Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

by Mark Binelli

  Detroit’s own population had plummeted from a high of two million to 713,000, with an estimated 90,000 buildings left abandoned. Indeed, huge swaths of the city’s 140 square miles were poised on the cusp of returning to nature. Along with the empty skyscrapers and block-long factories fallen into ruin, entire residential streets, once densely populated, resembled fields in rural Arkansas after most of the houses had either burned to the ground or ended up demolished. A friend’s mother said she now carried pepper spray on her daily walks—not for protection from potential muggers, but from the packs of wild dogs she’d been seeing in the neighborhood. A coyote had just been spotted near downtown.

  * * *

  One afternoon, to get a better sense of the state of the city beyond the confines of the auto show, I met up with John Carlisle, the proprietor of the marvelous Detroitblog, on which he filed dispatches from some of the least-visited corners of the city. By day, Carlisle edited a weekly suburban newspaper, but online, writing as Detroitblogger John, he’d become the Joseph Mitchell of the postindustrial Midwest, ferreting out stories about vigilante ex-cops, whites-only hillbilly bars, and an old blues singer doing a healthy side business selling raccoon meat. That afternoon, we drove alongside snow-covered plains where houses once stood, what locals had begun calling the “urban prairie,” and crept around the perimeter of General Motors’ immense Fisher Body Plant, closed since 1984, its six floors of broken windows—hundreds of them, entire blocks of them—giving the place an odd beauty, like a dried-out beehive. At the vacant lot where Motown’s headquarters had been left abandoned for years, we observed a moment of silent contemplation, Carlisle recalling the time before the demolition when he’d snuck inside and stumbled across Marvin Gaye’s old desk, with love notes to Gaye’s wife still in one of the drawers.

  Finally, back downtown, we parked in front of the Metropolitan Building, a fifteen-story, neo-Gothic office tower opened in 1924. It was a weekday afternoon, but the street was completely deserted. A block away, I could see Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s main thoroughfare.

  The Metropolitan, once the center of the jewelry trade in Detroit, housed a number of jewelry manufacturers and wholesalers, but it had been empty since 1977. Someone had painted a garish football mural on the ground floor, and a filthy brown teddy bear had been tied to a street sign. “Memorial,” Carlisle said. “Someone was shot here.” Walking quickly to one of the building’s doors, Carlisle turned the knob and was surprised to find it unlocked. Then he noticed a woman behind the counter at a carry-out place across the street, eyeing us. “Here, pretend I’m taking your picture,” he said, posing me next to the memorial bear. He snapped a few shots until the woman turned away. Then we slipped inside the building and Carlisle switched on his flashlight.

  The room had been completely gutted. Shards of plaster and glass covered the floor, and an icy draft blew through all of the broken windows. Carlisle splashed the walls with beams of light. Other than a single, cryptic graffiti tag, scrawled in Day-Glo orange, even the defaceable surfaces were barren. We began climbing the stairs. It was dark, and the wires dangling from the ceiling looked eerie and weblike. On one of the doors, someone had written, “If You Want 2 Die—” I paused and tried to make out the rest of the sentence, but it was illegible. Carlisle stopped on the flight above me and hissed, “What’s wrong? You hear someone?”

  Eventually we made it to the top floor. A couple of rusty radiators had been dragged to the center of the room and abandoned. “Crackheads always try to take them for scrap, but then realize they’re too heavy,” Carlisle said. He led me out to the snow-covered roof. We blinked in the bright daylight, staring up at what we’d come to see: the building’s beautiful stone facade, a carved knight’s helmet topping a coat of arms and ornate fleur-de-lis garlanding each window. Carlisle snapped a few pictures. He had started photographing Detroit’s ruins several years earlier. In his explorations, he had come across homeless encampments, drug addicts getting high, a couple having sex. In another building, eight cops showed up with their guns drawn. After realizing Carlisle had only a camera, they let him go. There was nothing for him to steal, anyway, even if he had been a thief.

