It’s a sight, all right. I got my BA at SIU, and I drove through Cairo a few times while down there. Carbondale has it’s share of poverty too, but it is absolutely a college town – meaning the college really keeps everything afloat.
It really is an excellent state school with lots of very excellent departments. Their forestry department is one of the best in the nation, in my view. Cairo seems like a warning of what Carbondale would have been had it not been home to the little teachers’ college that started up in 1869.
Off-topic: it seems like SIU has long been popular with students from Chicago-land. My idea is that it’s the school that’s farthest away from how, but still in-state. Anyways, it makes for a great local music scene with influences from Chicago’s indie-punk scene, St. Louis, and influences from further south as well.
That second cyburbia link has the photos from the same book I read. Some of them were from that very block; the brick building with the arcade and the little turrets was the Public Utilities Commission.
Just sort of makes me sad - there are lots of little towns like that in Illinois. I am sure there are other towns like that throughout the states.
Once thriving little communities now turning into ghost towns. On unintentionally blank’s link, there are houses being sold for less than the price of an used car. One is for $12,000 with monthly payments of $52 and it shows it as being listed for over 175 days already?! What kind of crap local economy can’t sell a house for that price?
For whatever it may ad to the topic of Morbid Illinois, from Spoon River Anthology:
The secret of the stars-- gravitation.
The secret of the earth-- layers of rock.
The secret of the soil-- to receive seed.
The secret of the seed-- the germ.
The secret of man-- the sower.
The secret of woman-- the soil.
My secret: Under a mound that you shall never find.
I could imagine a performance of the entire play on that street.
I know that was the reason my best friend from high school gave for picking it: in-state tuition made it affordable to attend, and the driving distance from Chicago made it unaffordable for his parents to visit.
There’s almost no retail left in the city. There’s a barbecue joint, Chinese buffet and a couple of diners. A few bars. There’s a few auto mechanics and, believe it or not, a Ford dealer. A couple of gas stations, and a run-down Days Inn by the Interstate. Services for river traffic. (Cairo has very high docking fees compared to other river communities, so now most river traffic goes on to another port.) Teachers and staff at the local school, and the clergy and staff of the remaining churches. Municipal government and law enforcement. A soybean processing plant. Handymen. That’s it for employment opportunities.
The nearest larger centers of employment are Cape Girardeau, Missouri and Paducah, Kentucky; both about an hour drive away. Otherwise, Cairo just isn’t near anything but farms, forest and lowlands.
But just a few minutes north of Cairo is Future City (slogan: “The City of the Future!”).
Downtown Future City, at the intersection of 1st and Broadway (Google Maps thinks it’s still in Cairo, but if you zoom out a bit you see the Future City label).
No flying cars to be seen. Must have been early in the morning when the streetview camera came around or something.
I’ve stayed at that Days Inn. It’s the first hotel you encounter after crossing into Illinois on I-57. It wasn’t too bad actually, as far as cheap motels go. A little creepy though, as I think there were only two other cars in the parking lot besides ours (and one of them probably belonged to the person working the front desk).
Someone on the IMDB board for the Silent Hill movie suggested that they should have used Cairo as the set for the real/fog world of Silent Hill, or that they should use it for the sequel.
