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

by Mark Binelli

  The state’s great wealth of natural resources fueled the city’s growth, as factories exploded along the easily accessible Detroit River. Northern Michigan had a seemingly limitless supply of lumber, and so Detroit became the shipbuilding capital of the United States, as well as a hub of production of wooden railroad cars. The Michigan Car Company, the largest of the local manufacturers, gave a sixteen-year-old just off the farm his first job, paying $1.10 an hour. Henry Ford lasted only for a few days before he went to work at a nearby machine shop, which proved more to his liking. The discovery, midcentury, in the state’s Upper Peninsula, of one of the richest copper mines in the world, along with numerous iron and lead deposits, resulted in an eruption of foundries and concomitant industrial concerns: Detroit became the number-one stove manufacturer in the country and a top producer of steam engines and lead-based paint and varnish.6 The Berry Brothers were apparently the Fords of the varnish world, with an operation so gargantuan it boasted its own Western Union telegraph office.

  Detroit factories also produced shoes, soap, pharmaceuticals (Parke-Davis was founded in Detroit in 1866), and matches. The first hints of the problems of housing and demography Detroit would face in the twentieth century surfaced during this apprenticeship boomtown period. Workers crowded slums; there was such a housing shortage that churches and stables were hastily converted into tenements. One of the worst of the ghettos lined the riverfront and was derisively called “the Potomac,” according to Conot, who describes streets teeming with beggars and prostitutes, barnyard animals and opium dealers.7

  Black workers were also drawn to the city, which, in the years leading up to the Civil War, had become a major terminus of the Underground Railroad, with the safety of Windsor, Ontario, just across the river. In 1833, an escaped Louisville slave named Thornton Blackburn and his wife were tracked down in Detroit by their former master and jailed there. Mrs. Blackburn swapped clothes with a visiting friend while awaiting trial, snuck out of the building and made her way to Windsor. Her husband was whisked away by a black crowd while being transported from the jail to the courthouse and also wound up in Canada, where he joined his wife, moved to Toronto, and, according to Burton, “acquired considerable property.” (After which, even more excellently, he snuck back into the United States in disguise and managed to rescue his mother from the selfsame Louisville slaveowner.) During Blackburn’s liberation, a black man was shot and a police officer suffered a fractured skull and had his teeth knocked out. This melee was dubbed Detroit’s “first Negro insurrection,” and the military was called in, as it was 134 years later with the second, much better-known insurrection. Any black citizens spotted on the street were arrested and thrown into jails that quickly became, as Burton describes, “crowded to the door.… Bugles were sounded, and the firebells added to the alarm. The announcement was made at every corner that ‘the niggers have risen and the sheriff is killed.’” Eventually, one Mrs. Madison J. Lightfoot received a $25 fine for acting as ringleader of the rescue operation, a charge she never denied. Burton insists the true mastermind was “a one-handed barber named Cook.”

  The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was inspired, in part, by the case of David Dunn, a politically connected St. Louis burgher who tracked one of his escaped slaves to Michigan, dragged the young man (Robert Cromwell), to a local courthouse and was promptly arrested himself for attempted kidnapping, ultimately spending six months in a Detroit jail while awaiting trial. In 1859, the abolitionist John Brown arrived in Detroit with fourteen freed slaves from Missouri. That evening, in a candlelit home on Congress Street, he met with Frederick Douglass, who was in town to deliver a lecture, to plan the raid on Harpers Ferry. Douglass objected, as did the local Underground Railroad agent George DeBaptist, who favored a less conciliatory approach, suggesting that Brown instead stage simultaneous attacks on a number of white churches throughout the South, blowing them up with gunpowder. (Brown rejected this idea.)