  “This city is like a living museum,” Carlisle said. “A museum of neglect.”

  We moved over to the parapet of the roof, crenelated like the top of some fortress, and gazed out at the city skyline. “That building is empty,” Carlisle said, pointing to the nearest skyscraper. He shifted his finger to the left. “So is that one.” Then, sounding surprised—and the hitch in his voice reminded me that he was not a professional guide, that he didn’t do this every day—he pointed to the next building over and said, “And that one, too.”

  In 1995, a Chilean photographer, Camilo José Vergara, had cheekily proposed allowing a cluster of buildings in downtown Detroit to molder and become “an American Acropolis.” Dismissed by many locals as a smirking Ivory Tower provocateur, Vergara turns out to have been a prophet. I hadn’t brought a camera, but I could have been a tourist in the off-season at a scenic overlook.

  And yet, standing in calf-deep snow, my hands thrust deep in my coat pockets, staring out at this wintry scene of ruin, I had to admit I didn’t really feel sadness, or anger, or much of anything. Depressingly, perhaps, it all just felt normal. For people of my generation and younger, growing up in the Detroit area meant growing up with a constant reminder of the best having ended a long time ago. We held no other concept of Detroit but as a shell of its former self. Our parents could mourn what it used to be and tell us stories about the wonderful downtown department stores and the heyday of Motown and muscle cars. But for us, those stories existed as pure fable. It was like being told about an uncle who died before you were born, what a terrific guy he’d been, if only you’d had the chance to meet him, see how handsome he looks in these old pictures …

  Would my kids one day grow up thinking the same thoughts about America as a whole, about my ponderous tales of cold war victories and dot-com booms? It was easy to let your imagination drift in melodramatic courses. A malaise spreading through the rest of the country—a creeping sense of dread that, after spending the past eight years doing absolutely everything wrong, this time we really had reached the inevitable end of our particular empire—all of this had the effect of making Detroit, for the first time in my life, feel less like a crazy anomaly and more like a leading indicator. The mood of hopelessness had become palpable. I found myself fleetingly wondering if Detroit, in the end, might reclaim its old title after all—not the Motor City but the city of tomorrow.

  John said we should go. I squinted out over the ledge one last time. The icy wind was almost harsh enough to make you cry, and Detroit, from up here, looked like it went on forever.

  * * *

  The story of Detroit has long functioned as a cautionary tale, as much a memento mori as one of those Roman catacombs lined with the skulls of dead monks. What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you will become. For this reason, observers have a tendency to approach Detroit as a forensic investigation, a sort of murder mystery. They examine the body, poke their gloved digits into the wounds, dust the crime scene for prints. Whom you ended up fingering in the drawing room could often say as much about your own biases as about the city itself. For instance, when people place all of the blame for the demise of Detroit on the riots, or white flight, or “political corruption,” there’s an implicit racial—sometimes racist—element to the critique, as Detroit, post-1967, would become a black city, still 85 percent African American today, run entirely by a black political elite, which lends the nostalgia for the “old” Detroit expressed by so many white suburbanites of a certain age an occasionally disquieting subtext.

  Unsurprisingly, black Detroiters of a similar age can offer up a wholly different reading of these events, one in which the word uprising replaces riot, and in which the destructive fallout, while not celebrated, is contextually understood as a reaction to years of workplace discrimination, redlining
, slum housing, and abuse at the hands of goon-squad cops. As for the city’s subsequent decline, well, an observer sympathetic to this point of view might note that of course the oppressors would not simply flee, not without sacking the joint on the way out the door and doing everything possible once they’d gone (top-down disinvestment, supporting lopsided suburb-favoring land use and tax structures, dismantling public transportation, more redlining) to ensure the failure of, and effectively place sanctions upon, the hostile regime left behind.

