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CONTENTS
Author’s Note
1 Gone
2 Ask Not
3 The Show
4 West Grand Boulevard
5 Party Bus
6 Glow
7 Motor City Mad Men
8 The Pitch of His Hum
9 An Important Man
10 Home Juice
11 Eight Lanes Down Woodward
12 Detroit Dreamed First
13 Heat Wave
14 The Vast Magnitude
15 Houses Divided
16 The Spirit of Detroit
17 Smoke Rings
18 Fallen
19 Big Old Waterboats
20 Unfinished Business
21 The Magic Skyway
22 Upward to the Great Society
Epilogue: Now and Then
Connections
Time Line
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Photo Credits
To the people of Detroit
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In a sense this book had been in the works since the summer of 1949, when I was born at Women’s Hospital in Detroit, but the inspiration came on Super Bowl Sunday in early February 2011 as I watched the title game at a bar in midtown Manhattan. At halftime, with the Green Bay Packers on their way to victory, I was caught in the swirl of emotions of an anxious fan and barely paying attention to the studio commentary and commercials. Then I looked up at the screen to see a green freeway sign that said DETROIT. A series of images flashed by in rhythm to a pulsing sound track. Wintry landscape. Smokestacks. Abandoned factories. World-class architecture. The Joe Louis Fist. The Diego Rivera murals Detroit Industry. Ice skaters gliding, runners in hooded sweatshirts pounding onward, determined to keep going. The giant sculpture The Spirit of Detroit. A narrator, his voice confidently embracing the scene: Now we’re from America. But this isn’t New York City, or the Windy City, or Sin City, and it certainly isn’t the Emerald City.
The camera swooped inside a Chrysler 200, leathered warm and black, and there was Marshall Mathers, the singer known as Eminem, cruising down Woodward Avenue in his hometown, city of my birth, the back beat hypnotic as he approached the Fox Theater and stepped from the sedan and past the golden marquee and walked down the aisle toward a black gospel choir, robed in red and black, their voices rising high and hopeful into the darkness from the floodlit stage. Then silence, and Eminem pointing at the camera: This is the Motor City. This is what we do.
By the time it was over, I was choked up. It took my wife to point out the obvious: this was a commercial, playing on emotion, selling something, image more than reality, and Detroit was a mess, its people struggling. All inarguably true, yet I also realized that my response was real and had been triggered by something deeper than propaganda. I had lived in Detroit for the first six and a half years of my life. My earliest memories were there, in our flat on Dexter Avenue and house near Winterhalter School, where I learned to read and write in an integrated classroom. Hudson’s department store, the Boblo boat, Belle Isle, Briggs Stadium, Vernors ginger ale, the Rouge pool, the Fisher Y, the Ford Rotunda out by the highway on the way to our grandparents’ house in Ann Arbor—these were the primordial places and things of my early consciousness. I’ve spent the rest of my life elsewhere, most of it in the college towns of Madison and Austin and in Washington, D.C., so I’d never thought of myself as a Detroiter. But Detroit came first, and the Chrysler commercial, whatever its intent, got me thinking in another direction.
I had no interest in buying the car; I wanted to write about the city. Detroit’s decay was already in the news, and its eventual bankruptcy was predictable, but its vulnerable condition was something others could analyze. If the Detroit of today had become a symbol of urban deterioration, it seemed important not to forget its history and a legacy that offered so many reasons to pull for its recovery. The story of Detroit was not just about the life and times of one city. The automobile, music, labor, civil rights, the middle class—so much of what defines our society and culture can be traced to Detroit, either made there or tested there or strengthened there. I wanted to illuminate a moment in time when Detroit seemed to be glowing with promise, and to appreciate its vital contributions to American life. To tell the story, I chose to go back not to the fifties, when my family lived there, but once again to the sixties, a decade I’ve explored in various ways in many of my books. It was not intentional, but as I was finishing, I came to think of Once in a Great City as the middle text in a sixties trilogy, filling the gap in time and theme between Rome 1960, about the sports and politics of the Summer Olympics, and They Marched into Sunlight, dealing with the Vietnam war and the antiwar movement in 1967.
