Peoria: a tale of two cities
Tonight I dropped off my friend at his house, which is in a neighborhood that most people don’t care to frequent. The south end. On his little dead-end street consisting of 7 or 8 houses, two of them had big orange stickers on the front doors indicating that they are uninhabitable. I drove home wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, going past Manual and up Western, thinking about the gun shots I heard a few years back from below the bluff while playing Madison Golf Course, and what a treat it was watching the kids play basketball on a lonely street just the day before.
An hour later I find myself in a suit and tie driving past Junction City and down Prospect, admiring the beautiful view of the river from the bluffs and all the new houses along Prospect. I turn down Grand View Drive, and wind slowly past the grand mansions, eventually pulling into the Country Club of Peoria for a conference.
As I walked up to the entrance, the disparity of where I had just been and where I am now really hit me. The BMW SUV being valet parked, the door man, the coat check lady, and the members only dining room full of finely dressed elders enjoying their dinners. I ordered a $7 martini and mingled a little during the ‘coctail hour’ before eventually being seated to listen to a couple of speakers tout our fine city as a high-tech, biotech and logistics leader.
If you haven’t been to the Country Club, it really is a gorgeous place. It sits high up on the bluff and looks down over river, but I couldn’t get the poor neighborhood I had left not long ago out of my head and I had the guilty feeling that I was just looking down on the working stiffs in the valley who are just trying to get by. The original mansions on the bluffs in Peoria were very wealthy people who, as the Country Club does, looked over the poor worker’s homes down in the valley. Literally and figuratively. In 100 years, has that really changed?
In Peoria the bluffs are historically the great divider between the haves and the have-nots. I grew up in the north end and whether or not I was specially told, it was assumed that I wasn’t to visit the area below the bluffs because that’s where the ‘bad’ people live. I followed that rule for a long time, but as I grow old and wiser (laugh amongst yourselves) I am learning what wonderfully vibrant, diverse and historical areas there are below the bluffs.
March 31st, 2007 at 12:27 am
As a “below the bluffs” child…
I was never specially told that those looking down at us from up on the bluffs were any better than us, we just knew they were.
Sort of like your generic christian knows he/she is better than your generic muslim/buddhist/jew/atheist/anything else, without ever haven been told so, well not outright anyway.
Those of us from below the bluffs didn’t move out of town, as expected, when the bulldozers came. We just moved into your house, while you fled further north.
As I grew older and more older, I still see the great devide, it’s just more spread out.
March 31st, 2007 at 7:04 am
Well done piece, PI.
I used to live across the street from Glen Oak Park on Prospect and then moved onto Virginia. Granted it wasn’t the south end, but many of my friends would ask “Why don’t you move?” I really liked living there and never had any problems. There was just something cool about that neighborhood. It felt more like being in the “City of Peoria”.
Everytime it gets warm, I think of the days of picking up a 12 pack on the way home from work, sitting on the front porch with friends and watching the traffic go by on Prospect.
But I digress.
The “great divide” is alive and well in this city, and I don’t really see anything changing in the future.
April 1st, 2007 at 7:31 am
I live in the southern valley or below the bluffs. I have been here for 25 years although I grew up in the Knolls. (by Sheridan Village) My wife is from the southend her whole life. She went to Manual while I went to Bergen.
There are some bad streets in the southend and there are some quite neighborhoods also. The only gunfire I have heard was from the firing range which sits just below Madison Park Golf Course. I have had vistors here say; “Oh my gosh! Is that gun fire?” Why yes it is but it’s just the police firing range a few blocks away.
I will tell you this. In all the years I have lived here the biggest problem was a crack house, which was dealt with and garbage or litter on some un kept properties. That is always a fight. Still, you couldn’t pay me to walk on Nowland, McQueen, Thrush, or McClure at night and even at some times during daylight. Last I checked, those streets are well on the bluff in the heart of the city. So to each their own.
April 2nd, 2007 at 7:23 am
Emtronics, unfortunately I don’t know which are the good streets and which are the bad streets, so I, like many others, just say “south side” and assume it’s all bad. I know it’s truly not all bad, but like I said, I wouldn’t know which is which- the same as we might all say Dunlap is nothing but a bunch of rich kids.
I’m aware of the firing range, but I was on the 16th tee box, which is along MLK and as far from the firing range as you can get- the shots definitely came from below the hill in the Manual area. If I had any doubt, the squad car sirens quashed it. Just another signal to my northside-ass to stay on top of the bluff. Right or wrong, that’s the way people feel, and believe me, I really don’t want to feel that way.
Heck, I know someone who won’t cross over the interstate into the West Bluff because it’s so unsafe, and she lives on MacQueen and does nothing but talk about the struggles with the crack houses around her!
April 2nd, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Am glad to see that you’re sensitive to the class society we have built on poor men and women’s toil.
It is disgraceful how the rich idiots are moving out to that God-forsaken Grand Prairie area, which I find to be dismal, super commercial, and boring as hell.
For our city to have wretched slums and gunshot alleys, while the rich play their mind games in palatial mansions is repugnant and foolish.
The poor will eat the rich, one way or another.
April 3rd, 2007 at 1:41 pm
The rich don’t have nearly the fun us “poor” people do in the East Bluff. Nothing like sitting on your porch, cracking open a beer and watching a street fight. If you are really lucky you get to watch the neighborhood whore give a 15 year old boy oral sex in front of her 5 kids. Drug deals in plain sight. Oh I can’t wait for the summer!! Next time the rich are bored in their vanilla cookie cutter lives out at Grand Prairie they can come and hang in the “hood”. It better than most of the reality shows on t.v.!! Maybe if they cared what happened here we would actually get the crap cleaned up and the police would care enough to actually get rid of the drug houses instead of making excuses for them.