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

by Mark Binelli

  Edwin St. Aubin, the real estate agent related to one of the city’s founding families, confessed that he could not envision a mass suburban repatriation anytime soon. “These people would rather live in a shack in a field than go anywhere near downtown,” he said. “They’ve completely insulated themselves from that economy.” Lowering his voice, he said, “You talk to some of these old developers? They’d want to line up bulldozers—” We were sitting in a restaurant, and here, he put his hands together, his fingers touching and his palms facing his chest, and slowly moved them across the white tablecloth. “And get rid of everything. Start over.”

  In the eighties, St. Aubin had been married to a German woman. They spent one New Year’s in the former West Berlin, and he recalled sitting on a rooftop watching a spectacular fireworks display and then glancing east and seeing nothing but darkness. At the time it made him feel like he was staring into Detroit from the suburbs. “That’s exactly what it’s like here,” he said, “only there’s no wall.”

  * * *

  As for Detroit Works, by April 2012, the planning team had announced … more meetings. “At least” sixteen more, to be followed by the launch of “a Strategic Framework Plan for Detroit’s future.” Detroit Works officials declined interview requests, though the team did post a number of “policy audits” on its website, completed during the earliest stages of the project, and reflecting “the observations and analysis of the technical team at that time.” Buried in the text, a list of neighborhood typologies laid out by one of the working groups hinted at the possibilities inherent in a fully realized vision of Detroit Works. The high-density City Hub, with high- and mid-rise buildings, would receive priority for regional rail and bus service, while in the Urban Homestead Sector:

  a family lives in a large, older home surrounded by a natural landscape, growing vegetables to sell at a farmers’ market. In return for giving up services such as street lights, the homeowner would get lower taxes (in exchange for experimenting with alternative energy and, where possible, using well water).

  In low-maintenance Naturescapes, devoid of homes, pipe-encased creeks would be re-exposed and wildlife would flourish; in Green Venture Zones, on the other hand, vacant land and industrial buildings would be converted to fish hatcheries, hydroponic and aquaculture centers, nurseries, small market farms, and other enterprises; Green Thoroughfares would transform lesser-used highways and boulevards into “green gateways,” presumably akin to New York’s successful reclamation of the High Line elevated train line.

  All grand visions. But with the city’s financial status in such turmoil that a state takeover was being threatened, the only thing Detroit Works could promise was an end-of-summer deadline for presenting its Strategic Framework to residents and “whomever may be in charge of the city at that point.”

  Tiffini Baldwin, 18, and her daughter Nicole, 3. Baldwin graduated from Catherine Ferguson Academy, a Detroit public school for teenage mothers, and is now studying physical therapy at a local college. [Corine Vermeulen]

  6

  DETROIT IS DYNAMITE

  NOT LONG AFTER THE dreadful census news broke and Detroit became the poster city of the undone American economy, an old 1965 promotional film began to circulate widely on the Internet. The unwittingly deadpan host was Jerry Cavanagh, the mayor of Detroit at the time, introducing the city to the world in a now deranged-seeming bid to host the 1968 Olympics. Sitting stiffly behind a desk in a wood-paneled office, Cavanagh, slightly paunchy, with a conservative haircut, dark suit, and fingers forming a diamond in a way surely promoted by pop middle-management books as a means of conveying alpha male gravitas, seems to embody a holdover authority-figure archetype from the days just prior to the counterculture’s triumphant rise. His cause certainly isn’t helped by the script he’s been given or by the style and content of the film, belonging as it does to that era-specific genre of documentary that includes the cold war instructional movie and nature specials hosted by Walt Disney. From the title—Detroit: City on the Move—on down, every line appears to have been written for maximum future ironic effect.

  “Yes, we are enjoying our finest hour,” Cavanagh says, before informing the viewer that Detroit is “frequently called the most cosmopolitan city of the Midwest,” that the city “stands at the threshold of a bright, new future,” while civic planners are “creating a new concept of urban efficiency” (here, the voice-over accompanies images of white men in suits sitting around a long desk in front of a wall-sized map of the city, its neighborhoods painted different colors) and her people “work shoulder to shoulder regardless of national origin, color, or creed” (here the illustrative images, weirdly, include a Native American powwow and German Americans dressed in lederhosen doing some kind of circle dance). “The inner city,” Cavanagh concludes, “is becoming an exciting place to live.”