The city itself is the main character in this urban biography, though its populace includes many larger-than-life figures—from car guy Henry Ford II to labor leader Walter Reuther; from music mogul Berry Gordy Jr. to the Reverend C. L. Franklin, the spectacular Aretha’s father—who take Detroit’s stage one after another and eventually fill it.
The chronology here covers eighteen months, from the fall of 1962 to the spring of 1964. Cars were selling at a record pace. Motown was rocking. Labor was strong. People were marching for freedom. The president was calling Detroit a “herald of hope.” It was a time of uncommon possibility and freedom when Detroit created wondrous and lasting things. But life can be luminescent when it is most vulnerable. There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition, what the world gained and what a great city lost. Even then, some part of Detroit was dying, and that is where the story begins.
Chapter 1
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GONE
THE NINTH OF NOVEMBER 1962 was unseasonably pleasant in the Detroit area. It was an accommodating day for holiday activity at the Ford Rotunda, where a company of workmen were installing exhibits for the Christmas Fantasy scheduled to open just after Thanksgiving. Not far from a main lobby display of glistening next-model Ford Thunderbirds and Galaxies and Fairlanes and one-of-a-kind custom dream cars, craftsmen were constructing a life-size Nativity scene and a Santa’s North Pole workshop surrounded by looping tracks of miniature trains and bountiful bundles of toys. This quintessentially American harmonic convergence of religiosity and consumerism was expected to attract more than three-quarters of a million visitors before the season was out, and for a generation of children it would provide a lifetime memory—walking past the live reindeer Donner and Blitzen, up the long incline toward a merry band of hardworking elves, and finally reaching Santa Claus and his commodious lap.
The Ford Rotunda was circular in an automotive manufacturing kind of way. It was shaped like an enormous set of grooved transmission gears, one fitting neatly inside the next, rising first 80 then 90 then 100 then 110 feet, to the equivalent of ten stories. Virtually windowless, with its steel frame and exterior sheath of Indiana limestone, this unusual structure was the creation of Albert Kahn, the prolific architect of Detroit’s industrial age. Kahn had designed it for the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago, where Ford’s 1934 exhibit hall chronicled the history of transportation from the horse-drawn carriage to the latest Ford V-8. When that Depression-era fair shuttered, workers dismantled the Rotunda and moved it from the
south side shore of Lake Michigan to Dearborn, on the southwest rim of Detroit, where it was reconstructed to serve as a showroom and visitors center across from what was then Ford Motor Company’s world headquarters. Later two wings were added, one to hold Ford’s archives and the other for a theater.
In the fullness of the postwar fifties, with the rise of suburbs and two-car garages and urban freeways and the long-distance federal interstate system, millions of Americans paid homage to Detroit’s grand motor palace. For a time, the top five tourist attractions in the United States were Niagara Falls, the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, the Smithsonian Institution, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Ford Rotunda. The Rotunda drew more visitors than Yellowstone, Mount Vernon, the Statue of Liberty, or the Washington Monument. Or so the Ford publicists claimed. Chances are you have not heard of it.
To appreciate what the Rotunda and its environs signified then to Detroiters, a guide would be useful, and for this occasion Robert C. Ankony fills the role. Ankony (who went on to become an army paratrooper and narcotics squad officer, eventually earning a PhD in sociology from Wayne State University) was fourteen in November 1962, a chronic juvenile delinquent who specialized in torching garages. Desperate to avoid drudgery and boredom, he knew the Rotunda the way a disaffected boy might know it. Along with the Penobscot Building, the tallest skyscraper downtown, the Rotunda was among his favorite places to hang out when he played hooky, something he did as often as possible, including on that late fall Friday morning.
