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

by Mark Binelli

  He’d come by to check on a flag he’d draped around one of the Heidelberg houses. The flag was so oversized, you only saw its stripes if you looked at the house head-on. The stars had ended up hanging somewhere on the roof or in the backyard. It was a windy morning, and the flag billowed dramatically.

  Mark Rudd said, “You’re the Detroit Christo!”

  Guyton said, “People have called me lots of names.”

  We paused in front of the polka-dot-covered house. Guyton told us he’d grown up there. He said he could remember sitting on this very porch as a kid and listening to his grandfather tell stories about the lynchings he’d witnessed during his own boyhood in the South. Guyton had asked his grandfather, “But what, exactly, did you see?” And his grandfather had said, “I saw their soles blowing in the wind.” These stories inspired Guyton to decorate the great oak tree in front of the house with dangling pairs of shoes, hundreds of them. Guyton said when people who’d visited the Heidelberg Project died—one lady was murdered in a crime and another guy, an aspiring artist, hung himself, and afterwards this aspiring artist’s father hung himself as well—sometimes the families would bring a pair of the dead person’s shoes to Guyton and ask him to add the shoes to the tree.

  Guyton had just returned from a show in Berlin. He talked about wanting to unite all peoples, and how, when he first started the project, his neighbors despised it. Some of them didn’t appreciate the fact that it was bringing white visitors to the block. Guyton spoke with a very precise, slightly nasal diction. He said some tourists from China had recently stopped by. He said that when he was in the army he’d been ordered to get rid of a bunch of the marijuana the government had been growing as part of an experiment about the effect of pot on soldiers during times of stress. He said he’d sampled some first. He said he was not surprised by anything the government might do.

  Then he said, “I know you guys are in a hurry, but let me ask you,” and he gestured toward the sky. “Do you believe in a Divine Creator who made everything?” Earlier, he’d made reference to a Creator’s having put him here for a purpose, but no one had said anything. The topic of religion had not come up during our car ride. We all shifted around uncomfortably. I muttered something unsatisfying about being a nonpracticing Catholic. The college professor said he believed in more of a “source,” something that we could all tap into, but not so much a divine being. Mark Rudd said that he believed in something but didn’t like to talk about it and didn’t really know how and that talking about God at all was a form of blasphemy, and for good reason, because once you started naming God, you got into religious wars. Feldman said he was into the cultural traditions of Judaism but not the idea of a divine being looking over us. Micah said he was God, at least that’s what his sister always said, because he was always smiling and that struck her as godlike.

  Guyton said he’d been pondering why he did what he did, and how he got to this point in his life. Waving his arms skyward again, he said he believed in a purpose for all of us. The sky did look strikingly beautiful this morning. It felt miserly, somehow, to argue with our host.

  When we got back to my car, everything was fine. I’d worried all morning for nothing. A few blocks earlier, a pheasant had dashed in front of our path. We seemed to all cry out at once, delighted. One so inclined might have interpreted the moment as auguring something good.

  * * *

  On Sunday afternoons during the summer, if you drive up St. Aubin, passing a few grim-looking light industrial buildings (one called Elevator Technology), several fields threatening to overtake dilapidated wooden houses, and a boxing gym for kids run by a former gangbanger, you will eventually notice cars tightly lining either side of the street, a highly unusual sight for this part of town. If you happen to have a window cracked, you will also hear amplified blues chords echoing over the prairie. Finally, you will arrive at the corner of St. Aubin and Frederick, where, in a field taking up nearly the entire block, a man named Pete Barrow has erected a crude stage and begun hosting weekly blues concerts.

  Actually, the stage is just a bunch of pallets nailed together and covered in carpet. A sizable crowd gathers by late afternoon, with spectators forming a U around the field’s perimeter, leaving a large, open expanse of grass between themselves and the stage. The standing room, kibitzing portion of the crowd mingles behind the seated folk and spills all the way down Frederick—it being pretty much all field around here, so no private homeowners to bother. A couple of early arrivers set up tents to protect themselves from the sun and Pete Barrow has constructed a wooden outhouse. Other people bring lawn chairs, coolers, and little grills to cook out on. You can also buy tamales from the tamale guy working out of the back of a van or peanuts from the peanut man, who moves around the crowd in the manner of a ballpark vendor, except instead of a neck-slung hot dog or beverage container he carries a brown duffel bag stuffed with hand-baggied portions of peanuts, the bag itself—the duffel, not the individual baggies, which would’ve likely been prohibitively labor intensive for his pricing structure—helpfully marked PEANUT MAN.

