by Dan Barry
Sewers, Curfews and a Ban on Gay Bias
VICCO, KY.—JANUARY 29, 2013
In a former pool hall that is now the municipal building for a coal smudge of a place in eastern Kentucky called Vicco, population 335, the January meeting of the City Commission came to order. Commissioners and guests settled into patio chairs, bought at a discount and arranged around a long conference table. Those who smoked did.
The Commission approved the minutes from its December meeting, hired a local construction company to repair the run-down sewer plant and tinkered with the wording for the local curfew. Oh, and it voted to ban discrimination against anyone based on sexual orientation or gender identity—making Vicco the smallest municipality in Kentucky, and possibly the country, to enact such an ordinance.
After that, the Commission approved a couple of invoices. Then, according to a clerk’s notes, “Jimmy made a motion to adjourn and Claude seconded the motion. All voted yes.”
Admit it: The Commission’s anti-discrimination vote seems at odds with knee-jerk assumptions about a map dot in the Appalachian coal fields, tucked between Sassafras and Happy. For one thing, Vicco embraces its raucous country-boy reputation—home to countless brawls and a dozen or so unsolved murders, people here say. For another, it is in Perry County, where four of every five voters rejected President Obama in the November election.
But the Vicco Commission’s 3-to-1 vote this month not only anticipated a central theme in the president’s second inaugural speech (“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law…”), it also presented a legislative model to the nation’s partisan-paralyzed Capitol, 460 miles away.
You discuss, you find consensus, you vote, and you move on, explained the mayor, Johnny Cummings. “You have to get along.”
Mr. Cummings, 50, runs a hair salon three doors down from the City Hall storefront. He spends his days hustling between the two operations, often wearing a black smock adorned with hair clips. One moment this wiry chain-smoker is applying dye to a client’s hair; the next, he’s dealing with potholes and water lines.
Now back to assumptions.
For a good chunk of the last century, Vicco was the local coal miner’s Vegas, its narrow streets lined with bars and attractions that ran on money earned the hard way in the subterranean dank. The city’s very name derives from the initials for the Virginia Iron Coal and Coke Company.
But as the coal camps folded, Vicco emptied out. Away went the car dealerships, the schools, the department store, the A&P, and even the Pastime theater, whose farewell film is said to have been “10,” with Bo Derek. In 1979.
Into the Vicco void came abandonment, drug abuse and budget deficits so dire that the city could not afford a police officer. There was also the requisite touch of public corruption. A few years ago, a mayor and his son, a city commissioner, were charged with using thousands of dollars in city money for their personal use. They both entered Alford pleas, in which they did not admit guilt but conceded that the case against them was pretty darn good.
The next mayor stepped down last year for health reasons and was replaced by one of the city commissioners, the hairstylist down the street, Mr. Cummings.
Cummings is a longtime Vicco surname. Johnny Cummings’s mother, Betty, was a schoolteacher; she has some dementia now and spends most days in his salon, telling him she loves him. His father, John, ran several businesses, including a bar; he died from a blow to the back of the head in 1990. One of those unsolved Vicco murders.
Mr. Cummings is gay, an identity he has never hidden, and the occasional rude encounter while growing up was nothing that he and his protective friends couldn’t handle. After high school, he was offered a scholarship to a beauty academy in California, but he returned after two months. Other than a brief spell in South Carolina, he has been planted here in Vicco, where, for the last quarter-century, he has co-owned a salon called Scissors.
“I make 20 trips a day” between Scissors and City Hall, he said recently. “Right now I have a lady with color in her hair.”
As mayor, Mr. Cummings inherited a skeleton-crew city that could not afford to keep all the office lights on. What’s more, the creaky pipes in its water system, which generates money for the city through sales to area customers, were leaking more than 40 percent of the water, or revenue.
“How do you fix this?” Mr. Cummings remembers thinking. “I’m just a hairdresser.”
He began by making amends with government agencies that had long since written off Vicco, hiring back the maintenance whiz who knew the city’s pipes better than anyone and securing public grants to pay for the work. Now, he says, the repaired pipes are creating enough revenue to hire more workers and restore some color to Vicco’s dreary black-and-white.
For example, he paid $600 for the bold blue metal bench that now sits in front of City Hall, emblazoned with the city’s name. He also hired the city’s first police officer in years: Tony Vaughn, a former detective and one of Mr. Cummings’s protectors back in high school.
“We have five drug dealers here, and everyone knows it,” said the barrel-chested Mr. Vaughn. “I’ll ask ’em nicely to stop, and then I’ll put ’em in jail.”
This place-in-progress called Vicco was one of a handful of municipalities to receive a request last year from the Fairness Coalition, a Kentucky-based advocacy group for people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Mr. Cummings happens to have a sister, Lee Etta, who is active in the coalition.
The coalition’s request: to consider adopting an anti-discrimination ordinance.
The city’s forward-thinking attorney, Eric Ashley, trimmed the coalition’s 28-page ordinance proposal down to a couple of pages. Then the mayor and the four-member Commission, all heterosexual men, met in December for a first reading and a discussion that ended with a 4-to-0 vote in favor of adoption.