  It’s a funny video. But there’s also something obnoxious, almost cruelly triumphalist, about taking glee in the naive optimism of the long dead, just because we were born late enough to know how the story ends. Plus, in the case of Cavanagh, to listen to his clipped narration and write him off as a stereotypical Establishment square equally misses the mark, as the mayor was, in fact, widely considered one of the most glamorous and charming political figures of his day, only thirty-three when elected, a brilliant young talent of endless promise and presidential-short-list caliber. President Kennedy saw a kindred spirit in Cavanagh, and the press, in turn, cast him—another youthful Irish Catholic Democrat with a Rat Packer’s swagger, a pretty wife, and an ambitious, forward-looking agenda—as a loyal vassal of Camelot, Life describing him as “the Golden Boy among U.S. mayors … a vigorous, young politician … who seemed to personify the surging prosperity of Detroit.… Civic officials from across the country were flocking to Detroit to see how Jerry Cavanagh did it.”

  The seeds of Detroit’s current problems had already taken hold by the time Cavanagh assumed office, and he understood the seriousness of the challenge he faced. At the same time, a number of key indicators had been pointing to signs of positive development in Detroit: property values on the rise, the auto companies doing solid business, and even the population, after several years of steady decline, apparently stabilizing. Unlike a number of other big-city mayors, Cavanagh also had a serious plan in place for dealing with the possibility of a riot and remained exceedingly popular with the black constituents whose votes had swept him into office. In 1963, Cavanagh linked arms with Martin Luther King Jr., during King’s Unity March down Woodward Avenue, which ended at Cobo Hall, where King delivered a longer preview of the “I Have a Dream” speech that would be made famous at the March on Washington two months later. Cavanagh had sent his liberal police commissioner, George Edwards, to greet King at the airport with the message, “You’ll see no dogs and firehoses here,” and the teeming crowd of marchers swelled behind King and Cavanagh with such rapturous goodwill that Cavanagh later told the Detroit News he’d only been able to say four words to King: “Hang on, hang on!”

  Cavanagh possessed a bottomless faith in technocratic Good Society solutions to the problems besetting the modern American city. He created after-school and job-training programs, multimillion-dollar “neighborhood centers” to serve specific communities, and computerized data banks to aggregate progress points (and warning signs) on a microneighborhood level. In another odd parallel to the Detroit of today, the city was regarded as the perfect laboratory. When the Johnson administration began developing a real urban policy, Cavanagh lobbied hard for federal dollars, pushing for Detroit to become a so-called model city—like a model home, a showcase for the myriad possibilities of state-drafted urban renewal. In speeches, Cavanagh began referring to Detroit as “Demonstration City U.S.A.”

  * * *

  To many conservatives, Detroit’s failures have since made the place a Demonstration City of a different sort—a major bullet point in the postsixties, Reaganite précis on the shortcomings of liberal urban policy. But the truth is, Ma
yor Cavanagh’s good-government reforms never had a chance to be properly tested or even fully enacted. The Cavanagh administration’s federal funding proposal, probably always a pipe dream, came to nearly $1 billion over a ten-year period. President Johnson balked at this number, countering with $2.5 billion over six years, to be shared not by a select group of “model cities” but by somewhere between fifty and sixty urban centers throughout the country. Along with a lack of resources, Cavanagh faced problems of his own making, including a slowness to fully integrate the police department, a distracting and ill-fated run for one of Michigan’s U.S. Senate seats, rumors of drinking and marital stress, and a public, impolitic break with LBJ over the Vietnam War.

