by Mark Binelli
The census story was trumpeted with a mixture of solemn condolence and barely concealed delight. The news raced around the Internet and made the front page of newspapers throughout the country. Local politicians also responded quickly—most, essentially, demanding a recount. The city council president insisted (on his Facebook page) that the count was “way low” and told a newspaper that one of the reasons had to do with the large number of Detroit residents who were serving prison time in other cities, which struck me as a poorly chosen line of argument.
Detroit’s population explosion had begun nearly a century earlier. People came to the city because Detroit represented an idea about America they wanted to believe. Progress was inevitable; personal salvation could be achieved through hard work. Detroit, New York Times columnist Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote in 1934, “is twentieth century”:
It belongs to a period of democratized luxuries, with gas stations on every corner, chain stores, moving-picture palaces, glittering automats, broadcast symphonies.… In a way Detroit is the birthplace of this civilization. It is as truly a world capital as any city on earth, more fascinating to the outlander than New York, more influential than Washington, or even Hollywood. Paris dictates a season’s silhouette, but Detroit manufactures a pattern of life. As a capital of revolution, it is far brisker and bolder than Moscow in transforming human habits and communizing the output of the machine.
With the onset of World War II, Detroit’s assembly lines began running three shifts, turning out tanks, jeeps, and fighter planes and becoming the first modern manifestation of the naked profit at stake in what had yet to be termed the military-industrial complex. Postwar, metropolitan Detroit provided a model for the suburbanization taking place across the United States. Southfield was home to Northland Mall, the first shopping mall in the country, built in 1954 by the Austrian-born socialist architect Victor Gruen, who would later denounce his creations as the precursors to hideous suburban sprawl. Warren, home of the General Motors Tank Plant, was, at the time, one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States.
All of which put unique pressure on the city proper. Just as various factors converged perfectly to make Detroit the Motor City, so did harsh new realities conspire to steal the title away: the automakers’ desire to escape the strong local unions, which benefited southern states; the lure of the low business taxes offered by the new suburbs, which could get by with less revenue, having far fewer expenses than an aging city like Detroit, with its larger, more impoverished population; pressure from the Pentagon for industry to move, with cold war leaders, afraid of nuclear strikes, convinced that the cluster of American military production in Detroit posed a threat; and the simple need for more land. It was much more difficult to expand a preexisting plant, let alone build a modern new facility, in a congested, older city, as opposed to the open fields of the suburbs. This problem led to a stronger push for “slum clearance” to make room for housing developments and factories, which, like today’s downtown stadiums, were basically state-subsidized giveaways to corporations in exchange for their willingness to locate in the city. In the end, as businesses and working-class whites with means gained increasing mobility, all but the most elite of blacks had less and less.4
Racial tensions had already been growing in the overcrowded city. In the August 17, 1942, issue of Life, amid ads for Colgate (“No Male … For the Girl Who Has Bad Breath”) and a cartoon in which Dagwood Bumstead makes himself a tongue-onion-mustard-sardine-horseradish sandwich, an article titled “Detroit Is Dynamite” described a city “seeth[ing] with racial, religious, political and economic unrest.” “The news from Detroit is bad this summer,” the piece began, ominously. “Few people across the country realize how bad it is.… Detroit can either blow up Hitler or it can blow up the U.S.” Detroit’s roiling citizenry, now numbering two million, “give their loyalty to their own group, creed or union.… In this melting pot flourish demagogues of every persuasion—Communists, Fascists, Ku-Kluxers, Coughlinites, pro-Nazi leaders of the National Workers League.”
In fact, six months before the Life article, the opening of the Sojourner Truth housing projects in a predominantly white neighborhood had prompted armed resistance, and by the summer of 1943, a full-blown race riot erupted on Belle Isle, spreading throughout the city for thirty-six hours. Thirty-four people died, including an Italian doctor who drove into a black neighborhood on a house call (dragged from his car, beaten to death) and a fifty-eight-year-old black man waiting for a bus (shot by a gang of white youths). Twenty-five of the dead and the vast majority of the eighteen hundred people arrested were African American. Six thousand federal troops were eventually called in to quell the fighting, and the city remained occupied for the next six months; it was the worst case of civic unrest in the United States since the New York City draft riots of 1863.
