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

by Mark Binelli

  “Sorry, man, I don’t have any money,” I said.

  “Really?” Tony said. Affecting a look of concern, he pulled a crumpled dollar bill out of his pocket and held it out to me.

  “No, I’m good,” I said, smiling.

  “You sure?” Tony asked. “I hate to see people with an empty pocket.” Then he shrugged and stuffed the bill back into his own pocket and invited me to come join him and his wife over by the river, where they would be having a couple of brewskies—he actually said “brewskies”—if I happened to get thirsty.

  After Tony walked away, I wrote “Tony/Antoine (de la Mothe Cadillac)” in my notebook and underlined it, twice. Then I realized there was no one else around. The two other homeless men had disappeared, as had the Middle Eastern tourists. I hadn’t been frightened when Tony flashed his blades, but now I wondered if I should leave. But then I glanced down the hill and saw Tony sitting on a bench near the river. He took a sip of beer and said something to his companion. They stared out at the gently rippling current, not giving me a second look, just enjoying the beautiful day like anyone would.

  A home on Detroit’s “urban prairie.” [Geoff George]

  5

  HOW TO SHRINK A MAJOR AMERICAN CITY

  THERE WAS NO GETTING around it: Detroit had too much space. Having experienced a decades-long, ongoing population bleed, the city had begun to feel like an overstretched empire in its decadent phase, sprawling far beyond its means. But after years of obstinate resistance and denial, a new consensus was finally emerging, at least in policy circles, about what to do with those forty square miles of vacant land. Detroit would have to shrink, in some sense of the word, in order to survive. The main obstacle had long been a psychological one: there seemed to be a bone-deep American reluctance to even flirt with the idea of thwarting manifest destiny, let alone embrace the notion of getting smaller. “I teach land use and planning and there’s nothing in there about downsizing,” was how John Mogk, who has spent decades studying urban policy as it applies to Detroit, put it when I dropped by his office at Wayne State University’s law school. “Most of the scholarship relates to development and growth—the assumption is that a population is expanding, so how best do you control it. There’s very little of value at all written about what do you do about decline.”

  It was in the air, though—notions of American fallibility, our fading sole-superpower status, China’s rise, India’s rise, unsustainable long-term deficits, all of that. The difference in Detroit was that the contraction would be literal. Mayor Dave Bing had run for office peddling a vision of benevolent retrenchment: condensing the city’s government agencies and its job rolls to bring them more in line with its population. Then in February 2010, as Detroit began grappling with the bleak findings of the census, Bing announced more details of what would euphemistically come to be known as “rightsizing”—a geographic shrinking, not of the city’s borders, but of its population footprint, wherein citizens living on isolated urban prairies would be incentivized to move to denser, more easily serviced neighborhoods. “If we don’t do it,” Bing told the Detroit News, “you know this whole city is going to go down.”

  There was talk of a multimillion-dollar federally funded light rail plan to anchor development along Woodward Avenue, of vacant land being bundled and cultivated as public parks or other green spaces, of assessing and ranking individual neighborhoods according to factors such as strength of housing stock, population density, and economic activity. Since the city remained too broke to fund an effort this complex on its own, the nonprofit Kresge Foundation had agreed to pay the salary of Harvard urban planner Toni Griffin, who would oversee what was being called, surely as a means of conjuring images of New Deal largesse—President Obama was still talking up generous stimulus spending and infrastructure building at this point—the Detroit Works Project.

