Postmodern impressions of Yreka

This evening, feeling a little homesick and contemplating my impending travels to (tentatively) begin tomorrow, I Bloogled my hometown of Yreka, CA. Most of the results were from people detailing roadtrips along I-5, with most of them saying something like "and then the freeway was shut down by a blizzard and we had to stay in this po-dunk town called Yreka." However, I came across a slightly more expansive post, also by a traveler, which I found to be rather odd. See below...

Yreka isn't what you might consider a "tourist town", but the city fathers saw fit to ignore the obvious and created a downtown area that is reminiscent of the town's Gold Rush past.

The poster must have been talking about this:













As you can see above, Yreka does indeed have a small, "gold-rush-eque" downtown. But this is not, as the poster had concieved, a contemporary development effort to lure tourism dollars. Those buildings look old because they are old.

That's the old Franco American Hotel building, from back when it was still the Franco American Hotel. It is an old gold rush era building, as are most of the others on the lower blocks on Miner Street just off the central Yreka exit. The only modern buildings on that stretch are there because some of the old ones burned down.

Now, what seems weird to me is that someone would see the buildings as they exist now and think that they are a facade, that they are constructs, that they are inauthentic. I have seen such places as the poster percieves downtown Yreka to be - in Nevada most obviously via Casinos developments, but also in some "revitalization" efforts in various California towns. In both of these cases, new developments are built to resemble "old-time" downtowns. However, in this case, an authentic "old-time downtown" is percieved to be a contemporary, artificial reproduction of such. Brenda pointed out that this perception, this perspective held by the author of the post in question, is actually an example of postmodernism. But that doesn't make me any less queasy...

What a stage we have reached when someone can see something that appears to be antiquated and presume that it is artificially so. What a strange place to be in where the artificial construction and re-creation of the past is sufficiently prevalent to skew someone's perceptions so greatly. With sprawling developments springing up all across America, with corporate and franchised businesses dominating local economies, could we finally be reaching a point where the average American is officially out of touch with the schema of small-town America, complete with its antiquated buildings and ma & pop businesses? Where do we go after this?

In the end, I'm just glad that I will have a chance this week to leave my current home of gigantic box-stores, Starbucks, and SUVs, and go home to a place that is quintessentially small-town America.