satanic cult (though one blue-eyed blonde who’d later be with Nushawn Williams did get a black rose from some kids making sport of the scare), just as there was no perfect happiness for the screwball comedienne whom some old-timers still denigrate as a teenage slut, running wild with a bootlegger’s son before leaving town. But the culture has a way of conjuring up a good fright when that’s what’s needed as distraction.
Jamestown had its start in 1811, when James Prendergast, a doctor from Tennessee, set up saw and grist mills by the Chadakoin rapids. From 1823 to 1873 it was the largest furniture-manufacturing city in the country, and up until the late 1920s was second only to Grand Rapids, Michigan. The lush forests that in 1800 blanketed the land, broken only by Indian footpaths, were gone a century later. The Indians were gone too. By then Jamestown was known as The Pearl City, owing to its production of pearl ash, used in making soap and glass. In the early days, while those with some capital set themselves to lumbering or artisanry—or, later, to establishing textile mills, small metalworks and photographic-paper businesses—the poorest settlers survived by hacking at the forests, burning the wood to ash and bartering this for staple goods from storekeepers, who sold it to asheries. As the forests passed from memory so did the asheries, along with the reason for the city’s moniker.
These days there are many “good parts” of Jamestown and, beyond the city limits, rambling houses and gracious country in the resort areas near Chautauqua Lake. (There are also year-round cottages off dirt roads hard by the water that recall places I’ve seen in Mississippi.) Jamestown High School’s Red Raiders play football on a million-dollar field covered with AstroTurf, and on special occasions they have been known to step out in identical gray slacks and blue blazers, courtesy of local donors. Some old fortunes remain here, concentrated in five foundations worth $160 million combined, and the entertainment pages note high-culture events befitting that part of the past memorialized in standard histories.
But downtown presents only mute mementos of the “air of constant activity and bustle” that guidebook writers of the New Deal found in 1940. The population, 45,500 then, is now 34,500 and falling. The rumble of public transport is gone, the Art Deco station for the Erie Railroad sooty and abandoned, its clock frozen like a prop out of Great Expectations at 9:25. The elegant Hotel Jamestown is an old folks’ home, as are several erstwhile commercial buildings, reflecting the only segment of the population that is growing. At the other end of Second Street from the high school, the cavernous Furniture Mart, to which buyers and dealers once flocked from all points, now houses Kelly Services, one of five temp agencies.
A slight, wise-eyed Puerto Rican girl named Tania, who left home at fifteen and later became a roommate of Nushawn Williams, went through one of those agencies for a job at Bush Industries, a furniture maker and the city’s biggest employer. She worked graveyard shift on the packing line when she was seventeen, along with nine other teenagers with whom she shared a two-bedroom flat. “They showed us a video when we first came in there saying how much better it is ’cause they have no union,” she said. “You know, ‘If you have a problem we can work it out.’ But if you complain, they fire you. They was paying us $5.15 an hour, and fifteen cents goes to the agency. I didn’t mind, ’cause when I got my check, you know, I was just glad to have the money. But then we all—all ten of us—got hurt at the same time: our backs. Not all the same minute, you know, but around the same time. They give you carfare to the hospital, but you got to pay your own way home. You got to pay for the hospital too. The doctor told me to stay home three days; I stayed four and they fired me. But it don’t matter, ’cause you can just go to the agency and they’ll hire you right back.”
Manufacturing started to bleed from Jamestown in the 1950s; from the 1960s to the early 1980s it was in full hemorrhage, and it’s still in slow decline. But unlike in Buffalo, where one shutdown at Bethlehem Steel alone cut loose 7,300 workers, here people left the plant gates quietly, a few hundred at a time, until 5,000 to 8,000 industrial jobs and perhaps the same number in support industries and services had disappeared. To consider the numbers now is staggering: job loss in the magnitude of anywhere from a tenth to a third of the population. Of course, it happened over time. There was other work—service work, part-time work, work out of town. Not all the manufacturers closed. And there were malls that went up in the suburbs, chain restaurants that moved in, a new civic arena downtown, the nursing homes, Walmart, Kmart and all the other marts that duplicate strip malls on the edge of every unlucky town in the country. People soldiered on, and, in the same way that a lifetime of days looking in a mirror makes aging tolerable, they barely noticed as the town fell apart around them. Perhaps for the same reason, they barely noticed the young subcontractors from Brooklyn who started coming to town in the early 1990s to work in the drug trade then expanding along Route 17 from New York to Jamestown and from there on to Buffalo and Canada. Their children took note, though, well before Williams came on the job.
Today in the legal economy, unemployment is 5.2 percent, but as Sam Teresi, who heads development at city hall, put it: “We’re following the national trend. While the figures are looking pretty good, it takes two and three members of the family now to equal the old wage of one. And every big company is using temp agencies. If that’s frustrating for a teenager, it’s also frustrating for a forty-year-old head of household who has no health insurance and a family to take care of. At this point we’ve weathered the storm—essentially we’ve bottomed out. Now we’re looking at how to sustain real, incremental growth. Manufacturing has to be a major leg in the economic stool, but we’re realistic. Jamestown is not going to become the oasis in the industrial desert that is America.”
Teresi conceptualizes the integrated pieces of a new economy as vividly as he juggles metaphors. But he also knows that if “good jobs at good wages” ever were enough to ensure the good life, they aren’t anymore. A generation of deindustrialization did more than remake the landscape and reduce the living standards of places like Jamestown, where the median family income is about $26,000 and almost a quarter of families with children under eighteen are poor. It made insecurity—always a feature of working-class life—the central experience. After twenty-six years of a citywide experiment in “labor–management cooperation,” there is no sign that the working class has any more power or any more pride. For too many of those without enough, there’s not enough of anything: not enough time, not enough confidence, not enough culture, not enough choices, not enough love.
On the last weekend before Christmas it seemed I had the downtown to myself. Two fine-jewelry stores, a camera shop, a florist doubling as a confectioner and one or two other merchants displayed holiday lights and brimming determination. But all the action was at the D&K Store, where people clothed in weariness waited to pick through bins—89¢, 99¢, $1.99, $14.99 tops—of sequins and wood blocks, pipe cleaners, tube socks, flannel shirts, pocket screwdriver sets, ceramic figurines: the flotsam and jetsam of the retail trade for the working poor. “We gotta get your daddy something now,” a wan young woman said, pulling along two pasty tykes and searching the aisles for anything that might say, I’m special.
Do you love me, baby?
Can you feel me, baby? I been away a long time.
Is it still me, baby—the one on your mind?
I drove away from downtown with Puff Daddy’s No Way Out playing in the car at full volume. On Tania’s suggestion, the album had become my soundtrack for seeing Jamestown.
Can I touch you, baby? Is that all right with you?
Can I love you, baby? What we’re about to do
could make the whole earth move, I’ll tell you my first move.
Climb up in it slow. I ain’t tryin’ to hurt you.
Can you feel me, baby? Should I keep it right there?