  “Here’s what the word was on Detroit in the movement circles: that ain’t nothing gonna happen in Detroit, because people in Detroit are working and they’re making too much money and life is too good,” General Baker, a black activist arrested on the first night of the 1967 riots, told me. “So nothing’s going to break in Detroit. We were different than every other city. Most of the movement cities, most of the people in the movement around the country, were pimping the poverty program money. We weren’t doing that shit. We were working. We had our own goddamn money, and we was militantly independent, wasn’t nobody telling us what the fuck we gonna do. So it was a different kind of movement that grew up in Detroit, a real practical, down to earth, pragmatic movement, you see, not a lot of ideological bullshit. This city has a history. My mom and dad and them used to tell me, even when they left the South—they were sharecroppers in Georgia, moved up here in ’41—they said, ‘If you want to work, go to Detroit. If you want to play and pimp and all that shit, you go to Chicago.’ So Detroit drew a different kind of people. It had a history of drawing a different kind of people. People were coming to work. And that’s what helped set them up for the rebellion.”1

  The story of the 1967 riot, or rebellion, is a familiar one. In the early morning hours of July 23, police raided a blind pig on Twelfth Street, expecting to bust twenty people or so, but instead stumbling onto a party for a pair of soldiers just returned from Vietnam. Eight-five people were arrested: it took over an hour to cart everyone away. It was a hot summer night, and as the police worked, a crowd gathered, growing increasingly hostile. Some bottles were thrown. The cops took off, alerting the riot unit downtown. By eight that morning, over three thousand people had gathered on Twelfth Street.

  After five days of unrest and a mobilizing of the National Guard and federal troops, forty-three people were dead and over seven thousand arrested. Nearly three thousand buildings burned. Governor Romney was living in Bloomfield Hills, and he flew over the city in a helicopter to survey the chaos. Thirty of the forty-three dead had been killed by law enforcement. For many, despite the violence and the sight of tanks in the street, a heady revolutionary spirit was in the air, reflected more in the MC5 cover of “Motor City Is Burning” than in the John Lee Hooker original. Hooker’s version ended mournfully, with a fireman telling him, Look, get outta here—it’s too hot. But the MC5 finished the song by gleefully shouting, Let it all burn …2 “I remember watching television during the riots,” John Sinclair told me. “‘The tenth precinct has been pinned down by sniper fire.’ We all said, ‘Yes!’”

  For Cavanagh, the riot—at that point, the worst in U.S. history—made the final act of his career, bookended by a failed Senate run and the collapse of his marriage, play out like classical tragedy. “If a guy put a gun to my head and asked me if any city in this country is manageable, I’d have to say no,” Cavanagh told a reporter, while the fires still smoldered, in a moment of honesty that’s still stunning today. He went on, “We did the textbook things here in Detroit. We did more than any other city in police-community relations, anti-poverty, inner-city schools, job training—the whole bit. I was sure of myself, got praised, and now I can’t guarantee anything.”

  “Maybe cities can be governed,” the mayor concluded. “But there has to be a different emphasis and a lot more money.”

  * * *

  Even in Detroit, you don’t hear about the 1967 riots as much as you used to. Looking back, there’s an arrestingly dated quality to the contemporary responses. Observers worried over potential future uprisings, as if pyromaniacal mutiny might continue to spread like some new, incomprehensible youth-culture trend. In a used bookshop, I came across a copy of The Detroit Riot of July 1967: A Psychological, Social and Economic Profile of 500 Arrestees, a study by Sheldon J. Lachman and Benjamin D. Singer of the Detroit-based Behavior Research Institute, which probed respondents with questions such as “Will the Negro Ever Have Everything the White Man Has?” “Is There Any Famous Negro Who Thinks Riots are a Good Thing?” and “Which Race Riots Have You Seen on TV?”

  When I was growing up in the eighties, though, the riots were still invoked with the compulsive regularity of a fresh grudge. This was in the suburbs, of course, where the grudge was not always expressed politely, and where even today, blame for Detroit going off the rails harks back to that distant summer. Meanwhile, across 8 Mile Road, an entirely different oral history had been passed along. University of Michigan Professor Angela Dillard, a black Detroiter whose research focuses on radicalism in the African American religious tradition, told me, “The black middle class, in some ways, has good narrative about the riot. My uncles talked about how they stood on the border waving at the white people leaving, then bought their homes! It wasn’t such a terrible thing when these people who had been terrorizing us for decades left.”