Republican Albert Cobo was elected mayor in 1950 by playing on racial fears and running on, essentially, an anti–public housing platform. As mayor, Cobo ignored the advice of all public policy experts and clustered low-income minority public housing in isolated ghettos rather than attempt any sort of integration. Not that that would have necessarily worked. White flight was well under way by the 1950s, when real estate appraisers labeled any neighborhoods with blacks “hazardous.” As late as 1970, according to the census numbers cited in B. J. Widick’s Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence, Warren and Birmingham had five black residents each, Grosse Pointe two, Dearborn, Hazel Park, and Harper Woods one.
* * *
You rarely saw any black people in St. Clair Shores, the blue-collar suburb where I grew up, at least when I was a kid. There were a handful of black students at my all-boys Catholic high school (in nearby Harper Woods), but they commuted from Detroit proper. A nasty rumor circulated around that time regarding a supposed police-band code used by Grosse Pointe cops: “NOMAD,” short for “nigger on Mack [Avenue] after dark.”
St. Clair Shores had been the sticks when my mother and her family emigrated from Italy in the late forties. Back then, the roads were still dirt, and even though my grandparents were desperately poor, they managed to scrape together enough money to purchase a corner lot on which one could fit at least three normal-sized suburban homes. As kids, my cousins and I would run around my grandmother’s yard, which felt to us like a park, chucking crab apples at one another and snapping the branches off the weeping willow tree for use as whips in obscure games involving slavery.
My father, Italo, arrived in Detroit in 1959, when he was twenty-six years old. He came from Pinzolo, a village in the Dolomites. While he was still a teenager, his parents pulled him out of school and sent him to Trieste to apprentice in a butcher’s shop. One of his jobs involved massaging the blood of freshly slaughtered pigs (by hand) as it drained into a tub (preventing coagulative jellying apparently being a crucial preliminary step in the production of blood sausage). He’d always been good with machines and dreamed of becoming a mechanic, but at that time, with the postwar Italian economy reduced to rubble and my paternal familial economy long an austere one—my grandfather, Clemente, a bit of a drinker, had mostly worked a string of odd jobs, including plastering homes, tending cows, and delivering mail to neighboring mountain villages via horse-drawn cart—his parents had impressed upon him the unshakable necessity of making his way across the Atlantic to seek fortune, or at least a steady job, in America.
For years, one of the primary exports of Val Rendena, the mountain valley where my dad grew up, had been knife sharpeners. According to local lore, the heavily forested valley was originally famed for its lumberjacks, but then at some point one of them hit upon the marketability of a key secondary skill of their trade: keeping one’s axe sharp. And so, during the long winter off-season, they began hauling their whetstones to balmier climes, where they would find work as itinerant knife grinders.5 The first knife sharpeners to make their way to the Detroit area had been Binellis from Pinzolo—although, in an unsettling twist, they came from the mater
nal side of my dad’s family. My father unconvincingly insists this line of Binellis bears no relation to the paternal Binelli line my grandmother married into, but the total population of Pinzolo and its two largest neighbors is something like two thousand people, which makes his protestations suspect. To sound less Italian, one of the first Binellis to arrive in Detroit dropped the “i” from his surname and thus became a “Binell.” (In a fairly sizable oversight, however, he neglected to change his first name, Mario.) My grandmother’s younger brothers, Caesar and Angelo, followed, along with my dad’s best friend, Fausto, and soon my father himself joined them. At first they operated out of the back of a van, eventually securing a brick warehouse building on Davison Street, on the east side of the city. They called their business Detroit Cutlery.
