There was a strange phenomenon that swept over much of my Notre Dame undergrad class in the months before we graduated: a lot of people realized they sort of really liked South Bend, IN.
This definitely didn't apply to everyone, as there were plenty of folks who couldn't wait to get the hell out of the Midwest. And it's inevitably hard to separate genuine affection for a city from nostalgic attachment in the months leading up to graduation. But as more and more people started going out to eat downtown and checking out the quirky local coffee shops and spending weekends on the river walk and finding the hole-in-the-wall bookstores, a lot of my friends and I really started to see the charm in the otherwise unspectacular, aging Rust Belt city.
We weren’t necessarily wrong. South Bend has a surprisingly solid food scene and a downtown area that might fool a casual roadtripper into thinking the city is twice the size and stature that it is. It was also pretty obvious that South Bend was nothing astonishing though. I've been to many of the other aging Rust Belt cities scattered across Indiana, and it's not like South Bend feels wildly different from Fort Wayne or Evansville or Hammond or Terre Haute. They all follow a pretty similar playbook.
But my point here isn't to dunk on people who grew a soft spot for South Bend. My point is that I wonder if we all took the time to dive into every city as intensely as my college classmates did our senior year in South Bend — going out to eat downtown and checking out the quirky local coffee shops and spending weekends on the river walk and finding the hole-in-the-wall bookstores — if we would come away feeling that same level of appreciation for a lot more of these overlooked cities? That maybe the issue isn't that many American cities are unspectacular but instead that I'm not taking the time to find what's spectacular in them? That I’m not treating my relationship with these cities like I do every other relationship in my life, acknowledging that they take genuine time, effort, and commitment to make them more meaningful?
That I'm just not giving them a chance to change my mind.
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