  What do you do with a discarded city? Political leaders had been struggling with the issue of sustained blight for decades. Whereas in a normal town, a mayor loves nothing better than to unveil plans for an ambitious civic building project (and, by extension, an enduring monument to mayoral vision and leadership), in Detroit, where all rules about how cities work have been upended, elected officials since the 1960s have sweet-talked constituents by promising to tear down more derelict structures than their predecessors. Most recently, Dave Bing made the leveling of ten thousand vacant homes within four years “a centerpiece of his administration,” in the words of the Detroit News. In early April 2010, the slated demolition of the first of these homes, on the 1100 block of Lewerenz Street in southwest Detroit, was promoted by Bing’s people and covered by the local press as a major media event. In Detroit, this is what passes for a ribbon-cutting ceremony; I was surprised Bing himself didn’t show up in a hard hat, hoisting a sledgehammer, ready to deliver the inaugural blow to the load-bearing wall.1

  This was not part of Detroit Works but simply standard mayoral practice, a more or less baseline promise you had to make to get elected. In fact, when the demolitions started, all details pertaining to what, exactly, the Detroit Works Project might encompass were still pure speculation. To assuage the fears of skeptical citizens, the Bing administration promised that the initiative would begin with a “listening” phase of at least forty-five town-hall-style community meetings, taking place over the course of eighteen months. While garnering community input, or at least paying lip service to the idea of doing so, made sense from the standpoint of desirable optics, the lack of urgency implied by such a leisurely approach made the mayor seem wildly out of touch. At the meetings, Bing and his representatives insisted, again and again, that Detroit Works was no Trojan horse hiding another, secret plan to sell large chunks of the city to moneyed suburban interests, a real fear of many Detroiters. And in fact, forget secret plans, there’s no plan, period became the constant public refrain—really, trust us on this one, guys, we got nothing.

  Still, the very prospect of such a comprehensive reckoning with land use, depopulation, sprawl, and the future of the American city felt like an important moment, one with potential application for the aging metropolises, large and small, which in aggregate made the present-day state of our union so atypically morbid. If anything like the rumors were true, Bing’s plan could end up being one of the boldest reimaginings of urban space in modern U.S. history.

  * * *

  People liked to compare the amount of vacant land in Detroit to equivalent-sized spaces. All of Paris could fit into Detroit’s forty square miles of nothing, or two Manhattans, or a slightly shaved Boston. Such formulations, though, inevitably led one to imagine a contiguous landmass, severable as a rotten limb, or possibly something to be cordoned off and beautified, like a Central Park—which, of course, was not the case. Vacant parcels were spread throughout the city, closer in spirit to tumors riddling a body.

  When enough of those parcels happened to cluster together, you had urban prairies: entire neighborhoods nearly wiped from the map, the inevitable result of a place built for two million servicing less than half that number. An exemplary swath of prairie had crept within walking distance of Service Street; some call the neighborhood I’m talking about South Poletown—Polish factory workers populated the area several decades ago—but I started thinking of it as Upper Chene, after Chene Street, which runs straight up from the Detroit River. On the two-mile stretch of Chene itself, once a thriving commercial strip, you could count the viable, operating businesses on two hands. Several of the now unrecognizable storefronts, having burned and partially collapsed years earlier, looked like funeral pyres left untouched as a monument to the dead. On the residential streets, entire blocks had gone to field. The remaining houses ranged, schizophrenically, from obvious drug spots to beautifully kept-up brick ranches, from old wooden bungalows to foreclosed properties scrapped to the joists by copper thieves.

  Once I shucked my trepidation at venturing into such lonely and forbidding territory, I began taking long bike rides around Upper Chene.
On summer afternoons, the insect noise could be deafening, and though the people sitting out on their porches would stare, I soon learned that country rules applied here, too—if you smiled and gave a little wave or a head nod, you’d generally get the same back, saving, of course, the dope boys, whose hard-gazed dedication to radiating inscrutability and menace convinced me to drop the smiling part. Mostly, though, the menace was due to the absence of people, and thus far more rural than urban, putting me in mind of Seventies exploitation movies like The Hills Have Eyes or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which naive cityfolk venture down the wrong dirt road and find themselves on the business end of a meathook.

  The scrappers were everywhere. One Sunday morning in broad daylight, on a desolate stretch of Grandy, I rode past a guy pulling pipes twice the length of his body and loading them out of the basement of a foreclosed home into a white minivan. A few blocks later, a couple of entrepreneurs came driving in the opposite direction in a pickup truck, its bed overflowing with twisted pieces of metal, including what looked to be a number of shelving units.

