Melissa Holbrook Pierson

Why did Melissa Holbrook Pierson write The Place You Love is Gone? In a series of meditations on displacement by new forms of development, Pierson preaches to those already baptized as haters of sprawl, strip malls, and big-box-lined highways. She bemoans suburban sprawl and urban gentrification for wreaking havoc in the places she once called home, but her book sheds no new light on this much observed phenomenon.

At war with any force that has altered places she loves, Pierson repeatedly casts herself as an unapologetic sentimentalist, “nostalgic,” and a “hypocrite,” to shield herself from criticism that her book is just that: an indulgent exercise in nostalgia and a hypocritical critique of the American lifestyle, which she herself lives. It’s a neat trick - embracing one’s flaws in the hopes that doing so will neuter others’ criticisms. It might even have worked, were it not that Pierson is, in addition to begin overly sentimental, also dull, repetitive, and melodramatic. 

Pierson begins by telling her childhood story not as a chronological narrative, but through the lens of place. She grows up in “a small snow globe of suburban happiness.” Specifically, the places she means to evoke are downtown Akron in Ohio, Daddy’s office, and the Akron City Club. To the extent that there is a story here, it goes something like this: Melissa Holbrook Pierson had a happy, upper-middle-class, white childhood. The place where it happened no longer exists as it did in the 1950s and ‘60s. “They change everything (thus a retroactive version of you),” she tells us, “and they didn’t even ask if they could. The bastards.” The reader is expected to empathize.

The story might be somewhat more compelling, despite the melodrama, if we knew who “they” were. But Pierson’s villains seem not only abstractions but, worse, drawn from the standard “Who’s Who in Suburban Sprawl”: cars, interstate highways, and malls; Wal-Mart and Bed, Bath & Beyond; Red Lobster and Friendly’s. Pierson attempts to make the reader complicit in her attack on “progress.” “We are a generation weighed down by a sadness we do not know we feel,” she tells her readers. But just who is a member of Pierson’s “We,” mourning for her lost childhood?

In her twenties, Pierson finds herself in Hoboken, New Jersey. Pierson’s 1980s Hoboken is both bohemian and dingy. Her description of a one-bedroom apartment would sicken an exterminator. Beyond the rodent-infested, unheated apartments shared with duplicitous roommates and failed romances, Pierson finds yet more fault with how New Jersey gradually changes: how an upscale gourmet market supplants a grocery founded by Italian immigrants at the turn of the century, for instance. Despite her disdain for the city’s humble beginnings, Pierson mourns Hoboken’s renaissance, a gentrification and displacement presumably jumpstarted by an influx of white, “artsy” college graduates, much like Pierson herself. 

Pierson finishes by describing her current home in New York’s Hudson River Valley. This Eden, too, has fallen prey to outside forces, specifically New York City’s need for water and homes. Residential development replaces woods and farms. Eminent domain claims private property for reservoirs to quench the thirst of downstate inhabitants. Not that Pierson’s sympathies are for her neighbors’ private property rights; rather, she wishes she could undo their choice to sell a particular property to a developer so that she could continue to go on hikes with two mountain views.

Pierson’s understanding of urban development is painfully simplistic. She hates the cars, highways, and malls for their failure to appreciate Akron’s urban center. She is equally disdainful of the gentrification that evidences a renewed interest in Hoboken’s urban charm. In the end, Pierson offers her reader nothing but the sense that America would make better use of its land if it would simply let her make all land use decisions.

Pierson’s book is an apt example of what critics of the anti-sprawl and New Urbanist movements despise. She is patronizing and contradictory; she yearns to live in open spaces but despises others who want the same for getting in her way. Whether you want to live in an urban downtown or a rural town center, Pierson can and will critique your choices in long, melodramatic sentences, brimming with nostalgia but devoid of the sort of intelligent sensitivity that might make her work useful.