“The Highway” is what Ankony and his friends called the area where they lived in the southwest corner of Detroit. The highway was West Vernor, a thoroughfare that ran east through the neighborhood toward Michigan Central Station, the grand old beaux arts train depot, and west into adjacent Dearborn toward Ford’s massive River Rouge Complex, another Albert Kahn creation and the epicenter of Ford’s manufacturing might. In Detroit Industry, the legendary twenty-seven-panel murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts painted by Diego Rivera and commissioned by Edsel Ford, the founder’s son, among the few distinguishable portraits within the scenes of muscular Ford machines and workers is that of Kahn, wearing wire-rim glasses and work overalls. Ankony experienced Detroit industry with all of his senses: the smoke and dust and smells drifted downwind in the direction of his family’s house two miles away on Woodmere at the edge of Patton Park. His mother, Ruth, who could see the smokestacks from her rear window, hosed the factory soot off her front porch every day. What others considered a noxious odor the Ankonys and their neighbors would describe as the smell of home.
On the morning of November 9, young Bob reported to Wilson Junior High, found another boy who was his frequent collaborator in truancy, and hatched plans for the day. After homeroom, they pushed through the double doors with the horizontal brass panic bars, ran across the school grounds and over a two-foot metal fence, scooted down the back alley, and were free, making their way to West Vernor and out toward Ford country.
It was a survival course on the streets, enlivened by the thrill of avoiding the cops. Slater’s bakery for day-old doughnuts, claw-shaped with date fillings, three cents apiece. Scrounging curbs and garbage cans for empty soda bottles and turning them in for two cents each. If they had enough pennies, maybe go for a dog at the Coney Island on Vernor. Rounding the curve where Vernor turned to Dix, past the Dearborn Mosque and the Arab storefronts of east Dearborn. (Ankony’s parents were Lebanese and French; he grew up being called a camel jockey and “little A-rab.”) Fooling around at the massive slag piles near Eagle Pass. Dipping down into the tunnel leading toward the Rouge, leaning over a walkway railing and urinating on cars passing below, then up past the factory bars, Salamie’s and Johnny’s, and filching lunches in white cardboard boxes from the ledge of a sandwich shop catering to autoworkers on shift change. Skirting the historic overpass at Miller Road near Rouge’s Gate 4, where on an afternoon in late May 1937 Walter Reuther and his fellow union organizers were beaten by Ford security goons, a violent encounter that Ankony’s father, who grew up only blocks away, told his family he had witnessed. Gazing in awe at the Rouge plant’s fearsomely majestic industrial landscape from the bridge at Rotunda Road, then on to the Rotunda itself, where workmen were everywhere, not only inside installing the Christmas displays but also outside repairing the roof.
To Ankony, the Rotunda was a wonderland. No worries about truant officers; every day brought school groups, so few would take notice of two stray boys. With other visitors, including on that day a school group from South Bend, they took in the new car displays and a movie about Henry Ford, then blended in with the crowd for a factory tour that left by bus from the side of the Rotunda over to the Rouge plant, then the largest industrial complex in the United States. Ankony had toured the Rouge often, yet the flow of molten metal, the intricacies of the engine plant, the mechanized perfection of the assembly, all the different-colored car parts coming down the line and matching up, the wonder of raw material going in and a finished product coming out, the reality of scenes depicted in Rivera’s murals, thrilled him anew every time. The Rouge itself energized him even as Rivera’s famed murals frightened him. The art, more than the place itself, reminded him of the gray, mechanized life of a factory worker “in those dark dungeons” that seemed expected of a working-class Detroit boy and that he so much yearned to avoid.
When the Rouge tour ended in early afternoon, Ankony and his pal had had enough of Ford for the day and left for a shoplifting spree at the nearby Montgomery Ward store at the corner of Schaefer Road and Michigan Avenue, across the street from Dearborn’s city hall. They were in the basement sporting goods department, checking out ammo and firearms, when they heard a siren outside, then another, a cacophony of wailing fire trucks and screeching police cars. The boys scrambled up and out and saw smoke billowing in the distance. Fire!—and they didn’t start it. Fire in the direction of the Rotunda. They raced toward it.
