Pretenders – "My City Was Gone" (1982)

I went back to Ohio

But my city was gone

“My City Is Gone” is the third of three records chosen for the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK that feature narrators who have left the towns where they grew up and gone out into the wider world in pursuit of the American dream.

In “Born to Run,” the singer gets his motor runnin’ and heads out on the highway that leads away from his hometown.  He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he’s sure he’ll find a place where he has a better shot at success than the place he’s leaving behind.

In “Detroit City,” the singer has learned the hard way that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence.  He decides to swallow his pride, admit that life in the big city sort of sucks, and return to the family and friends he left behind.

In “My City Was Gone,” the singer learns that while you can go home again, there’s no guarantee that the home you remember is still going to be there.

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The United States wasn’t the first country to implement large-scale urban renewal, but I think it’s fair to say that no country did it bigger than we did.

You can trace American urban renewal back to the “City Beautiful” movement of the 1890s.  But it didn’t really blow up until the Housing Act of 1949, which was a key part of President Harry Truman’s “Fair Deal.”  

The primary goal of that law was the eradication of big-city slums.  All too often, it was neighborhoods that were mostly populated by black or immigrant families that were defined as slums and bulldozed, which often resulted in large-scale displacement of those communities.

The so-called slums were sometimes redeveloped for commercial or industrial uses, forcing the former residents to go elsewhere to find affordable places to live.  

And when the old slum housing stock was replaced by public housing projects, bad design and poor maintenance sometimes resulted in those projects becoming very unpleasant places to live.  (Cabrini-Green in Chicago and Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis are two notorious examples of public housing gone bad.) 

The Pruitt-Igoe housing project
in St. Louis (now demolished)

Urban renewers also set their sights on downtown shopping districts that had fallen on hard times because they couldn’t compete with suburban shopping malls .  Cities implemented all kinds of different strategies in hopes of revitalizing their downtowns, but there were many more failures than successes.

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Chrissie Hynde grew up in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio – a suburb of Akron.  She moved to London when she was 21, and eventually achieved fame and fortune as the front woman of the Pretenders.

Hynde wrote “My City Was Gone” after returning to Akron to visit family several years after becoming an expatriate.  The song bemoans the fact that South Howard Street – Akron’s main downtown drag – was unrecognizable thanks to urban redevelopment.  “My city had been pulled down” and “reduced to parking spaces,” Hynde wrote.

Chrissie Hynde

And it wasn’t just downtown Akron that had changed.  The “pretty countryside” around Cuyahoga Falls “had been paved down the middle,” and many of the farms in the area “had been replaced by shopping malls.”

“Way to go, Ohio,” Hynde sings scornfully – and believe me, no one does scornful better than Chrissie Hynde.

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When it comes to tearing up downtowns and turning farms into shopping malls, nobody does it better than the United States.  Which is why I’m including “My City Was Gone” in the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK. 

But Hynde’s greatest loss wasn’t South Howard Street or the pretty countryside around Cuyahoga Falls that had been “paved down the middle”:

I went back to Ohio

But my family was gone

I stood on the back porch

There was nobody home

I was stunned and amazed

My childhood memories

Slowly swirled past

Like the wind through the trees

Returning to your childhood home and finding that everything you remember has changed isn’t something that’s a quintessentially American experience – it’s a universally human experience.  

You can’t blame those changes on the Housing Act of 1949 or anything else that the government or the real estate developers did.  

Sooner or later, your parents die and the friends you grew up with move away.

All that remains of your childhood are the memories.

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Click here to hear “My City Was Gone.”

Click here to buy “My City Was Gone” from Amazon.