Two Communities Experience the Recession in Varying Degrees

June 7, 2009— -- Each weekday morning, they assemble and form a line in a room on an upper floor of a drab building on Main Street in Rockford, Ill. They are gathering to file for unemployment benefits.

By midmorning the queue has lengthened to dozens of people and stretched around a corner and down the hallway. No one is smiling.

Linda Parker, until two days earlier a senior account executive at the Rockford branch of HSBC bank, is one of the people in the line.

"There's no optimism now," she said. "Everything you hear on the news, it is bad."

At midday on Main Street in Greenville, South Carolina, people are drifting up and down the street going to or coming from lunch at one of dozens of restaurants or cafes. Greenville has not escaped the larger economic decline, but it has proven recession-resistant if not recession-proof. Many of the strollers are smiling.

"We're holding our own," said Mayor Knox White. "And I guess that's good news."

Two Cities, Two Main Streets

Rockford, Ill., and Greenville, S.C., are two cities with two Main Streets, each faring differently during this long, bitter season of economic distress.

Main Street in Rockford is a thoroughfare of desolation and desperation. It has been years since this was really Rockford's main business street. The buildings are aging. There are few retail businesses other than a handful of inexpensive restaurants and a few shops.

Walking along a section of Main Street that is now a pedestrian mall, Mayor Lawrence Morrissey played guide to the evidence of the sour economic times affecting his city of 175,000.

"This bank over here is struggling, really struggling," he said, gesturing to a branch office of a local bank. "Bagel shop is gone. Over there's a For Lease sign."

At the Kiwi Bar and Restaurant on Main Street, the sparse group of customers quickly evaporated as the lunch break for the local businesses drew to a close.

Wendy Fisher, manager of the Kiwi, said, "It's tough to maintain a rent, retail space rental, your overhead, your payroll. Staying in business is tough enough."