Roof repairmen since midmorning had been taking advantage of the fifty-degree weather to waterproof the Rotunda’s geodesic dome panels. Using propane heaters, they had been warming a transparent sealant so that it would spray more easily. At around 1 p.m., a heater ignited sealant vapors, sparking a small fire, and though workmen tried to douse the flames with extinguishers they could not keep pace and the fire spread. The South Bend school group had just left the building. Another tour for thirty-five visitors was soon to begin. There was a skeleton staff of eighteen office workers inside; many Rotunda employees were at lunch. A parking lot guard noticed the flames and radioed inside. Alarm bells were sounded, the building was evacuated, the roof repairmen crab-walked to a hatch and scrambled down an inside stairwell, and the Dearborn and Ford fire departments were summoned, their sirens piercing the autumn air, alerting, among others, two truant boys in the Monkey Ward’s basement.
By the time firefighters reached the Rotunda, the entire roof, made of highly combustible plastic and fiberglass, was ablaze. Two aerial trucks circled around to the rear driveway. From the other side, firefighters and volunteers stretched hoses from Schaefer Road and moved forward cautiously. It was too hot, and the water pressure too limited, to douse the fire with sprays up and over the 110 feet to the roof. The structure’s steel frame began to buckle. At 1:56, fire captains ordered their men away from the building, just in time. Robert Dawson, who worked in the Lincoln-Mercury building across the street, looked over and saw a “ball of fire” on the roof but at first no flames below. “Suddenly the roof crashed through. Everything inside turned to flame. Smoke began sifting through the limestone walls. Then, starting at the north corner, the walls crumbled. It was as though you had stacked dominoes and pushed them over.” The fire had reached the Christmas displays, fresh and potent kindling, and raged out of control, bright flames now shooting fifty feet into the sky. The entire building collapsed in a shuddering roar, a whirlwind of hurtling limestone and concrete and dust.
Fire officials, aided by a prevailing northeast wind, concentrated on
saving the north wing, where the Ford archives were stored. The south wing was already gone, its 388-seat theater a crisped shell. At the perimeter, Bob Ankony and his buddy angled for a closer look. “There were a bunch of security guys there trying to keep us back. One guy, we were pushing him to get past. We wanted to get right up to the fire,” Ankony recalled. “I was into burning garages. We had torched garages with cars in them. Now we just wanted to see cars on fire. We were youths and stupid.” The security guard held them back. The boys picked up chunks of rock and dirt and started throwing them at the guard. This attracted the attention of some nearby Dearborn cops, who took the teenagers into custody and hauled them to the police station.
For days thereafter, Ankony and his pal held exalted status among the Cabot Street Boys, the gang of young delinquents in his southwest Detroit neighborhood. Word spread that they had taken their petty arson up several notches and burned down the great Rotunda. The more they denied it, the more they were disbelieved.
The rest of Detroit was mourning the loss. In his “Town Crier” column, Mark Beltaire of the Free Press, who as a teenager had visited the original Rotunda pavilion at the fair in Chicago, wrote, “Tears for a building? Of course, and many when such as the Ford Rotunda dies. Over the years the Rotunda acquired a special personality all its own. It was known and recognized by people who had never been inside. They were aware of the Rotunda especially by night, even while driving many miles away.” Another columnist wrote that the Rotunda “had stood for more than a quarter century as testimony to Detroit’s industrial eminence. Its history was wrapped inextricably with that of the modern automotive industry.” The Rotunda’s manager, John G. Mullaly, who had been on leave to organize Ford Motor Company pavilions at the Seattle and New York World’s Fairs, returned to tour the charred remains with the manager of the Christmas program. Fifteen million dollars up in smoke, a holiday tradition ruined, and a symbol of the Motor City’s might in ashes, the visitor count permanently capped at 13,189,694. Mullaly and his boss, Henry Ford II, would not say so publicly yet, but it was obvious that the Ford Rotunda could not and would not be rebuilt. Something was forever gone.
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