  Like that of many other Northern cities of the time, Detroit’s progressive facade proved flimsy as a (white) sheet, barely covering the city’s own rank history of race hatred. Four years after the Brown plot, a light-skinned African American saloon owner named William Faulkner (really) was accused of molesting a nine-year-old white girl, Mary Brown, and her nine-year-old black friend, Ellen Hoover, after they stopped by his establishment one afternoon to warm their feet. Both girls later recanted their story, with Brown admitting she’d made up the charge in order to avoid being punished for her tardiness. Unfortunately, their admission came six years after Faulkner was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. (He was subsequently released.) During Faulkner’s trial, a white mob gathered outside the courtroom. An article in the Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, headlined “Case of the Negro Faulkner,” described how the mob, thousands strong, surged as the convicted barkeeper was escorted by police out to Gratiot Avenue, in the direction of the jail.

  The riotous gang rampaged up and down Beaubien Street, targeting black residents. “The mob,” according to the Advertiser and Tribune,

  was composed, to a large extent, of young fellows brought up in the “street school”—rowdies and vagabonds, ignorant, unreasoning, and crazy with whiskey and prejudice. Their spirit and their shouts were full of bitter and violent hatred for the negro. “Kill the nigger!” “D——n the nigger!” “Butcher all niggers!” “Stone that nigger house!” “Tear down that nigger dive!” “Every d——n nigger ought to be hung!” We will do the mob the justice to suppose that but a few of them could read, and that they despised, above all things, the free school and the church.

  After the hooligans threated to cut his hoses, the fire marshal allowed the black homes to burn, though fires that had spread to neighboring white-owned homes and businesses were extinguished in the name of the common good. In all, thirty-five buildings were burned to the ground. Other outrages were detailed in the oral history A Thrilling Narrative from the Lips of the Sufferers of the Late Detroit Riot, March 6, 1863, with the Hair Breadth Escapes of Men, Women, and Children, and Destruction of Colored Men’s Property, Not Less Than $15,000.8

  Interesting side note: Faulkner was apparently light-skinned enough to be described, by the anonymous compiler of the Thrilling Narrative, as “to all intents a white man.” “If [Faulkner] thought he had one drop of colored blood in his veins, if he could, he would let it out,” an elderly Detroiter is quoted as saying, his claim bolstered by the inclusion of a poem titled “The Riot,” written by one “B. Clark, Sen., A Colored Man,” containing such stanzas as:

  Now be it remember’d that Faulkner at right,

  Although call’d a “nigger,” had always been white,

  Had voted, and always declared in his shop,

  He never would sell colored people a drop.

  He’s what is call’d white, though I must confess,

  So mixed are the folks now, we oft have to guess,

  Their hair is so curl’d and their skins are so brown,

  If they’re white in the country, they’re niggers in town.

  Still, did we mention—business was booming! Conot notes that by the eighties Detroit, a city “whose egalitarian character had struck Alexis de Tocqueville in 1830,… now contained a significant number of the nation’s four thousand millionaires.” Detroit’s first skyscraper, the ten-story Hammond Building, was erected in 1889 with much hoopla (state holiday, bands, an aerialist pushing a wheelbarrow across a tightrope). And four years later, Ford, by this point chief engineer at the main branch of the Edison Company, fired up a crude homemade engine in the kitchen of his family’s new home. It was Christmas Eve. The room immediately filled with smoke and fumes, displeasing Ford’s wife, Clara, who had been pouring gas into the motor (which had no carburetor) by hand.

  And yet, for all that, the engine had worked. Henry Ford removed it from the kitchen sink, and his wife went back to preparing Christmas dinner.

  An urban garden in Upper Chene, tended by a storefront pr
eacher. The roofless building was once a furniture warehouse. [Corine Vermeulen]

  3

  DIY CITY

  Or, Okra as Metaphor

  It has also been my good fortune to have lived long enough to witness the death blow dealt to the illusion that unceasing technological innovations and economic growth can guarantee happiness.… Instead of putting our organizational energies into begging Ford and General Motors to stay in Detroit, we need to go beyond traditional capitalism.… Instead of buying all our food from the store, we need to be planting community and school gardens and creating farmers markets.

