grandmother was born, the economy clustered around the Great Lakes had been the wealthiest in the world. The most advanced companies of midcentury America were based in places like Upstate New York and Michigan. The frontier of technology came from companies like Xerox and GM. There was no such thing as Silicon Valley.
By the 2000s, the outlines of prosperity were still visible. There was a dilapidated grandeur. But the grandeur was not so distant. What struck you was how fast things could fall apart. The warehouses where angry teen bands played had employed your parents. There were abandoned subway tunnels under Rochester.
I remember sitting on a hilltop near the lake where I grew up, bored, cloud-gazing, passively observing that someday this place would be gone. I was half right. The small college town forty-five minutes from the city is still there. But it’s changed. It’s 'Hudsonized' as I like to say. There are less factories, less people. More restaurants, more tourism. You can get a farm-to-table prix-fixe meal on pedestrianized street. A slate-roofed barn brews Belgian beer and moules frites.
I don’t see so many working class teens around. Maybe because there are fewer families. Maybe because they are all hiding inside. Property values are up though. It won’t become one of the nameless fictional places clustered at the edge of Grand Rapids that Tess calls interchangeably "Dirt City".
Tess and her friends remind me of misspent summers in Rochester. Going to coffee shops with bad local art and comfortable thrifted furniture. Bombing around in rusty cars that sputtered and smelled of gasoline. Shows in warehouses. Mixtapes burned on CDs. Friends who disappeared into mental institutions or drug addiction. And in your imagination, there being some nihilist glamour to it all. Because you and your parents and your teachers all understood the world they raised you in was dying.
It’s not 2003. Bed bugs ate through the cozy cafe couches. Obama’s cash-for-clunkers program sold those shitty old cars to China as scrap metal. The warehouses are condos. Spotify curates your playlist. Opiates aren’t heroin chic. At best they are a stigma, at worst they are death. And for all my brooding memories, we were somehow happier.
Maybe because in the era of the working class teen, you could get a job at a video store and still afford a car and drive around with your friends and feel free. The sense I had, my friends had, that the world we lived in was temporary, fading fast, was not unique to us, to the working class teens of Buffalo and Rochester and Detroit and Grand Rapids.
Everyone has felt it. As they watch their youth pass.
