Southern Illinois, #03: Cairo
(Yeah, go ahead, muckefuck, try arguing the town isn't in Southern Illnois. :: laugh ::)
Fast-forwarding right to the goodies -- Cairo.
Jamie had already been to Cairo as part of her honeymoon (where her and her husband roadtripped throughout the southern part of the state), and she sent amazing pictures of the downtown area. Why so amazing? Cairo, in its height, had tens of thousands of people in it, employing a number of people with jobs due to its location along the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Between those jobs steadily vanishing and intense race rioting, the population dwindled down to the 1500 or so there now.
Now, 1500 isn't abandoned, by any stretch of the imagination. But apparently huge chunks of the city have been rendered abandoned. Tons of buildings are covered in overgrowth, windows boarded up or bashed out, with some huge chunks missing out of several them. It was, indeed, Life After Man, in person. The current population belied how the city -- once apparently beautiful -- sat in ruin. Nothing outside of one restaurant and a Dollar General seemed to even be open, and that includes medical facilities, gas stations ...
I was dumbdounded. And that's saying something. And several things caught my eye -- for starters, sections of downtown had fairly new brick roads installed. And while they wren't brand new, they couldn't be more than a decade or so old. Yet, these roads lead to absolutely nothing. So, why install them to begin with? Another eye-opener was the sheer amount of vegetation -- in some cases, they completely enveloped homes and literally crushed them. I think it's the first time I've ever seen that, in my life. Several spots are historically registered, and they are fairly well maintained, and it seems other buildings had restorations started, that were never finished. This seems true of the Gem Theater, which is falling apart, a sign in the ticket window announcing restoration covered in dust the only sign that someone -- at some point in time -- started trying to save it.