  In another field, at Chene and Canfield, Tyree Guyton, the artist from Heidelberg Street, had arranged a bunch of discarded shoes in the shape of a river; shortly after he’d laid out his installation, I’d noticed some kids from the neighborhood wading right through the middle of it like anglers. When I asked what was up, they said, “Free shoes!” A little girl warned me that it was hard to find your size, or even a matching pair. A few blocks away, just past the Church of the Living God No. 37, a white pit bull began barking furiously at me from the yard of a home that I’d thought abandoned. When I got closer I noticed a young man in a crisp Tigers cap staring coldly at me from one of the front windows.

  I bicycled down a block of Dubois with just a single house left standing, almost dead center of one side of the street. The whole of the other side had turned feral, forested by a tangle of unmowed grass and gnarled trees. Despite its isolation, the two-story wood frame house had been neatly maintained, with a handsome gray paint job and a lush garden of rose bushes and fruit trees surrounded by a picket fence. A round-faced man in a bright red T-shirt and Bermuda shorts sat on the top steps of the porch. I stopped and said hello. His name was Marty. When I got closer, I noticed he had a cane next to him on the porch. The writing on Marty’s flip-flops proclaimed him Big Slugger #1 Dad.

  Marty used to work in the auto industry and also at Thorn Apple Valley, a sausage plant near Eastern Market that closed in 1998. I’d made frequent deliveries to Thorn Apple Valley as a teenager; my dad sold them sausage casings. Marty and I bonded over this odd coincidence, though we figured out we’d probably never met back then. “I did things with pigs—live pigs,” he told me, widening his eyes theatrically to signify, You really don’t want to know. He told me anyway: while he’d never butchered, he’d had the karmically unpleasant job of herding the soon-to-be-slaughtered pigs into the abattoir, using a whip. He’d gotten into the habit of naming his favorite pigs and keeping them in the back with him as long as possible, though eventually they all had to go.

  I asked Marty if he’d be willing to move if the neighborhood got rightsized. He shook his head. “This is our house for generations. We pay our taxes. That’s not happening.” Someone opened the gate at the side of the house. “Who’s back there?” Marty asked. It turned out to be his aunt, who also lived in the family home. She tended the flowers and this afternoon was pulling a red wagon laden with gardening supplies. “I do it as much as I can,” she said. Marty said the house had been in his family for fifty years. “Sixty-four years,” his aunt said. “My mother bought this house when I was three months old.”

  “You got to analyze this,” Marty said. “These are some rough times we living in. Most of our jobs went overseas. I ain’t never seen an economy like this, ever.” He’d lived on the block his entire life, watching the neighborhood disappear around him: the barbershops, bars, ice cream parlors, all gone. “This neighborhood used to be straight,” he said. He squinted at the thicket of trees across the street. “You get used to it, though. One thing, it’s quiet here. Don’t be all that crazy stuff around here. I like the serenity of my environment. To me? All this is a big plasma screen. You just have to be strong and keep God with you. What does the Bible say? ‘You’re in this world but not—’ No, wait.” I said I thought it was “of this world but not in it,” and he nodded, right, right. Though later, I realized I’d screwed up the quote. Of course we were all in it.

  * * *

  Detroiters are rightfully wary of top-down urban renewal plans. The city’s wild budgetary and population woes date back to the peak of the auto industry, when workers from Europe and the rural South flooded the city, hoping to reap the benefits of Fordism. In 1919, James Couzens, the longtime financial manager of Ford, was elected mayor. Couzens had built the company’s extensive dealership network and was the primary architect of the five-dollar workday, which had sparked the mass migration of labor to Detroit in the first place and created a problem for Couzens unimaginable to Dave Bing: a city with far too many people. In the ten years prior to Couzens’s election, Detroit’s population had more than doubled, leaving thousands of citizens, according to Robert E. Conot, “packed into leaky and unheated barns and shacks without plumbing” or into slapdash tent cities.