  Barrow, a retired autoworker, never sits in with the band. “Well, I sing once in a while,” he says, “but there ain’t nothing to it.” You see him working the crowd between sets, exhorting people to “chuck it in the bucket,” “it” meaning cash money, “the bucket” meaning the bucket he hauls around to collect the optional cover charge. “I need money to cut this lawn, people!” Barrow also shouts, when he’s not telling people to chuck it in the bucket. What he doesn’t say, not until the very end of a long conversation, and then only as a casual aside, is that he happens to be related to one of the neighborhood’s most famous sons. His first cousin was Joe Louis Barrow, who grew up in Black Bottom, worked after school at Eastern Market, and learned to box at a recreation center near the Brewster-Douglass projects.

  The corner of Frederick and St. Aubin could be an historical reenactment of the very rural Southern past left behind by the ancestors of so many African American Detroiters, and however temptingly easy and perhaps even inevitable the romanticization of such a scene might be, it’s nonetheless not unreasonable to worry about how the best and the brightest diligently taking their pencils to the map of Detroit with the intention of “rightsizing” the place might fail to budget for this sort of thing, unthinkingly squeezing out the cherished alchemic components necessary to make a truly great city: the messiness, the clamor, the unplanned jostlings and anarchic eccentricity. Raising any sort of gentrification fears at this earliest stage of Detroit’s would-be comeback feels like an academic luxury. And yet, when phrases like “the most potentially ambitious urban planning initiative in modern history” are being bandied about (to describe Bing administration’s rightsizing efforts), it’s hard not to grimace at the thought of the plasticized, deadening nature of planned communities.

  Many would consider nearby Lafayette Park, the Mies van der Rohe development that partly replaced the razed Black Bottom neighborhood, one of the more successful residential areas in Detroit: middle class, diverse, safe. Even the chilly architecture, by this date, has aged into an appealing Alphaville sort of retro chic. And yet, I’d venture to guess you could spend as much time in Lafayette Park as you fancied and you would never see a house band jamming on a stage made of pallets while a singer in his seventies named Kenny Miller, dressed casually in a tan windbreaker, gray denim pants, and white Fila sneakers, his only nod to show business being his gold-rimmed brown-tinted glasses, performed “Paying the Cost to Be the Boss.” Nor would you be able to wander among a standing-room crowd and spot a guy dressed in the official-looking vest of a casino employer dealing out a poker game. You wouldn’t have seen thirty people move into the center of the field to join an elaborate step dance to a song called “Wobble” and you wouldn’t have noticed the number of men arriving on motorcycle and seemingly affiliated with one of the city’s many black biker clubs, their leather jackets, per custom, signifying which club precisely, e.g., the Black Dr
agons, the Outcasts, the Black Gentlemen, the Sons of Zodiac, and (a personal favorite) the Elegant Disciples. You wouldn’t have the opportunity to shake the hands of one of the Outcasts or to be the recipient of the salutation “They call me Satan. But my name is Joe.” You wouldn’t hear Satan’s thoughts on the Bing rightsizing plan (“I think it’s a bunch of bullshit. Let people do what they want to do, live where they want to live”), nor would you learn that Satan, who just turned sixty and has massive arms and long silver hair and a light, almost South Asian complexion, used to work as an underwater welder on oil derricks in the Gulf, doing commercial deep diving—he was certified at two hundred feet—and that he’d also been a cop, briefly, in Louisville, though he didn’t like it, and now he mostly builds and fixes Harleys, having lost one of his legs after being hit by a drunk driver in 2001 while riding his motorcycle and left for dead. You also wouldn’t get to ask a stupid question like So how did losing your leg affect your riding? nor would you receive a response combining a good-natured slap of the prosthetic with a cry of It didn’t make it easier!

