Why here?

Springfield Armory Museum: A reminder of a time when the city was prosperous.

{My} route...brings me down and around to the city proper, a long, straight street in another country, with homemade shop signs in Spanish, blocks of Third World decay, citizens of many colors draped in windows, doorways, on corners, in parked cards, often with a look in their eyes that asks what you're asking -- Is this the right place, how in the hell did I wind up here?''

-- John Edgar Wideman, on Springfield, Mass., in Fatheralong (1994)