But for decades now the city has been keenly intertwined with and aware of the incoming collapse of manufacturing in America. All of us here, we've lived it and seen it. Watched the foundries go silent as the owners abandoned them to crumble along the lake shore. We had a skyline of skeletal buildings and broken glass windows. Until the city had then torn down.

Factory after factory after factory.

Today unemployment here is at around 16%. And that's the most hopeful estimate. But the employment hasn't been terribly good here for several decades, save for a time in the 90s when the US economy was on steroids.

What do you do when your main industry is leaving?

Well... you start trying all sorts of things. For example you might put a roof over the downtown to maybe make shopping more pleasant all year round.

Sure, sure. Hindsight being 20/20 it wasn't all that great idea. Making a downtown that locks up at night... probably not the best plan in the world. But see it for what it was... an attempt to re-invent. An attempt to defuse the rapid crush of changing economic factors. And in a way it was a bit prescient... foreseeing the rise of malls as centers for economic activity. Sadly, because newer and bigger malls are always going up there's a distinct life cycle to shopping malls that goes something like this:

New and hip --> Strictly functional --> Place that sells shoes and has army recruiting offices --> Ghost town.

Where was I?

Oh yeah.

After many years of trying to revitalize the downtown-mallenstein monster, and after it sat empty for a few years, they they plowed it under.

To the dirt. Piles of rubble and bent steel and large piles of sand and dirt.

Plowed under.

Gone.

And that's how downtown has been for several years. The Summer Celebration and Irish Music Festival are held near the lake, and not too far from them.. .a large expanse of dirt.

I drive down there from time to time to see what's going on. Every time I do some new building is going up. Every time I do, some new specialty shop has moved in. The factories along the lake shore are gone, and there's a view of the lake, and a view of the Michigan Alternative and Renewable Energy Center (MAREC)... an incubator for alternative energy businesses. A huge old, old shirt factory was converted to residential condos to establish a downtown population.

Almost imperceptibly, like a persistent ivy, what was just 15 years ago another crumbling factory town has pushed to reclaim land, trying to put it, and the people, back to work. The flow is so strong in the opposite direction that sometimes it's discouraging..especially as unemployment climbs to 1/5 of all citizens here.

But what choice do we have but to try to rebuild?

The wife and I went with some friends to a new restaurant in downtown Muskegon because the Irish music festival looked too packed. The Muskegon Athletic Center. Their specialty is gourmet macaroni and cheese. I had a beer battered tilapia. The place was full when we went in.

From the evening vantage point of the restaurant's windows you wouldn't know the building was surrounded on 3 sides by dirt and empty space of what was once the downtown mall. All you could see were the parts of town still standing and lit up in the dusk, and the newly built Culinary Arts Institute, the bright lights on the kiosk of the Frauenthal Performing Arts Center, and people walking to and from the Irish Music Festival or emerged from the rodeo at the LC Walker Arena... meanwhile people laughed and talked in the beer garden, and a horse-drawn carriage stood wait outside... he'll carry you anywhere downtown for a modest fare. Down near the beautiful and historic Muskegon Lake.