  A female blues singer whose name I didn’t catch had told the crowd to “put some cotton in the children’s ears” before launching into a song called “I’m a Dirty Old Woman with a Dirty Mind.” You wouldn’t have heard that, Lafayette Park, nor would you have caught that cherry red ’66 GTO driving down Forest or have had the following exchange with the guy standing next to you in the leather vest and dark glasses:

  GUY IN LEATHER VEST: Man, I used to have that exact car!

  ME: What happened?

  GUY IN LEATHER VEST: They stole it! Don’t mean no disrespect, but white boys stole it.

  MY FRIEND BILL: Some of us are dicks.

  ME: Ever find it?

  GUY IN LEATHER VEST: In Detroit? Shit.

  Later, Harmonica Shaw took the stage with a sort of gunslinger’s belt strapped around his middle, only the belt had different harmonicas. It would have been a shame to miss that.

  Neighborhood watch leader James “Jack Rabbit” Jackson, a retired Detroit police officer living on the city’s east side. [John Carlisle]

  4

  NOT FOR US THE TAME ENJOYMENT

  IF YOU WERE TO make the five-minute walk east from Mark Covington’s Georgia Street Community Garden to Gratiot Avenue, then turn north and stroll a single block, you would reach the Slumberland Child Development Center. In a city of haunted ruins, it takes special élan to stand out as an unusually haunted ruin. For the Slumberland Child Development Center, the crude mural featuring Mickey Mouse and the Tasmanian Devil provides that extra boost, especially if you live in the neighborhood and happen to know the recent history of the place—how, in 2009 and again in 2010, the former day care center was used to hide the cadavers of murder victims. Including the two Slumberland corpses, the bodies of eight women were discovered in the immediate vicinity over the same time period. Two years on, there had been no arrests in connection with the killings. In one of the local articles on the case, a resident wondered if the neighborhood was becoming a “mecca for dumping bodies.”

  Though his community garden earns most of the attention, Covington also serves as vice president of a group called the City Airport Renaissance Association. As the body count piled up, the members of CARA, dedicated to stabilizing what remained of their neighborhood—called “City Airport” because of its proximity to the barely used Coleman A. Young Municipal Airport,1 which for years has handled only cargo and the occasional private commercial traffic—began knocking on doors and distributing flyers warning residents of the killings.

  If you ask a Detroiter about saving the city, it’s unlikely that she will mention tech start-ups or urban farming. The first thing most Detroiters want to talk about is crime.

  * * *

  I was robbed at gunpoint when I was twenty, just a short walk from Service Street. A group of us had decided to drive from Ann Arbor, where I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, to Greektown, one of the few parts of downtown Detroit that can pass for a shlocky tourist zone in a regular, fully operational city. I rode with Jill, a friend of a friend I’d just met that night. We parked and entered the stairwell of the parking structure. Hiding on the other side of the door was a man with a gun. He hissed for us to look away from his face and hand over our money, in that order. I remember giving him my wallet and, bizarrely, clenching my stomach, as if preparing to take a punch. That was where he’d pointed the gun. Then, to my horror, Jill began arguing about having to give up her purse, which, she insisted, was a gift from her grandmother; it had “sentimental value.”

  “What you got in here, bitch?” the mugger wanted to know, suspicious, as he rifled through her bag. I did my best to telepathically signal that I’d just met this young woman and had no sentimental attachment to her. Eventually, he thrust the purse back into her hands. I couldn’t tell if he was disgusted by her audacity or filled with a strange respect. Then he let us go.

  Moments after we staggered out of the stairwell, Jill burst into tears, and I felt obligated to put my arm around her and comfort her, even though she’d endangered our lives for her stupid purse.

  * * *

  As urban pathologies go, crime as an issue can feel prosaic. The problem is fairly similar—specific stats aside—from one inner-city neighborhood to the next, even if the first happens to be in New Orleans and the second in East Brooklyn. What makes Detroit’s crime situation particularly interesting is not the crime itself but the civilian response.