  As a kid, dragooned into working at my father’s shop, I wound up spending more time in the city than most of my friends. Otherwise, family trips to Detroit were exceedingly rare, usually centering around a Tigers game, or a visit to Belle Isle to see the wild deer that used to roam in the more heavily forested parts of the island, my father slowing our Buick to a crawl whenever he spotted one and hissing “Varda!3 Look how beautiful.”

  Living on Service Street, I noticed how, at certain times of the week, downtown streets would be overrun by white people, at which point you’d realize there must be a game or concert on. For instance, Detroit Lions fans like to gather in parking lots near Ford Field, the downtown football stadium, several hours before kickoff time. By nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, when I’d step out to buy a newspaper, I’d spot the tailgaters bundled up like deerhunters, clutching coozied Miller High Lifes between mittened fists, their breath misting the chill air alongside the smoke coming off their grilled brats.

  One Sunday, my brother Paul was going to a game with some coworkers, so I joined them for a breakfast beer and sausage in a parking lot on Gratiot. A very pleasant carnival atmosphere reigned, the sort of communal gathering you didn’t experience much in a driving city like Detroit. The crowd was overwhelmingly male and even more overwhelmingly white. When I finished my beer, I looked around for a trash barrel. My brother smirked and said, “If you want to, you can just crush the can and toss it in the middle of the parking lot. That’s what they do here.” He put his own empty can down on the ground, which seemed fussy and demure in the context, and I did the same. But it was true: lots of the other men were just tossing their empties. I wondered why the parking lot didn’t look like the lowlands of a city dump, since a number of these guys had been drinking for hours before I arrived, and then I noticed that a handful of black men—homeless, or just hungry—were trolling the area with giant trash bags, gathering up the empties. In Michigan, cans and bottles can be returned for a ten-cent deposit.

  A wave of exhaustion came over me, even though I’d only been awake for a couple of hours. The gulf between city and suburbs felt gaping and hopeless. Still, when one of the tailgaters asked about my reporting, I mentioned that things in Detroit felt different, better, knowing I risked scorn for being hopelessly naïve, a dupe. Predictably, the guy shook his head and said he’d been hearing that for the past thirty years. The main problem, he claimed, was leadership, that the city really screwed up by electing
the worst people ever, that nothing would change unless you changed things at the top—a not uncommon assessment from white suburbanites, “leadership” often signifying “thieving blacks who demanded the keys to the shop, and now look what fucking happened.” If there was national schadenfreude about the failure of Detroit, regional schadenfreude was even stronger, and it hinged in large part on race.

  In that moment, I thought of certain aspects of United States foreign policy—the practice of isolating enemy states financially and then watching the leader whom we’ve labeled a tyrant act more and more like one when his regime begins to crumble under the pressure of the embargo. The leader and his state must fail in order to confirm the triumph of our own ideology. And if his people do not rise up against him, their suffering is, at least in part, their own fault. Here, Detroit was the rogue state, defying the bullying hegemony of a superpower that (in the eyes of many Detroiters) wanted to install its own hand-picked leader, making the transfer of any remaining natural resources that much smoother.

  The Emergency Financial Manager law passed by the Republican-dominated legislature in Lansing and backed by the new Republican governor, Rick Snyder, granting the state’s executive branch (i.e., Snyder himself) enormous power on a local level when municipalities faced serious financial crises, had heightened—and racialized—the perception of leadership being undermined. Emergency managers, past and present, had been appointed in majority-black cities (Pontiac, Highland Park, Inkster, Benton Harbor, Flint) and Detroit feared the possibility of an actual power-grab by outsiders. Thus far, the city itself had managed to hang on to home rule—although in the summer of 2009, a new financial manager, Robert Bobb, was granted near-dictatorial control over the Detroit public school system, one of the most racially polarized institutions in the entire metropolitan area.