My mother, Anita, was born in Madonna di Campiglio, a mountain resort town overlooking Pinzolo. Her family emigrated to Detroit in 1947, when she was only two years old. Her parents had managed various hotels in Campiglio, but the war had a predictably deleterious effect on local tourism, necessitating the move. As it happened, her mother, Josephine, had been born in Manhattan, where my great-grandfather had also worked as a knife sharpener. They lived in a tenement building on First Avenue near 125th Street, now Spanish Harlem but at the time the largest of the city’s several Little Italys. Through a series of misfortunes, my grandmother found herself back in Val Rendena with a new stepmother but without her father, who stayed behind in New York to sharpen knives and send over money.
My grandmother Josephine began working in one of the hotels in Madonna di Campiglio, which was where she met my grandfather, Pio. Also the son of an Italian knife sharpener, he had grown up in Wiesbaden, the German spa town, fought for the Germans in the First World War, and studied in art school in Frankfurt, before making his way back to Italy. After marrying my grandmother, he considered moving the family to New York, where one of his best friends from the Kunstgewerbeschule, Ludwig Wolpert, a master silversmith who has been described as “one of the greatest Judaica artists of the twentieth century,” invited Pio to join him at the Jewish Museum as an art instructor. But New York proved an impossible sell to my grandmother, whose memories of tenement slums were not exceptionally happy ones, and so instead they moved to Detroit, where her own father and brother, drawn by the beachhead of other Italians from Val Rendena, had settled and opened a knife shop. Nonno Pio, close to fifty by the time he left Italy, tried finding work that interested him (cooking at the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, teaching art classes at a local high school, sculpting headstones for a cemetery), but nothing ever bore fruit, and so he borrowed some money and bought a knife route from one of the Binells. He called his business, which he ran out of a shed next to the family’s cramped, slant-floored wooden home, the Sharpen Shop. Uncle Dave (my grandmother’s younger brother) also had a knife shop, Dave’s Cutlery, which he ran out of his garage, across the street from my grandparents’ place. Meanwhile, my father’s uncle, Caesar, had broken away from Detroit Cutlery and formed a rival knife shop, Statewide Cutlery (which was eventually sold to another cousin and became John’s Cutlery, John sprucing up the company logo with the tagline “Never a Dull Moment”), and then there were the Ferraris, cousins on my mother’s side, who had the Ferrari Brothers Cutlery, and the good old Binells. Basically, we were related to everyone who sharpened knives in a professional capacity in Detroit.
My parents met at a picnic at Uncle Dave’s. After they married, they settled a few blocks away from my grandparents in St. Clair Shores, although my father continued to work in Detroit. Every so often, after moving back, I’d drive by his old shop, a warehouse building on Davison, between McNichols (6 Mile) and Mound. It was a rougher part of town than I remembered: lots of warehouse buildings that had seen better days, a prison, strip clubs, Coney Islands. There used to be a fast food joint called Marcus Burgers, “Home of the Loose Burger,” which my brother and I rechristened “Home of the Loose Bowels” and which seemed to have either closed or moved. We both helped out at the shop during our summer breaks and on Saturdays during the school year. I hated working inside, though, so as soon as I became old enough to drive, I began making deliveries all over the city, including to Service Street, my future block.
The shop had a fenced-in parking lot topped with barbed wire. There was a crack house just down the block. A clicker opened a section of fence remotely, the fence wobbling noisily as a motorized conveyor pulled it back along a groove. Fortified against the hostile forces in the neighborhood with heavy metal doors requiring buzzing in, the shop felt decidedly unwelcoming and contributed, like many other unadorned buildings, to Detroit’s bleak and battered physiognomy. That whole stretch of Davison was not different from the many industrial zones criss-crossing the city like fattened arteries. You couldn’t call it blight exactly, since many of the facilities, at least at the time I was working for my dad, remained going concerns.
Since then, of course, many of the shops had closed.
* * *
I remembered Service Street as an unremarkable back alley. But once I started living there, pulling onto the redbrick cobblestone always felt like entering a secret world. Doors to several of the buildings had been painted vivid colors—one was bright orange, with various-sized and -colored polka dots receding into the background—and a pair of old kitchen sinks had been converted into window boxes. There were landscaped flower beds, wind chimes hanging from a post, a fire pit at the rear of a dirt parking lot.
