29 September 2003

Morton Avenue in Jacksonville, Illinois. To swing on to its wide lanes from Church Street or Massey Lane is to be pumped into the town’s gasoline IV, to be sucked into its iron lung. A five-mile east-west scar that pulls together the old town and the rapidly growing “village” of South Jacksonville, Morton Avenue is home to an everchanging array of cheap restaurants, gas stations, and strip malls. In a classically American display of overindulgence, this thoroughfare and the thousands of cars that use it accomplish the same feat of transportation that would be accomplished in a comparable European city by a few buses and a train line.

It’s where Jacksonville goes to eat, make money, and spend money. It’s where disaffected high school students plop down on the hoods of their pickup trucks and pimped-out coupes to smoke cigarettes and bemoan the lack of anything better to do. It’s the endless series of stop-and-goes that creeps out to the interstate, passing the prison just as the corn and soybean fields—which used to hug the town tightly—finally come into view. Above all, it’s where family businesses from the now-deserted town square go to die, their souls reborn in a neon afterlife of melting asphalt and chain store brand names. Morton Avenue is what became of small-town America long before it even knew it had changed.