  GRACE LEE BOGGS, The Next American Revolution

  Brothers and sisters, I wanna tell you something. I hear a lot of talk by a lot of honkies sitting on a lot of money telling me they’re high society. But I’ll let you know something. If you ask me, this is the high society.

  MC5, “MOTOR CITY IS BURNING” (live intro)

  SPEND ANY TIME IN DETROIT and you’ll quickly see that the city’s ongoing and multi-sectored collapse has made room for a kind of street-level anarchy. Red lights: optional. Buildings: porous. All manner of vice could easily be had. More positively, self-reliant Detroiters exploited, with admirable vigor, the twin strengths of their particular failed state: space and lawlessness. Artists, musicians, and other bohemian types tended to hog all the ink when it came to manifestations of the do-it-yourself spirit, but painting foreclosed homes “Tiggerific Orange” as a conceptual art prank or throwing a rave in an abandoned auto factory were not the only creative reclamations of negative space. Detroit had become a DIY city unlike any other, the kind of place where regular civilians took it upon themselves to tauten the civic slack.

  Des Cooper, a local journalist and demographer, moved to Detroit from the D.C. suburbs in the early eighties and she came to see the DIY nature of her adopted hometown as one of its “huge, huge strengths.” The amount of work people do for themselves simply to live in the city, she told me, was truly stunning when you stopped to think about it. “Because the problems are so huge and the people have so few resources, it doesn’t always look that way,” she went on. “There’s a perception that people here are kind of lazy and not really trying. But then you think of somebody who doesn’t have a car and has to take two buses to get to work and worry about child care—and then they come home and do neighborhood patrol and go to block club meetings. Nobody in West Bloomfield has to do neighborhood patrol!”

  She had a point: once you began to pay attention, the sorts of activities to which Cooper referred were apparent everywhere, and despite all evidence (historical, economic, you name it) to the contrary, the transformational potential of Detroit could start to appear boundless.

  In 2010 alone, the blog Rethink Detroit pointed out, the New York Times ran ten articles on Detroit’s DIY revitalization, spotlighting the plucky entrepreneurial resolve of the owner of a downtown creperie, a group of guys who opened an art house theater in a shuttered public school, and the Detroit Zymology Guild, “a weekly canning session held in the back of an art gallery.” There were vigilante demolition teams, such as the Motor City Blight Busters, who, like a weird, Detroit-specific version of the Guardian Angels, tore down unsalvageable abandoned homes, and guerilla landscapers like the Lawn Mower Brigade, which (yes) went around trimming the grass in vacant lots.

  One winter afternoon, I joined the members of Detroit Dog Rescue, an unlicensed, technically illicit dogcatching operation as they drove around in a van looking for strays. Estimates had placed the number of roaming dogs in the city in the tens of thousands. Detroit’s animal control lacked resources to deal with the magnitude of the problem and had enacted a policy of automatic euthanization for any unclaimed pit bull breeds after four days. We visited one empty bungalow taken over entirely by pack of wild dogs. Through the gaping hole where the ground floor picture window would’ve been, the leader of the pack, a pregnant black Lab, growled at us from behind a shredded couch. Two more dogs, a malamute and another black Lab, watched from a second-floor landing. We left a mound of dry food and moved on.

  The Detroit 300 were citizen crime fighters who’d been credited by the police with helping to capture several suspects, including a serial rapist and the murderer of a thirteen-year-old girl. One night, the group marched on a block where a woman had been killed over sixty dollars during a home invasion. Raphael Johnson, one of the Detroit 300’s founders, was himself a convicted murderer, having shot an older man when he was seventeen, during a petty squabble at a house party. After serving his prison sentence, Johnson had come close to winning a seat on Detroit’s city council. Detroit police chief Ralph Godbee told me he embraced the group. “Some detractors think this is vigilantism, but I think that’s a very narrow view,” he said. The Detroit 300 could penetrate neighborhoods, the chief explained, where police officers would not have been welcome.

