By Jay Jamison
Forty years ago, I did a lot of traveling for my job. At a gas station convenience store in either Iowa or Indiana (I can’t remember which), I asked for directions to the county fairgrounds. The clerk responded with a question, “Are you familiar with Dismal Seepage, Indiana?” or whatever the name of the town was. I was momentarily left speechless. If I was familiar with the town, I’d probably know where the fairgrounds were. After I regained my composure, responding in the negative, he then gave me instructions something like, “Go down this road and make a right where the old schoolhouse used to be.” He not only cited landmarks unfamiliar to me, he also referred to landmarks that no longer existed!
I thought about that strange event recently as I drove around the Jacksonville downtown square. With the exceptions of The Farmer’s State Bank and Trust Company and the Illinois Theater, not a single landmark storefront remains from the days of my first drive around the square on a bicycle 54 years ago. In fact, not only are many familiar businesses missing, some of the actual buildings from my youth are gone.
I remember watching a semi-tractor trailer drive past my screen printing shop in the 300 block of East State Street in the 1990s. He drove by about three times before he stopped his truck in front of my shop and walked through the door, agitated. “How do you get to route 78 North!” he pleaded. In those days we still had the Central Park Plaza clogging downtown traffic, surrounded by a maze of one-way streets. My partner and I gave him instructions on how to escape the labyrinth of downtown, and he was so pleased he bought a shirt off the clearance rack. I couldn’t use landmarks for the poor driver, because so many of them no longer existed, just like that convenience store clerk of my experience many years ago. That truck driver wasn’t the last to give us the “how do I get out of here?” line. Fortunately, we had a big city map on a wall in the rear of the store to give actual street names for frustrated lost souls.
Several years after graduating from Illinois College, I returned to campus, walking through the gates at the corner of Park Street and College Avenue. Classes were just changing, and the upper quad was full of students milling about. As I turned toward Schewe Library I noticed something odd. I stopped and said to no one in particular, “Jones Hall is gone.” I just stood there, mouth agape. I got some funny looks from the kids, staring at me as if I’d just escaped from an asylum. An entire building from my student days had vanished without a trace. Jones Hall was the only Victorian style building on campus. A hideous pile, Jones contained the History Department and the Theater. IC President Mundinger once jokingly called the architectural style, “Early American Railroad.” Old alumni returning to campus after many years often seem dazed by the changes. Ugly or not, another landmark was gone.
Familiar landmarks help us identify where we are and where we might be going. In that respect they are comforting. Unfamiliar surroundings can be disquieting, especially when you remember what was once there to guide you. Part of the human dilemma is that the notion of permanence and change only seem to conflict because we don’t live long enough to experience, that in due course, all things change.