  Some blame the unions for their unchecked power and excessive demands, making Michigan an impossible place to do business; others, the Big Three automakers, for selling out the working class by moving factories abroad and to southern “right to work” states and for so badly bungling their own business model with chronic shortsightedness and an inability to adapt to a world involving actual competition with high-quality foreign product. Environmentalists might see the combustion engine as Culprit Zero; urbanophiles, the metastasizing suburbs; leftist European academics, the rot of capitalism and the long-fated unraveling of our great Yankee folly.

  But I wasn’t really interested in any of that. Detroit-as-whodunit had been done, ad nauseam. Rather than relitigate the sins of the past, I hoped to discover something new about the city—specifically, what happens to a once-great place after it has been used up and discarded? Who sticks around and tries to make things work again? And what sorts of newcomers are drawn to the place for similar reasons? These questions seemed particularly pertinent now that Detroit was no longer such a freakish outlier. Cities in Florida and California, in the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt, in England and the Mediterranean and who knew where next, they’d all woken up to the same problems that have been pummeling Detroit for decades, including but not limited to structural bankruptcy, unsustainable city services and public obligations, chronic unemployment, vacant and increasingly worthless real estate, and the disappearance of a workable tax base. Left unchecked, Detroit levels of crime, political instability, and blight would certainly follow.

  I wanted to think about how Detroiters struggled mightily to solve these problems—historically, yes, but more importantly right now.

  * * *

  I wasn’t alone. In the waning months of the Bush administration, a curious thing happened, as Michigan experienced a small but significant uptick in one very specific sector of its tourism economy: journalists started showing up. It turned out that explaining the origins of the financial crisis in any detail required elaborate definitions of complex and stupefyingly boring financial terms like credit default swap and collateralized debt obligation. But with the potential bankruptcy of General Motors, you had something tangible and wholly understandable to a layperson. We’d all at least ridden in an American car at some point, just as we all possessed opinions on various ways in which they sucked. Even better, Detroit provided the sort of breathtaking visual backdrop that shots of anxious-looking Wall Street floor traders or the exterior of Bernie Madoff’s condo simply could not compete with. As the hurricane approaches landfall, journalistic convention dictates a live report from the field, wherein the correspondent must don a rain poncho and shout into a microphone while being buffeted by the elements, palm trees flailing wildly on the deserted beach in the background. A visit to the ruins of the old Packard plant or a “ghost street” of abandoned houses became the financial-collapse equivalent. It had taken the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression to do the unthinkable: Detroit had suddenly become trendy.

  And so we all came. Reporters from Fortune, the Guardian, CNN, the Economist, Vice, from Tokyo and Paris, Sydney and Los Angeles. While attempting to get footage of the Packard plant, a Dutch film crew was carjacked, which itself became a news event, adding to the “Detroit so crazy!” story line in a satisfying, metanarrative kind of way. At a public school rally, I nearly bumped into Dan Rather. Was Dan Rather even on television anymore? Had he just turned up on his own dime, drawn by an old man’s vampirish sixth sense to the most swollen vein in the circulatory system of the present news cycle?

  Time also turned its gaze back to Detroit in 2009. This time around, the magazine had come not to engage in speculative nuclear annihilation but rather to launch Assignment Detroit, a project being billed as a bold new journalistic experiment—a team of reporters would cover the city over the course of a year, living in a company-purchased home in Indian Village, one of the last remaining swank neighborhoods in the city proper. Not coincidentally, one of the first stories produced by Assignment Detroit was about how residents of such besieged neighborhoods had taken to hiring private security details to patrol their blocks. The previous fall, around the time of the auto bailout hearings, a photo essay of ruined Detroit buildings on Time’s website titled “Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline” had been a big hit, despite the unfortunate ordering of adjectives. The tagline of Assignment Detroit’s new blog, “One year, one city, endless opportunities,” also hinted, inadvertently, at the magazine’s own opportunistic appropriation of Detroit’s sudden chicness.