  The desire to escape this Boschian tableau was a sensible one. Workers in Detroit also happened to be making enough money to buy the very cars they were building, which promoted mobility, as did the new, rapidly expanding highway system being built in large part because of the lobbying efforts of their employers.

  With, of course, the notable exception of one demographic group. Detroit’s African American population, which doubled between 1940 and 1950, was generally restricted, through redlining tactics, to living in packed slum housing in neighborhoods like the roughly sixty-square-block Black Bottom. These neighborhoods had the city’s oldest housing stock—Sugrue again: “tiny, densely packed frame homes jerry-built by poor European immigrants in the mid and late nineteenth century”—and thanks to discriminatory banking practices that severely restricted loans to minorities, black residents had difficulty raising money to prevent the slums from further degrading. Pressure to build new housing projects met with deep neighborhood resistance.

  But the builders of Detroit, having radically changed nearly every aspect of the lives of Americans—where we could live, how much we could earn, how far we could travel—believed there was a solution. As far back as 1939, General Motors, in its massively popular Futurama exhibition at the New York World’s Fair, had begun predicting what a techno-utopianist’s “city of the future” might look like. Not surprisingly, GM’s vision included fourteen-lane expressways and elevated civilian walkways to double the available width for car traffic below.2 The film accompanying the exhibit, To New Horizons, set in the “wonder-world of 1960,” imagined “an American city replanned around a highly developed modern traffic system,” where “along both banks of the river, beautifully landscaped parks replaced the outworn areas of an older day” and “on all express-city thoroughfares, the rights of way have been so routed as to displace outmoded business sections and undesirable slum areas whenever possible.” As the camera panned over a diorama of the future city, the narrator portentously intoned, Man continually strives to replace the old with the new!

  Directly behind and to the west of my loft is the neighborhood that used to be Black Bottom. Beginning in 1946, Mayor Edward Jeffries condemned 129 acres of Black Bottom in the name of progress, uprooting nearly two thousand black families. As presaged by Futurama—almost to the year!—a freeway was eventually routed through the former neighborhood, “displac[ing]” the bulk of this specific “outdated slum area,” including Hastings Street, the vibrant center of working-class African American life in Detroit (famously name-checked by John Lee Hooker in “Boogie Chillen”). The rest of Black Bottom became Lafayette Park, a cluster of identical podlike “homes of the future” designed in the In
ternational Style by Bauhaus master Mies van der Rohe. The stark, glass-fronted town houses and high-rise apartment buildings received mixed reviews as architecture; but in any event, they weren’t built for poor people. As is often the case with the promises bundled into large-scale civic development schemes, construction of its lower-income housing was slated for the back end of the timetable and ultimately wound up dropped altogether.

  * * *

  I happened upon another failed urban renewal plan by accident, through a young Dutch photographer named Corine Vermeulen. In 2001, Corine had moved to the city to attend Cranbrook, the famous art and design school whose past instructors had included Charles Eames and Eliel and Eero Saarinen. Her work avoided predictable images of grit and decay, instead focusing on what kept the city alive: inner-city beekeepers, lowrider car enthusiasts, storefront mosques, pastoral scenes of the urban prairie. “I feel like Detroit is the most important city in the U.S., maybe in the world,” she told me one night, utterly serious. “It’s the birthplace of modernity and the graveyard of modernity. My American experience is Detroit. Detroit is America for me.”

  At a certain point, she brought up Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, her favorite film, explaining how much of the movie is set in a mysterious postindustrial netherworld called “the Zone”—a desolate, forbidden place that also offers supernatural promises of transcendence, at least according to the titular Stalker, who has agreed to guide the film’s other two main characters, called only the Writer and the Professor, into the Zone in order to fulfill their deepest desires. Yanking a book by the anarchist writer Hakim Bey out of her bag, Corine began to tell me how Bey’s theories of anarchic “temporary autonomous zones” connected with Stalker and, ultimately, Detroit, where anything could happen.3