  Along with groups like CARA and organized anticrime patrols like the Detroit 300, private citizens, in do-it-yourself Detroit fashion, attempted to fill the void left by the hobbled police department, which possessed one of the worst 911 response times in the country. (Thirty-four minutes in 2009—and that was for priority calls, as in, “A burglar is climbing through my bedroom window right now!” Nonpriority callers could expect waits closer to an hour.) Not coincidentally, metro Detroit accounted for 43 percent of all concealed weapons permits issued in the entire state of Michigan.

  It could get sort of crazy. A few days after the new city council was elected in the fall of 2009, it was reported that five of its nine members had CCW (carry a concealed weapon) permits and regularly carried firearms. Around the same time, a robber made the mistake of breaking into the Westside Bible Church—where he was promptly shot by the pastor. A resourceful AP reporter had followed up on the gunslinging minister story by conducting a quick poll of Detroit churches and managed to turn up a number of other armed men of the cloth, including Holy Hope Heritage’s Rev. William Revely, who admitted to occasionally preaching while wearing his .357 (and who kept in practice by target shooting at a gun range with a fellow pastor), and Greater Grace Temple’s Bishop Charles Ellis III, who insisted he didn’t wear his concealed weapon during services, but then again, he didn’t have to, as the church had its own armed, eighteen-member Ministry of Defense present at all major functions. Speaking to the AP, Revely remained unapologetic: “I’ve always felt that the only way to handle a bear in a bear meeting is to have something you can handle a bear with.”

  The police could be just as nonchalant about gun ownership. One time, John Carlisle—“Detroitblogger John”—took me to Club Thunderbolt, a strip club run by a guy named Jay out of his dead parents’ house, in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. Jay had been shot in the face when he was eleven. (Now in his forties, he looked as if he’d recently suffered a stroke.) He showed me around the house, the butt of a pistol sticking out of the back of his pants, eventually leading me upstairs to his “War Room,” which contained a stack of cardboard boxes. “Brand new AK-47 here, and 10,000 rounds of ammo,” he said, patting one of the boxes. Then he leaned into the open doorway of his bedroom and emerged holding a double-barreled shotgun. “I’ve always got this ready to go,” he said. “I sleep with numerous weapons.” I could see a pair of nunchucks and a crossbow hanging above his bed, and there was a Kevlar vest hanging closer to the door.
“You really don’t want to fuck with me,” Jay continued. “Shit, with the police here? I could dig a hole in the backyard and nobody would know. I saw a cop car seven days ago. And I saw a sheriff at the gas station yesterday. That’s it, in this neighborhood, in a week.”

  Jay told me that he’d been sitting in bed one night, watching Jay Leno, and he’d heard a burglar creeping up the stairs. He grabbed his shotgun and chased the man outside, firing at him through the door.

  “I shot high, because I didn’t want to kill somebody,” Jay said.

  A cop showed up five-and-a-half hours after Jay called 911. When the officer arrived, he told Jay, “Next time, aim lower.”

  * * *

  To obtain a CCW permit in Michigan, one must first complete a gun safety and proficiency class with someone like Rick Ector, the proprietor of Rick’s Firearm Academy, who was quoted in the AP story. Ector said he’d taught pastors and “people from all walks of life.” As he explained it, “Detroit is not a very safe place.”

  On Ector’s website, he’d splashed across the top of the page: “If You Live, Work, or Play in Detroit, You Need a CCW/ CPL!” Below this imperative, visitors could scroll through such statements as:

  Detroit is the most violent city in the USA.

  Each and every single day within the Detroit city limits one (1) person will be murdered, two (2) people will be forcibly raped, nineteen (19) people will be robbed, and thirty-six (36) people will be victims of an aggravated assault.2 (Be advised that these numbers only reflect crimes that were reported; criminals, as a rule, do not report crimes committed against them.)

  I was surprised to discover, via the website, that Ector was African American. In a case of reverse stereotyping, I’d always considered this specific type of right-to-bear-arms proselytizing as distinctly Caucasian behavior. Curious, I gave Ector a call, and he invited me to take a class. The next one would take place on a Sunday, in the bland conference room of a suburban hotel located on a freeway service drive, beginning at 8:00 a.m. sharp.