by Bryan Kelly

IF YOU HAVE been following along, you know that the New Vision is to make Ann Arbor Manhattan and Ypsilanti Brooklyn. If you haven’t been following along, well, there you have it.

That’s Downtown Development Authority director Susan Pollay’s comparison, echoed by Mary Jo Callan of the Office of Community and Economic Development in Washtenaw County, on the dearth of affordable housing in Ann Arbor and the promise of cheaper artist’s lofts downriver.

This metaphor, of a taste to be determined, has made me contemplative. I lived in Brooklyn and worked in Manhattan in the summer before my senior year of college at Michigan. I was an editorial intern at the Onion, America’s Finest News Source.

Unforeseeable at the time, it would be a summer light on laughs. I discovered, as all college students must, that in a place like Manhattan everyone is talented, and smart, and charming, and funny, and goes or went to a prestigious university, and most of them are tight-assed careerists—yes, even at the Onion. Indeed, it was an indescribably tense and joyless office to work in one of the blandest I’ve ever had the misfortune of spying on. There was a time for jokes, and a time for sitting quietly, filling the copier, and looking busy without being so, and most of the time involved the latter.

I made matters worse by sending the boss of my boss’s boss a joke. It had to do with Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, who’d blown a few saves in a row that summer (2007). At the conclusion of a rote email, I included the one-liner “Rivera Blows Poolside Save of Drowning Boy (?)”, and a Photoshopped picture of a grief-stricken Rivera standing over the corpse of a child. It was macabre, perhaps, and overly hasty—though, in my defense, Rivera would notch just 30 saves that season, the second-worst showing of his career—but hardly deserving of the curt reply I received.

That is, I received no reply. Not from him, anyway. From my own boss, I did get this:

Bryan,

Editorial interns are encouraged not to submit jokes.

Thanks,

[REDACTED]

At the Onion, jokes were a liability. The brass wanted a quiet, cool, unambitious personage, a Watson to their enigmatic Holmes, to stock the copier and tag online articles.

Meanwhile, “home” life in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn was not much better. At the local market, avocados cost as much as what the queen of Portugal might raise to commission an entire avocado-seeking expedition, back in exploration times (adjusting for inflation).

To make matters much worse, I made no money that summer—I refused to get a “real” job, an instinct that continues to this day—and so felt no joy in participating in any of the things that cost money, i.e. fun. I lived with three guys who had all been frat brothers at Colgate, a dark hole of a university in central New York (I would later unearth a future ex-girlfriend from there). They knew already how to be casually successful without being either boastful or thankful. For fun I threw a football at a cooler in the backyard, imagining I was Chad Henne. The cooler broke.

Ah, memories. But wait, how does this reflect on the idea of Ann Arbor as Manhattan and Ypsilanti as Brooklyn? Not promisingly. To stay cool, Ann Arbor, first and foremost, needs to treat its funny interns better, and not be so tight-assed and careerist. Second, it needs to realize what Manhattan is, what it thinks about itself. If the New York Times is to be believed, all Manhattan does is complain that it’s become too expensive, too tourist-y, that it’s lost some inherent avant garde vitality, which has migrated to Ypsilanti—pardon me, Brooklyn—because of the sky-high cost of living.

Sound familiar?

We are a medium-sized town. With that comes the psychology of the middle child, harangued by a doubt about its place in the world that is as difficult to suffer through as television is now, or opera used to be. (I speak from the joyless hedge maze of middle-childishness, by the way.)

And yet, medium-sized towns have the advantage of being a place where experiments on how to live progressively can be more easily implemented. If one of those experiments is to “think regionally”—which, I believe, is Ms. Pollay’s point with the Manhattan/Brooklyn metaphor—it is a fine one. It does not tempt me, however. I’d rather not concede Ann Arbor just yet.

One reform I find persuasive is to adjust zoning and building codes to allow for more freedoms, more persons to live under one roof. Another is to ensure our permits and fees aren’t driving up the cost of building and maintaining homes and businesses in Ann Arbor. The movement to allow density downtown is alive and well, and not going anywhere. It can and should be balanced by the effort to identify areas in neighborhoods where economic development can be cultivated while remaining true to the neighborhood character.

The second-best thing we can hope for is a cut in property taxes and no new millages. Wages will have to go up before the wider status quo improves. (I hear the President is trying to address the matter. If so, the news charms me; it means the initiative will show brief promise before being co-opted, and then take six years to fail.)

Ann Arbor would be best served trying, as the Eastern mystics might put it, to become what it is: that is, freethinking and irreverent. I live in Ann Arbor because not everyone is a rich intolerable bore—not yet, anyway. And I do not live in Manhattan or Brooklyn because I can’t afford it. I can get by in Ann Arbor—as an English major, it’s all I’ve ever hoped for—waiting for a big break, with a countdown in mind if that break should not occur. And if I can somehow do it, the problem can’t have gotten out of hand just yet.

While I am here, I would like to keep what semblance of culture we have alive, and not let it escape downriver. For it is culture, a wide spectrum of culture, high-, low- and middlebrow, that Manhattan has lost and Brooklyn has gained. And for a city, culture is a terrible thing to waste. We must do everything we can to keep it, or else, when one asks what we are, we may have to reply, with sheepishness, “Um, Manhattan to Ypsilanti’s Brooklyn?”