GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #909: PRESERVE ELMHURST

 A while back I started noticing these green signs all over my hometown. They say, in white lettering, PRESERVE ELMHURST. I wondered what they meant by that. For much of my adult life I have watched the Elmhurst I knew and loved be torn down only to be replaced by soulless McMansions and corporate designed fabrications. They couldn't possibly mean that, could they? I mean, why bring it up now when Elmhurst has been . . . what's the opposite of decimated? And I mean that by the classical definition, as in, to destroy one's forces by one-tenth. Because the one-tenth in this case is the Elmhurst that remains.

And then the ugliness reared its head. And in this day and age you have to wonder. Do they mean, keep Elmhurst white? Elmhurst is mostly a nice place to live, but there's been quite a bit of racism in the past. Or maybe they want to keep Elmhurst hetero? Maybe they have a dislike of pronouns? When white people start talking about protecting heritage . . . you see where this is going.

For some reason it kept slipping my mind, but I finally had the chance to look into it today. Much to my relief it is not any of that nonsense from the previous paragraph. It is, puzzlingly, the thing from the first paragraph. Preserve Elmhurst, I suspect, is too little too late. It was started by the teardown of a nearly 100-year-old house. I get that. I want historic things to be preserved, too. But the fact of the matter is, Elmhurst has never been interested in preserving anything (except maybe the Glos Mansion), and there is no reason to develop such an interest now. The people who run the city want Downtown Elmhurst to be Chicago, Jr., and the rest of the city to be Hyde Park. They're not going to let some century-old house stand in the way of commerce and making sure it's impossible to live in Elmhurst without at least earning a six-figure salary.

Maybe if we started this twenty-five years ago, we could have had a chance. It's too late now. Too much money has been spent to go back. One thing I do know, though: Elmhurst's excess will eventually catch up to it, and a lot of those McMansions are gonna wind up empty. The ones that don't burn down for the insurance, that is.