The Commission’s agenda for its January meeting, two weeks ago, included the second reading and the formal vote on the anti-discrimination proposal. This time, representatives of the Fairness Coalition took patio seats in the smoke-filled room.
The commissioners hashed through their questions and doubts, which Mr. Ashley did his best to answer and allay. But one commissioner, Tim Engle, who has known Johnny Cummings since forever, said he needed to change his vote.
“Tim stated that due to his religion, that he had to vote no to the above-mentioned ordinance,” a clerk’s notes of the meeting said.
“There are things we’re not going to agree on, and that’s perfectly fine with me,” Mr. Engle said, according to the local newspaper, The Hazard Herald. “That’s what the debates are for… that’s what this group’s here for. I want them to do what they think’s right and what they think they need to do.”
Because the mayor votes only to break a tie, Mr. Cummings mostly just listened to the discussion. Yes, it was a little shocking to hear an old friend change his vote on grounds of religion. But it was also gratifying, even crystallizing, to hear another commissioner say simply: Everyone should be treated fairly.
Claude Branson Jr., 56, a retired coal miner who sits on the Commission—and the only commissioner, he proudly notes, with a mullet haircut—said recently that Mr. Cummings’s presence had not played as much of a factor in the vote as had “the whole broad perspective of the world.”
“We want everyone to be treated fair and just,” he explained.
In Vicco, at least, officials just assumed that such a belief is self-evident and therefore not that big of a deal. Besides, this tough little city has other matters on its collective mind.
The maintenance supervisor is tackling problems with the sewage plant. The new police chief wants to revisit some of those unsolved murders. And the mayor is planning to transform an empty lot into a park, open to all.
EPILOGUE
Johnny Cummings remains the mayor of Vicco.
After he and Vicco were featured in the This Land column, a segme
nt about Mr. Cummings appeared on “The Colbert Report” television program. That, in turn, prompted Max Mutchnick, a co-creator of the “Will and Grace” television show, and his husband, Erik Hyman, to build a children’s park for the community.
“All that was fun,” Mr. Cummings said. “It took about a year for my 15 minutes of fame to die down.”
Storied Providence Skyscraper, Now Empty, Seeks a Future
PROVIDENCE, R.I.—NOVEMBER 13, 2013
The last full-time employee in the tallest building in Rhode Island has grown accustomed to the 26 stories of emptiness. He doesn’t even hear the absence anymore—that silent roar of business not transacted.
“At first it was very weird,” says Paul Almeida, the chief engineer and resident optimist for a 428-foot Art Deco skyscraper that has defined the Providence cityscape since 1928. “Then, all of a sudden, it was nothing.”
Just another job. Single-handedly maintaining a skyscraper that once announced Providence as a Gotham of industry, but whose soaring hollowness today only nags at the city’s sense of self-worth. Like a chastened Ozymandias, it whispers: Now what?
Until that vexing question is answered, Mr. Almeida, 48, continues his rounds, hands shoved in a 2004 World Series Champions Boston Red Sox sweatshirt. His work boots echo as he walks across the marbled lobby, where the last day of public business for the last tenant, Bank of America, remains set in metal calendars beside pens chained to counters: FRI APR 12.
Mr. Almeida began as a porter right out of high school nearly 30 years ago, after submitting an application to Human Resources, Third Floor. Back then, hundreds tended to the financial needs of thousands, as money was deposited, withdrawn, made. Now, the Greek gods adorning the lobby ceiling preen in vain.
A button’s push in a golden elevator sends Mr. Almeida rocketing through floors of office vacancy hinting of former purpose, like window lettering announcing “Commercial Real Estate Group.” A former porter ascends, up, up, up.
When it opened, this steel-frame structure sheathed in Indiana limestone rose in sleek contrast to the Colonial-style buildings at its feet. Winning hopeful huzzahs and inspiring advertising Babbittry—“A Business Building for Building Business”—the skyscraper welcomed Providence to tomorrow.
“This was a really bold statement that said, ‘We are going somewhere—we are charging forward,’” says Matthew Bird, an associate professor of industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design who has studied the building’s history.
From a top-floor perch, the masters of Rhode Island industry could admire their domain spread out before them: the jewelry factories and textile mills, the Narragansett Bay shimmer, the Providence bustle. They might then repair to a prefabricated, leather-upholstered dining room—said by some to resemble an airship’s gondola—plopped near the apex of the building.
“All designed for party time,” Mr. Bird says. “There’s absolutely nothing public about that space.”
Built as the Industrial Trust building, the structure became known as the “Superman building,” in the mistaken belief that it had appeared in an establishing shot for the Superman television series of the 1950s. Set aglow by floodlights, it was the beacon of the capital, signaling to Rhode Islanders coming south from Massachusetts that they were home.
But nearly all those mills once seen from above closed down, and Providence’s role as a financial center came and went. The building slipped into economic irrelevance, its ownership changing hands, until a Massachusetts company called High Rock Development bought it for more than $33 million in 2008.
