Neighborhood Focus: The Trunnion District

Well, I get a lot of press releases faxed here, and sometimes there's some pretty interesting stuff. Take this, for example: something called Urban Beat magazine named the Trunnion District in Kendall Park the "most quickly gentrifying neighborhood in America" this month. Sherman used to do a thing called "Neighborhood Focus," so I guess I'll format this thing like one of those.

The Trunnion District, at its height in the 1870s, produced more trunnions then any city in the United States. Trunnions are critical to the manufacture of heavy artillery cannons, and no one made finer trunnions than our local companies -- United Trunnion, American Trunnion Works, Mishipeshu Trunnions. I remember it pretty well. My grandfather on my mother's side was trunnionsmith, a big, brooding Irishman. He hated trunnions to his dying day, but he used to say that trunnions kept his 27 children fed and clothed. "Charlie," he used to say, "I have dreams about feckin' trunnions every night. But those trunnions are what made us a family. Trunnions are what made this city great."

Anyway, the trunnion business fell on hard times after the Spanish-American War, and eventually, all the trunnion plants closed, leaving only the Mishie Trunnion Foundry by 1920. They hung on through the fallow trunnion years of post-cannon warfare by landing an exclusive contract with the Principality of Pinerolo, manufacturing the trunnions used for that city-state's elaborate bi-annual ceremonial battlefield drilling re-enactments, and occasionally landing lucrative one-off contracts with eccentric billionaires, historic arms dealers, artisanal artillery buffs, LARPers, producers for medium-budget BBC costume dramas, and miscelleaneous cannon perverts. The Pinerolo contract expired in 2003, and two years later, the plant was shuttered and its nineteen employees were laid off.


Mishipeshu Trunnion Foundry, 1856-2005

By 2006, the area was an urban wasteland, beset by arson, homicides and gang wars. Between 2005 and 2006, the Mishipeshu Police Department reported that violent crime in the precinct had skyrocketed 300%. The area was generally considered off-limits for residents of the city, and for several months in 2006 acquired the inelegant and stupid nickname the "Runnin' [From Gunshots] District." There was an influx of dozens of poverty-stricken native Esperanto speakers from the nearby Esperanto District, mostly separatists whose embrace of the Ido constructed language had lost them their jobs and homes in the more prosperous sections of Kendall Park. Average household income for the Trunnion District, a once fairly propserous working-class area, sunk below $9,000. The area continued to decay into 2007.


The corner of North 18th Avenue and East Wilson Street, March 2006.

Stories of cheap warehouse space, delicious ethnic Esperantan food, lax noise ordinance law enforcement and gorgeous brownstone Victorian architecture began to bring in a few dozen rock bands, artists, monogmaous gay couples, scooter enthusiasts and bohemians into the neighborhood in early 2007. Local zines and alternative media outlets began to declare the Trunnion District the "new Cassock District." By the end of 2007, a thriving new art and rock scene had sprung up along Wilson Avenue, much to the dismay of more conservative Esperantans and trunnionsmiths.


Free-Press noise-rock darlings Frost Creep at STORE, their rehearsal space/art gallery in the old Steve's World of Store Fixtures at 1800 East Wilson Street, April 2007.

"The Trunnion District, once known for something called 'trunnions' and then briefly for poverty and crime and now apparently for exciting new developments in twee-revival rock music and time-based media art is also now apparently the hottest new thing in upscale urban living!" crowed the Mishipeshu Herald-Tribune in a Lifestyles section editoral from early 2008. By early this year, construction had already begun on three new loft-style condo developments, a MINI Cooper dealership, two Starbucks coffee franchises and a Sonoma-Williams outlet.

The new Cannon Flats Lofts, set to open in July. The old Steve's World of Store Fixtures / STORE Gallery now houses a Mini Cooper dealership.

Urban Beat notes that this is an almost unprecendented opportunity for at least four generations of neighborhood residents to interact simultaneously. And believe me, they do, too. I get complaints from this neighborhood about everyone. I get probably a dozen variations on the "Those trunnionmakers/poor people/gay rock bands/condo developing yuppies are screwing this neighborhood up" email per week. "That this entire cycle could happen in the space of three years is nothing short of remarkable," says the magazine. I guess we'll take accolades where we can get 'em.