My downstairs neighbor, Las, a personal chef, could often be heard shouting, “Shiva! Be still, girl!” Shiva was a pit bull given to loud barking. Las himself struck me as an incongruous pit bull owner: gentle-voiced, with a round baby face, except for the traces of gray stubble, and such a mellow demeanor you might take him for a transplant from Laguna Beach, though he’d been born and raised in the city.
When we first met, I told Las my story about making deliveries to Butcher & Packer as a kid. Having driven to the apartment straight from the airport, I was, perhaps, a bit overeager to impress him, the first black Detroiter I’d had the opportunity to tell about my book project, with my own Detroit bona fides. Las nodded and said, “Right on,” but didn’t seem terribly wowed. He said the Butcher & Packer guys would occasionally give them old pallets to burn in the fire pit. Then he asked where I lived in New York, and told me that he had worked, for several years, at a Soho interior design studio not far from my apartment. Having established street cred in our respective neighborhoods, we gazed out the window for a moment, and then Las asked if I had any other questions about the block.
Las was just one of an appealing mix of residents, among them a jazz drummer, a clothing designer, the founder of the Detroit chapter of the Black Panthers, several DJs and artists (including a creator of art neckties), and, during occasional visits from Amsterdam, John Sinclair, the poet and former manager of the MC5 famously busted in 1969 for possession of two joints and sentenced to ten years in prison.6 It also turned out that Detroit techno, a seminal early genre of electronic dance music, had basically been invented on Service Street. This had been back in the eighties, by the so-called Belleville Three—high school classmates Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson, who had all had recording studios on the block. In no small measure, the long-standing European romanticization of Detroit can be traced back to the borderline-deranged partisanship of the Continental techno enthusiast. I would still occasionally see May, whose record label office remained on Service Street, driving down the alley in his blue convertible BMW, when he wasn’t DJing at some club in Tokyo or Rotterdam, which is how he still spent most weekends. If he wanted to play in Detroit, Derrick told me, he would have to throw his own party.
My favorite new neighbors were Steve and Dorota Coy, young artists who had met and married in Hawaii and then, in what might be an unprecedented move in the history of human migration, decided to relocate to Detroit. The first night we hung out, Steve told me, “This is the last frontier in this c
ountry. What else is left? There’s Hawaii. There’s Alaska. And there’s Detroit.” It made a strange kind of sense, although we were both very drunk. Dorota (born in Poland) and Steve tagged abandoned buildings with stencils promoting their nonexistent corporation, the Hygienic Dress League. Often, they depicted themselves in their artwork, wearing gas masks and carrying machine guns or mysterious briefcases. In real life, they never went anywhere without their tiny dog, Bob, often carted around by Steve in a shoulder bag. They were subletting an entire floor of an old furniture warehouse, about three thousand square feet of raw studio space, for $250 a month.
Another neighbor, Holice Wood, a stocky guy with a ponytail, had a variety of moneymaking gigs, or “hustles,” as he liked to say. Detroit was the sort of a place where even the people who held down a real job also had a hustle going, Holice told me, adding pointedly, “And now most people have lost their real jobs.” Holice’s own hustles included, but were not limited to, promoting blues concerts, starting his own T-shirt company, and plotting the opening of a marijuana dispensary. Despite the ponytail, Holice evinced none of the mellow grooviness such a hairstyle choice generally implied. He spoke with a loud, sandpapery voice and had a habit of fixing you, right in the middle of conversation, with a highly scrutinizing, cold-blooded stare, giving the impression that he might at any moment begin shouting for no reason or else challenge you to a fist fight. He lived in a windowless cinderblock bunker on the very corner of the alley, adjacent to a garage that I’d always taken for a chop shop (since the mechanics seemed to work only in the middle of the night) but that apparently was being rented by a muscle-car enthusiast with a regular day job. I never had a conversation with Holice that did not, at some point, involve his taking a massive, lung-puckering toke of a joint, which gave even a veteran smoker like Holice a croaking voice for a few moments afterward. That, too, did nothing to reduce his intensity.