  The new obsession with Detroit did not end with journalists, at least not according to the journalists themselves, who reported on how artists were also colonizing the city. Could this be a first wave of bohemian gentrification? Was Detroit the next Williamsburg? One young couple from Chicago had bought a home in Detroit for a hundred bucks. Brooklyn artists came and froze another house in a block of ice. Thanks to a nearly 50 percent tax incentive being offered by the state, Hollywood film crews also arrived, along with actors like George Clooney and Richard Gere. A glossy French fashion magazine even produced a special “Detroit issue” featuring shots of models in ruined industrial backdrops. The magazine cost twenty dollars in the United States—or, in local terms, one-fifth of the price of a home in Detroit.

  Land speculators made the scene, too, as the new mayor, former Detroit Pistons basketball star Dave Bing, began to publicly acknowledge the need for the city to both shrink and radically reinvent itself, a pledge that urban-theorists, who had long regarded Detroit as the unsolvable math problem of their field, found tantalizing. And so they came, too, along with the Scandinavian academics, the neopastoralian agriculturalists, the deep-pocketed philanthropical organizations and the free-market ideologues and the fringe-left utopianists—they all came. For the most idealistic of these pioneers, which is how many of the newcomers self-identified, Detroit might very well be the city of tomorrow, but of a wholly different sort than described above. They’d come to see the place as a blank slate, so debased and forgotten it could be remade. The irony was almost too perfect: Detroit, having done more than any other city to promote the sprawl and suburbanization that had so despoiled the past century, could now become a model green city for the new century, with bike paths and urban farms and grass-roots sustainability nudging aside planned obsolescence.

  So I joined the wagon train, alongside the hustlers and the do-gooders, the preachers and the criminals, the big dreamers looking to make names for themselves and the heavily armed zealots awaiting the end of the world. They—we!—came like pilgrims, to witness, to profit from, to somehow influence the story of the century. It might very well turn out to be the story of the last century, the death rattle of the twentieth-century definition of the American Dream. But there could also be another story emerging, the story of the first great postindustrial city of our new century. Who knows? Crazier things have happened in Detroit. It’s a place so unspooled, one’s wildest experiments, ideas that would never be seriously considered in a functioning city, might actually have a shot here. Nothing else had worked, and so everything was permitted. The ongoing catastrophes had, in a strange way, bequeathed the place an unexpected asset, something few other cities of its size possessed: a unique sense of possibility. On a psychological level, this played out as one of those instances when a hoary cliché (or, in this case, a Kris Kristofferson lyric) is basically true: having nothing left to lose really did open the mind to an otherwise tricky-to-com
e-by sense of freedom.

  After I moved back to the city, people I met in dozens of different contexts described Detroit as “the Wild West.” Meaning, it’s basically lawless. Meaning, land is plentiful and cheap. Meaning, now, as the frontier quite literally returns to the city—trees growing out of tops of abandoned buildings! wild pheasants circling the empty lots!—so, too, has the metaphorical frontier, along with the notion of “frontier spirit.” All possibly offensive notions to the people who’d never left, for reasons of choice or circumstance. But it’s undeniable that Detroit feels like an extraordinary place, and at the same time, just as Greenland might be called ground zero of the broader climate crisis, Detroit feels like ground zero for … what, exactly? The end of the American way of life? Or the beginning of something else?

  Either way, that is why so many divergent interests are converging here right now. Who doesn’t want to see the future?

  Service Street. The author’s building is the third from left. [Chris Ringler]

  1

  GOIN’ TO DETROIT, MICHIGAN

  DETROIT IS 139 SQUARE miles and shaped, roughly, like an outboard motor. Looking at a map, you might also think of an anvil, but mostly because the northernmost border, the famous 8 Mile Road, traces such a perfectly planed line. My own return to the city began at the edge of downtown, in the Eastern Market neighborhood. Though best known for its weekly farmer’s market, Eastern Market remained primarily a distribution hub for wholesale food: produce, imported dry goods, meat from several working slaughterhouses.