Gathering at the River: Cruising on East Speedway :: Essays Papers

Gathering at the River Cruising on East SpeedwayWhither goest thou, America, in thy shiny gondola car in the night? -Jack Kerouac, On the Road Roll the windows down, turn the medicine up, and drive slowly. Now youre cruising. Cruising is the art of seeing and being seen, and in Tucson the nucleus of this art is Speedway Boulevard. This six-lane street runs east to west through Tucson and is unrivaled and only(a) of the busiest thoroughfares in the city. It hosts a mix of commercial and private buildings small shops, offices, restaurants, grocery stores, flat buildings and older homes, as well as the University of Arizona. Despite the apartments and occasional houses, Speedway is broadly speaking a commercial street populated with strip malls and other businesses. Cruising is just about visible along the more commercial, business-oriented East Speedway, which for the purposes of this essay is defined as the three mile stretch of road from Alvernon to Wilmot. Like most st reets, Speedway was built for an entirely practical reason to conduct automobile traffic from one place to a nonher with a minimum of waiting. This utilitarian reason is change by cruising. The purpose of cruising, unlike driving, is not to arrive but to not arrive. Cruising is a social activity wherein the cars become tools for meeting other peck as well as a means of getting from one place to another. The reputation of cruising, and of the nighttime Speedway, is not nearly so benign. As traffic slows and the music increases, the character of Speedway as a place - that is, a focus for human memory and experience - changes to reflect the activities and desires of the cruisers. The character of Speedway as a place is temporal and spatial the street of Friday midnight is radically diverse from the street of Tuesday morning. Daytime drivers quickly change lanes in an attempt to visit the one which will deliver them to their destinations the fastest. Speed and efficacy defin e the solar day Speedway. As the type of driver changes, so does the drivers reason for being there. The weekday interchange is replaced by the weeknight cruise. The drivers also become, as a group, less diverse in terms of age and gender. The majority of cruisers appeared to be teenagers. Also, though I byword many young women, the majority of cruisers were male.