OLD WORLD UNDERGROUND WHERE ARE YOU NOW?; or, TEA FOR ONE

the tallest building in mansfield, ohio (going by my floor count), which used to be the farmers bank building (going from the stone relief above the building's main entrance on park avenue west), now belongs to jpmorgan chase. and to say so was going to lend support to my cynicism about the city, about the resurgent sociopolitical polarization of america between town and country, and thereby lend weight to my eventual revelation -- or to what it was that had been revealed to me yesterday when i had been trying to suss out mansfield's gay bars.

of course, i knew that mansfield wasn't entirely what i might have liked to think about about a little city at the edge of the middle west that was famous for its meth and heroin problems. the city, at least as far as the inhabitants of its surrounding villages seem concerned (and they are, and they'll tell you), should be famous for its art center as well. i didn't know. but i did intend to visit. and even if that white building among the trees on marion avenue hadn't been the center, i would have gone back afterward to photograph it. and i don't know if people in mansfield would consider their city to be generally progressive, but that building did win a progressive architecture award when it was built in 1971. even if the mansfield art center isn't quite famous, don hisaka, its architect is. i mean, i didn't know who he was, but the man at the gift shop whom i asked about the center's funding (who maybe misheard "founding" -- although that's impossible because what i asked was if the center was supported by the city) wrote hisaka's name on the membership application he gave me. the center, he told me, had recently done a retrospective of the architect's work in photographs.

the current retrospective of the work of henry melroy was over, in the process of being taken down from the second floor gallery, and i wasn't going to be allowed upstairs. this i was told at the foot of the staircase by the woman descending it. the majority of the melroy works looked still to be on the walls, but she'd already begun unpacking the next exhibit. but i didn't much care. i didn't know anything about henry melroy, and i had already decided that i'd come out ahead after only putting three dollars in the donation box (it turns out that the center is an independent nonprofit) after assuming i would have to pay at least five for what i assumed was a municipal museum before arriving. i don't know why she eventually allowed me up.

i didn't know anything about henry melroy, but that's why art centers like the one in mansfield (like the local literary museums that still survive all over japan) are treasures. it's beside my point to describe his art. and besides, the retrospective included a work entitled "the determined blind critic" which featured in its foreground a top hatted figured holding a brush full of white paint and poised to something devious; and although i wouldn't normally be dissuaded by an artist's attempts at dissuading a critic by means of criticism, i doubt that in my descriptions i'd say anything particularly revelatory, and it was time that i started seeing to my revelation. what the hell would trying to describe something like, i don't know, surreal fauvist irrelationshipism sound like anyway? and the effect of the relationship of the title of a work like "desert fairy massacre" to the faceless rag doll in the painting that held a pistol extended in one hand in front of a field of nonparallel cacti whilst being beset by a volley of shooting stars would be as impossible to express as the much simpler but also necessarily total effect of seeing that the sketch of audrey hepburn as holly golightly as a shredded flesh zombie that was easily the least conspicuous of the pieces on display at the coffee shop downtown was titled "you look sexy." maybe it's just beyond me, but that too is beside the point.

and beside it too (almost literally, there on main street downtown) was that café. i don't know if it makes the city any more progressive, but mansfield is not entirely without, i don't know...cool. and next door, there's a chalkboard sidewalk sign exclaiming in blue and pink that president obama has the support of mansfield's artists. the independent book store across the street should be an encouraging surprise for anyone troubled by the purportedly short life expectancy of the old fashioned book tour.

and up the street there's the squirrel's den, which is where i bought my faux vintage cards depicting the demolished richland county jail and the mansfield commerce building and was given both a tour and a business card that got me into the city income tax offices on the seventh floor of the municipal building to appreciate the view. ladonna also told me how she always tells young people (which in our conversation apparently meant me) to keep chasing their dreams. her dream of opening a confectionery wasn't realized until she was fifty, and she had had to work a night shift elsewhere for its first three years to keep her new business open. she had told president obama the same story.

so my cynicism had been tempered by the time i got back to central park, which occupies a handful of blocks between main and diamond streets, one block away from the chase tower. in 1962, the bodies of two girls were found dead in a mansfield creek, and in the ensuing investigation, the police learned about an underground public restroom where men met for sex. "tearoom, mansfield surveillance" by william e. jones is a film that consists only and entirely of fifty-six unedited minutes of surveillance footage acquired by the filmmaker, footage that was taken in 1962 by the mansfield police and the highway safety foundation from behind a two way mirror in that restroom. at the end of the clip that i found online, a strapping motorcycle cop -- whose resemblance to something out of tom of finland is a sadly ironic coda to the outrageously sad sex footage that precedes it -- delivers a citation of a much portlier mansfield joe. each of the men filmed was given between one and twenty years imprisonment or confinement in a state hospital. the restroom was filled after the sting.

i don't know. i tried to find that above ground shot. i even allowed for a reversal of the image. but it's been fifty years. i'm sure the park, like the city, has changed. today there's a martin luther king jr. memorial, and the trees that now provide abundant shade to the lawn areas on either side of park avenue wouldn't have been so large and relaxed in 1962. that public gentlemen's restroom may not even have ever been there. and the city has surely changed. but it's been fifty years, and that tearoom is still the only gay bar in mansfield, and so even without much hope of finding it, i figured i would see what i could find. that restroom might not have ever been there at the park, but until yesterday i hadn't even known that it could have been, and i wonder how much of its american history a president obama knows when his campaign makes a stop in mansfield, ohio, main street u.s.a.

but i'll admit again that mansfield had tempered my cynicism. the people there today are as fine, diverse and eager as the men in that surveillance footage. and i can't help but want to come back, especially as i suspect that the manager of the book store will probably be starting her own brewery, but suspecting as well that maybe it's the rest that have had the wool pulled over their eyes. i drive through the park again on my way to photograph the grain silos and the state reformatory and appreciate the banner signs along park avenue one more time: "visit downtown mansfield. 'cruise in.'" don't mind if i do.