The owner’s timing has been exquisitely bad. Not long ago, for example, it announced a plan to carve the building into 280 rental apartments—though, to do so, it would need tens of millions of dollars in tax credits and tax breaks. But the state was still reeling from its backing of a spectacularly unwise loan to a failed video game company owned by the former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling.
On the hook now for $100 million, the taxpayers of Rhode Island are not feeling generous.
David Ortiz, a spokesman for Providence’s mayor, Angel Taveras, says the mayor did not think helping to convert the building into pricey apartments “was the wisest use of taxpayer dollars.” But he says that city officials are trying to work with the developers to find a viable plan.
“It’s a beautiful and iconic building,” Mr. Ortiz says. “And we’re doing everything we can to find a solution.”
But High Rock is pressing on, saying the days of one company’s occupying a skyscraper are over. It argues that the redevelopment will create hundreds of jobs and address the growing trend of young professionals’ wanting to live in downtown environments.
“We have a vacant 428-foot symbol of Rhode Island’s economic challenges sitting in downtown Providence,” says Bill Fischer, a spokesman for the owner. “We’re fully prepared to re-engage.”
But the building no longer glows at night. Although a bluish green continues to beam from its very top, the rest of the skyscraper now disappears into the daily dusk. Perhaps to save $30,000 a year or, perhaps, to make a point.
“Lighting up the entire exterior of the building every night and saying everything is O.K. is not right,” Mr. Fischer says. “Everything is not O.K. with the Superman building.”
Private dining car in the sky
Mr. Almeida, its last and lonely employee, is not more powerful than a locomotive, but he does his best to keep the building fit for its next purpose. “I guess somebody’s got to do it,” he says.
And why not a man who linked together tables for meetings of the board of directors? Who knows that this empty room was known as the “dish room,” because of the valuable china once on display, and that this empty conference room was called “green acres,” because of a carpet the color of money?
The ascending elevator stops at the 26th floor, formerly the bank president’s preserve. “His secretaries would sit here,” Mr. Almeida says, nodding at some carpet space. “I would come up here, but not very often. I’d do whatever needed to be done. Furniture moved….”
He takes in a panoramic view once reserved for industrialists, and now at his feet. Then he heads out a side door to a stairwell, where a red Superman cape, the vestige of a recent catered party, dangles from a sprinkler-system pipe. Mr. Almeida ignores it.
He climbs a staircase to reach the private dining car, where the wine closet is empty and the dark leather cracked. Just outside one window is a birdhouse for a peregrine falcon.
“The only tenant we have,” he says.
Soon he is plummeting to the basement, to a series of vaults that look like stainless-steel props from the Chaplin classic “Modern Times.”
Rows of gaping safe-deposit boxes, some containing metal shavings from having been drilled open. Huge cages that once contained Persian rugs and other bulk items of value. Vacuum tubes that sent cash zipping from the bank lobby to the counting room—at one time, $2.3 billion in deposits was stored right here.
Mr. Almeida seems unimpressed. He turns out some lights and heads down one more flight, to the very bottom, to his office in the boiler room, where, somewhere, water is dripping.
He sits at his tidy desk, upon which the red leather work diary, the glass mug filled with pens and the stack of Bank of America Post-it notes are arranged just so.
He worked his way up—or down—to this position. After years as a porter, he studied hard to earn certification as a boiler operator. He studied some more to become a stationary engineer. Then he looked up one day and someone said, “You’re the only one here. I think you’re in charge.”
Mr. Almeida gets up from his desk. He has things to do. And soon he’ll be turning on the heat so that no pipes burst in the tallest building in Rhode Island.
EPILOGUE
Paul Almeida, the chief engineer and true superman of the Superman building, died unexpectedly in 2015. He was 49.
And, as of this writing, the tallest building in Rhode Island remains vacan
t. Potential tenants have expressed interest over the past few years, but hopes have, like the building’s elevators, rarely soared beyond the first floor.
Then again, “Hope” is the motto of Rhode Island.
At the End, Divide Between Clinton and Trump Is Only a Manhattan Mile
NEW YORK, N.Y.—NOVEMBER 10, 2016
Just one mile. That was all.
After the most divisive presidential campaign in living memory, a cross-country melee for the ages, the two warring camps pitched their election night tents and waited to hear the nation’s agonized decision. All that separated them, as the bird flies, was a single mile across the midsection of Manhattan.
The Republican Party of Donald J. Trump prepared to cheer or cry at the New York Hilton Midtown, a spacious establishment along the Avenue of the Americas, between 53rd and 54th Streets. Meanwhile, to the southwest, the Democratic Party of Hillary Clinton braced to celebrate or concede at the glass-encased Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, on 11th Avenue and 34th Street.
And geographically, at least, only a mile of New York City pavement divided them.
It seemed odd at first, even tone deaf, for the two candidates to have chosen to end their races in Manhattan. This was, after all, evil Gotham, supposed home of liberal elites so out of touch with “real” Americans everywhere else.
The easy explanation is that Mr. Trump is a born New Yorker, while Mrs. Clinton is a former United States senator from New York who has adopted the Westchester County town of Chappaqua as her home. They are the first New Yorkers to represent the two major parties in a presidential election since Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) defeated Thomas E. Dewey (R) in 1944.
