Every time I wander through Western Maryland, I see any number of guys my own age. Some of them are, in fact, guys I knew in high school. Most of them are a well along in their journey down Male Pattern Baldness Highway. A lot of them have beer guts. (I know, I know. I do too, but I'm talking Olympian-scale beer guts.) Invariably they've married their high school girlfriend and have several children. The more rednecky guys work for their more successful friends' contracting business. The once-popular guys are mired in some mid-level sales job and are generally divorced. All of them have a defeated look about them. While I'm busy laughing about our Junior Prom--themed "Almost Paradise," I'll have you know--they're probably thinking that it was the best time of their lives. And I think: There but for the grace of God go I. (Of course, when I look at guys I knew in college who seemed like complete drunken idiots and who are now junior partners in big Richmond and Norfolk law firms, I think: Yeah, God, thanks for the kick in the butt.) I feel bad for these dudes, but their bleak lives make me feel a hell of a lot better about myself.

So when I see a city that makes poor beat-down old Baltimore look good, I feel bad for the place, but it makes me feel a hell of a lot better about my hometown.

A few days ago I saw a PBS special about Judy Garland. I never got the appeal of the late '50s and '60s androgynous-costume-wearing, torch-song singing Judy Garland. My much more prosaic taste is more in line with all of the dopey happy movie musicals she made, so I stopped paying attention to the show right after it spotlighted one of my favorite musical pictures: "Meet Me In St. Louis."

In 1942, St. Louis probably still was the epitome of a nice, prosperous, big but charming American city. Things have changed--have they ever.

I frequently point out, when bemoaning the collapse of Baltimore as I once knew it, that during my lifetime Baltimore has lost about 300,000 inhabitants--significantly more than the entire population of Richmond. Imagine Richmond itself just plain vaporizing and you'll have an idea how Baltimore has shrunk. From being the nation's sixth largest city in my childhood it has sunk to about the nineteenth.

And then tonight, while I was aimlessly surfing some websites that cover neato abandoned buildings, I discovered this incredible site: www.builtstlouis.net

Wow.

St. Louis in the 1890's was the nation's fourth largest city. It is now barely hanging on at number 48. From being a city about the same size as Baltimore, it has lost about the entire population of Washington to become about the size of Richmond. The city itself now claims only 300,000 inhabitants. Now, imagine the entire city of Washington just vaporizing, and that tells you what's happened to St. Louis.

Have a look at the site and compare it to your own city. The vast stretches of abandoned houses and empty fields where city blocks once stood are breathtaking. The scope of the houses is unbelievable, too. The 1942 movie depicts St. Louis as the ideal of everything that was nice about living in the United States in 1904. The city, as it stands (more or less stands, that is) now, depicts everything that could possibly go wrong with living in the United States in 2006. (I also noted that, while Hollywood decided that St. Louis was full of big rambling wood-frame houses, clapboard houses are really quite rare in that city.) Compared to Baltimore's more staid architecture--Baltimorean stinginess strikes again--St. Louis was full of ornate and fanciful houses in every imaginable revival style. Pressed and patterned brick seems to have been a civic obsession. Walking the streets of the city in 1900 must have been the fulfillment of the American dream, with the beautiful and well appointed houses seated amidst tree-lined streets and lush gardens. A century later, thousands of the houses are just plain gone; many of the remaining ones are notable more for their missing roofs and collapsing bay windows than for their unique styles.

Everything has gone wrong there. The city's manufacturing base is dead. Its river port--the original purpose of the city's existence--is a nonentity as river traffic is a shadow of its former self. Its status as a rail hub has been obliterated by air and automobile traffic and changed patterns of rail freight. Its banking and trade have been swallowed by national conglomerates. With the bulk of its economy wiped out, there just isn't much need for people to live in St. Louis anymore. Those who do--the metropolitan area does still lay claim to a population of nearly two million--have long since fled the city for the vast array of suburbs, a pattern all too common across the nation, but one particularly destructive in this case. Even though I've seen the same patterns in Baltimore, the effects haven't been as devastating. In the space of about forty years, St. Louis has gone from being an important city with an impressive and bustling downtown and endless miles of beautiful residential streets to a vacant and shattered ruin.

In college, I studied the cities and architecture of the ancient world, and I always wondered what some of those ancient people might think, if they somehow woke up in the present and saw what had happened to their cities. An ancient Roman might be mystified by the bustle and notorious awful driving of his descendants, but more than cars and trains, he would probably be horrified by the sight of the all-important Forum lying in ruin. There are St. Louisans who can see that change within their natural lives, no time-travel required.

For me, the most poignant aspect of my tour through the website was the realization that I really wanted to live in St. Louis--that is, the St. Louis of a century ago. With almost every picture of a crumbling house, I started to picture myself living in it.

No. One crumbling house is enough for a lifetime.