Some sad news from the one time Finnish bastion of Meadowlands, Minnesota. Schneiderman’s Furniture will close its flagship Meadowlands location. The clearance sale begins today.
OK, let me stop for a moment and explain why this is significant. Furniture stores generally don’t elicit excitement of any kind. Why should they? What can you tell me about this couch, other than whether or not I can afford it determines my social class? It’s blue, I guess. That’s nice.
But Meadowlands is not just a small town in northern Minnesota. It’s pretty much a township. It’s a vast, rural area in between Duluth and the Iron Range that rests well off the highway that connects Duluth to the Iron Range. Its school closed years ago. And yet, somehow, the place has kept a high-end furniture store open for more than 40 years (and the Schneiderman family operated a grocery and hardware store for 20 years prior to entering the furniture business).
Meadowlands is a place like the place where I grew up, a few miles north in Zim. Fog collects over the peat bogs in the morning. It’s always four degrees colder than the nearby towns. Taconite trains rumble by on the tracks, headed from the Range to Duluth, never stopping. People know each other well, even if they don’t like each other. And today the one thing that made the place different from all the other places like this place is closing. To say that it’s just another symptom of the bad economy is just not adequate.
You can still buy your furniture in Duluth or the Twin Cities, just like everything else. But there does not exist a big enough city to replace what is being lost in this long, strange transition to whatever comes next.
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