  The struggle by Detroiters to reinvent their city has been under way for decades and does not necessarily await a Marshall Plan or some other consultant-driven solution from above. When I’d go for bike rides in the urban prairie sprawling just a few blocks from my apartment, amid the empty fields and bedsheet-curtained crack houses, striking repurposings of the open space had already taken place. There was the lovely house where the owners had ornately fenced several neighboring lots, decorating the lush yard with Italianate statuary. A few blocks away, four old men had chained a table and some chairs to a tree in a field, where they would sit and play cards on sunny afternoons. Farther up the street, another guy lived in a mobile home permanently parked in an empty corner lot. He’d draped a giant American flag over the side of the RV, either as sincere patriotism or an extraordinarily committed act of satirical commentary.

  Along with the influx of homesteading artists, by far the most breathlessly covered aspect of this neo-frontier autonomy has been the urban farming movement. Very rarely are journalists treated to a story so metaphorically apposite—hope literally growing from the fallow soil of the postindustrial necropolis. By the count of a 2009 study, 875 farms and community gardens had sprung up throughout the city, one of the largest such networks in the United States; organizations like Earthworks and the Greening of Detroit had been promoting urban agriculture for years, with all that Detroiters lacked—for one thing, a single major grocery chain in the entire city1—resulting in the sort of unspoiled ecosystem in which farming not only could thrive but made perfect sense. In recent years, the ballad of the urban farmer dovetailed as if scripted with the budding locavore movement, and the narrative of an underserviced minority population in the poorest big city in the United States seizing control of their nutritional destiny by embracing a preindustrial, communitarian way of feeding themselves proved irresistible.

  With the amount of press devoted to Detroit gardeners like Mark Covington, the personal beneficiary of coverage by Time, MSNBC, the Guardian, the Associated Press, and the official White House blog, you’d think he’d invented celery. But Covington also happened to be an incredibly engaging character. A thirty-seven-year-old heavy-equipment operator, he’d begun cleaning up and then tilling the garbage-strewn fields in his blighted east side neighborhood out of boredom, after losing his job in 2008. He’d started out with four beds, eventually “adopting” the lots through a city program that gave citizens permits to beautify unused city-owned properties, as long as no permanent structures were erected.

  When I stopped by for a tour, Covington was wearing a blue T-shirt that read “I’m an East Sider” and a Denby High School football cap. He had close-cropped hair and one of those thin mustaches that circle around the bottom of your mouth to become a chinstrap-looking beard. Covington said he’d lost fifty-five pounds over the course of the barely two years he’d been gardening, solely due to healthier eating. I pictured him fifty-five pounds heavier—he remained a massive presence—and nodded, impressed. The neighborhood was a battered quilt of houses and vacant fields, except for Covington’s community garden, which stretched across a
park-sized patch of land comprised of a half-dozen former home lots, including, at the time, twenty-three beds of tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, bell peppers, okra, turnips, bok choy, Napa cabbage, carrots, bush beans (“my family alone picked fifteen pounds this year,” Covington told me), Swiss chard, collard greens, vivid orange clusters of marigolds (which “bring beneficial bugs, red and black aphids, that eat cabbage beetles”), and jalapeño peppers. The different vegetables were labeled with hand-painted signs. Raspberries grew out of an old tire. Pallets corralled a compost heap of grass clippings.

  Covington seemed at once bemused by and grateful for the amount of attention his efforts had received; along with the media coverage, he’d been invited to speak at a number of conferences. His last day job had been working for an environmental services company, cleaning oil, bodily fluids, and other waste products from refinery tanks, machinery, and Amtrak trains. Vomit, he said, “was the nicer stuff.” He said he hoped to expand the garden to include goats and chickens and maybe one day opening a little farmers market in the abandoned party store on the corner. The last owner of the party store had been selling drugs out of the back. “You couldn’t buy Pepsi or bread, though,” Covington said. Now prostitutes used the space to turn tricks.2 On a telephone post outside the shop, a little yellow sign read “Top Cash Paid Gold Diamonds.” A dead possum, about the size of a large cat, lay in the middle of the street.