With the Sedgwick County Commission at first resisting and then finally
submitting to medical opinion (and political pressure) regarding the need to
order many businesses and places of public gathering to close for the sake of
minimizing the potential spread of the coronavirus on Monday, the other
shoe–which every small business-owner and all of their thousands of supporters
throughout the city have known was just waiting to be dropped–came down
on Tuesday, and the scramble find a new normal began in earnest. We’d seen
libraries, movie theaters, restaurants and shops of various kinds, and so much
else start to limit their hours or close down entirely last week; this week it
finally became official. The question becomes the classic one which arises in
every emergency, every instance of limited resources: what can be sustained,
what can be changed, and what can’t be saved?
Like many Wichitans, toward the end of last week I made the time to check in
on places of business I was most worried about surviving the loss of commerce
which this order–and, let’s be honest, the even stricter ones likely to follow
it–is going to entail. We stopped by Manna Wok and Grace Asian Market to get
some bulgogi and kimchi (and commiserated with the owners who said they were
praying their business would survive), and Little Lion Cafe for some ice cream
(and commiserated with the one worker on staff who was slammed with orders from
worried folks like me). We checked in at Bagel Haus, Pollo Express, TJ’s Burger
House and Prost. Everyone has their favorite little spots, of course, and
fortunately there are a couple
of websites
providing regularly updated lists of what places have online ordering, which
ones have curbside pickup, and which have simply closed for the duration. How
well online patronage will help the local dining scene over the weeks (and
perhaps months) to come remains to be seen.
What I worry about the most, though, isn’t the loss of the wonderful and
diverse food these local restaurants provided, but rather the spaces they
created. You don’t have to be an devotee of urban sociology or civic republican
theory to recognize the immense value of “third places“–those
locations where one is not at work, nor at home, but rather in an open-ended
(while still closely defined) arena of connection and interaction. We’re
talking about the YMCA, or the public library, or community centers–all of
which, of course, have needed to close down to prevent people congregating and
spreading the virus further.
Places of commerce do this too–not all of them, and not all equally well,
but some specialize in it. Indeed, for some the fact that they can provide a
space for young and old, rich and poor, regulars and newbies, like-minded folk
and trouble-makers, all to occupy a particular place and observe, listen to,
laugh with, and learn from other actual flesh-and-blood human beings is exactly
their business model. There are many establishments which may advertise
this–but none embody it as well as Wichita’s bookstores.
Watermark Books & Cafe
(full disclosure: my wife worked there for over eight years) has had to cancel
all its book clubs, reading groups, and story times. Sarah Bagby and her
management staff have had to let their booksellers go, and close their doors,
which has been a terrible loss for the College Hill community–to say nothing
of the innumerable elementary and middle schools which Watermark regularly
brought authors out to–which the store has become so entwined with over the
years. Eighth Day Books, the tiny
linchpin of a sprawling spiritual community (the Eighth Day Institute, of which I
am a member) that connects together churches and faith groups throughout the
whole region, is focusing on online and phone orders, as EDI’s regular
gatherings have had to be suspended, and access to the store limited, with the
small, devoted staff of Eighth Day hunkering down to weather the storm. And Prairie Dog Comics, home of some
of the best RPG game nights anywhere in the state (and where I buy my daughters
copies of Ms.
Marvel), has had to pack up its tables and end its evenings of gaming,
restricting itself to fulfilling phone and online orders, and only allowing
browsers into the store on a strict reservation basis. All of this, and more,
doesn’t just threaten businesses–it threatens a by-product of commerce which
is far more important that the commercial transactions themselves:
namely, people getting together and sharing their literary passions, their
spiritual insights, their geeky delights, with those in the same space.
In the larger sense, of course, cities have always been about the civic and
commercial creation of such spaces. The reigning ideal of urban life, after
all, is to live in a place where complex social connections could co-exist with
what an old professor of mine once called “the
heterogeneity of anonymity“–that is, a place where we are
sufficiently strangers to each other to allow all sorts of original communal
associations to emerge, without the burden of the past traditions, prejudices,
or authority. That ideal is rarely achieved, obviously–and considering the
importance of traditions to who we are, making that urban ideal into an idol is
plainly wrong-headed. But it’s appeal is undeniable all the same. Recently
Michelle Goldberg, a New York Times columnist, mourned
seeing the people of NYC forced to isolate themselves. “Historically,
cities have made it easier for people to live alone without experiencing
constant loneliness,” she wrote, noting that choosing to live in a city is
“to depend on interdependence.” To be isolated from one another, in
particular from those third places where the rich possibilities of community
are most regularly realized–as they were and, God willing, still will be, at
Watermark, Eighth Day, and Prairie Dog–strains urban interdependence as
nothing else.
In some ways, our city might be considered better able to handle such a
strain than many other, larger cities–which, not incidentally, is where
coronavirus outbreaks have been most severe. Because Wichita dominates, but
does not encapsulate, its rural surroundings, there is still plenty of space
for mandated isolation to take fulfilling–or at least less cramped–forms.
Goldberg quoted a psychologist who observed how the impact of quarantine and
the closure of beloved spaces depends much upon where you live; the loss of
socially enriching spaces will be felt differently “if you’re able to
stroll around your farm and pick the produce you’ve been growing,” in contrast
to those who are “living in a one-bedroom apartment with three roommates” whom
they have to nonetheless keep separated from. While not every Wichitan can
easily get out to Andover or Yoder to pick up farm-fresh food from local
butchers and producers, the obstacles to doing so–or to even having immediate
access to such oneself–are far smaller than they are to even the residents of
Kansas City or Oklahoma City, much less Dallas or Chicago or Denver.
At the same time, a city like ours, perhaps exactly because common places of
complex interaction and community feeling are spread far apart and are
relatively few in number (not to mention too
easily bought out and torn down by local financial players), when a crisis
comes it is that much easier to retreat to our private locales, set aside
public concerns, and forget about the ways in which a city could be made more
resilient in the face of threats to its urban existence–and particularly,
threats to those spaces which ground the emergent communities and associations
central to city’s character. You saw some of this, perhaps, in the Sedgwick
County Commission’s initial
reluctance to face the questions of triage which this pandemic is making
unavoidable. Wichita’s political culture isn’t one which has been historically
characterized by a great deal of openness to affordable alternative
transportation, sustainable food networks, and other
strategies for keeping cities’ cultural and commercial connections functioning
even as the threat of disease mandates a distancing for a time. Perhaps,
though, surviving this pandemic will bring about a change.
First we have to survive it, though, and that means helping our essential
places survive, even if–maybe especially if–they aren’t considered
“essential” in the eyes of the government. Talking with Warren Farha,
the owner of Eighth Day Books, this week, he expressed his determination to
find a way through this challenge, and get to the other side. People–maybe not
all the people, all the time, but enough of them, often enough–want and need
to come into a place they know, among people they know, looking for the books
and art and insight they know they will love, if they can only find it.
“You can’t replace all that with online shopping,” Warren said to me; “the
door has got to be open so that people can come in and be part of something
larger than themselves.” Maybe they’re not going to come in for a time, he
admits–but that just means the desire will be all the greater afterwards. I
think our job, as we sort out our next steps in this unprecedented week we’ve
experienced, is therefore to find ways to triage our limited time and dollars,
and to deliver them in whatever ways we can to help keep these wonderful places
alive, until the community connections they enable are able to fully bless our
city once again. I’ve no simple solution as to how any particular Wichitan can
or should do that–but I’m pretty we should all think about how.