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

by Mark Binelli

  Mohammad Okdie, the only non–African American to make the final primary cutoff—Okdie’s parents were Lebanese immigrants—mentioned he regularly rode the bus. During his closing remarks, he declared, “I am you, Detroit.”

  Gary Brown said, “I will not embarrass you.”

  Kenyatta, delightfully, concluded with a quote: “As the Last Poets said, ‘It’s down to now.’”

  Pugh asked the voters of Detroit for their support of his leadership, “flaws and all,” then flashed a grin.

  On Election Day, the voters—such as they were: turnout was under 25 percent—wound up responding to Pugh’s message, and he became the new city council president. Brown, coming in second, became council president pro tem. After his victory, Pugh told the Free Press he’d be calling the newly reelected Detroit city clerk to congratulate her and also, more urgently, “ask[ing] her for a certified letter that I was the top vote-getter … and the salary that corresponds to the top vote-getter is $85,000 a year. That’s officially provable income. And the mortgage company was kind enough to postpone the sheriff’s sale.

  “I’m on much more solid footing on negotiating,” he went on. “It’ll be wrapped up before the swearing-in. Hell, it may be wrapped up before December.”

  * * *

  As November approached, stencils began appearing on buildings around town featuring an anachronistic, bearded visage and the words RE-ELECT PINGREE. Elected in 1890, Hazen S. Pingree still reigns, pretty much uncontested, as Detroit’s finest mayor. Republican railroad barons thought they had hand-picked an acceptable leader from the capitalist ranks, one who gave (per Robert Conot) “every indication [he] would complaisantly respond to their desires.” Pingree, fifty years old, a Civil War veteran and owner of the largest shoe factory west of New England, surprised and infuriated his benefactors by becoming one of most progressive mayors in the country, siding with labor during a streetcar-workers’ strike and dramatically revealing the dirty dealings of the public school board (apparently, some things never change) during a surprise appearance at a Board of Education meeting, where he announced to his stunned audience, “You are a bunch of thieves, grafters and rascals! As your names are called, the police will take you into custody.”

  Other echoes of futures to come: the depression of 1893 had left one-third of Detroiters unemployed. Along with securing money for an ambitious public works program, Pingree pioneered, nearly a century before it became a staple of the bright-new-ideas-for-saving-Detroit trend piece, an urban farming scheme in which more than three thousand families were encouraged (and partially subsidized) to grow vegetables on five-hundred acres’ worth of half-acre plots throughout the city. Because the program launched in mid-June, the only crops harvested that first year were turnips, beans, and late potatoes, and the gardens were mocked as “Pingree’s potato patches.” In the end, though, it became Pingree’s signature initiative, ultimately viewed as an ingenious pilot program by copycat mayors in Boston, Minneapolis, and New York.

  Pingree eventually became governor of Michigan, a vanguard presence of the coming Progressive Era, admired, and copied by towering figures in the movement like Robert LaFollette and Teddy Roosevelt. In his 1895 account of his battles with the status quo, Facts and opinion; or, Dangers that beset us, Pingree wrote that “monopolistic corporations” were to blame for “nearly all the thieving and boodling” besetting us and our cities and wonderfully described the white collar bandits of the late nineteenth century as “a grade of criminals of finished rascality.” The book’s frontispiece was a photograph of Pingree’s dedication of the volume to the “great masses of American people,” handwritten on a potato. (A note at the bottom of the page reads, “Photographed from Original Potato.”) It was as governor, campaigning against his would-be Democratic replacement in the mayor’s office, that he informed a crowd in Detroit that “this town needs somebody to tell the public-utility crowd to kiss something else besides babies.”

  Frontispiece, Facts and opinion; or, Dangers that beset us

  The yearning for a duly-elected savior like Pingree was understandable. In recent years, the only Detroit politician who’d come close to the old man’s panache—as terrible as it was to admit—was the Hon. Kwame Kilpatrick. From the moment I returned to the city, no matter what Bing or the council happened to be grappling with, a disproportionate amount of news coverage was devoted to the deposed mayor. It was like Nixon being sentenced to house arrest in the Lincoln Bedroom and still being allowed to call the periodic press conference. Kilpatrick had served time, moved his family to an expensive home in suburban Dallas, missed several restitution payments, and was ultimately sent back to jail. Still, his every move, voluntary or otherwise, caused seismic tremors in Detroit—a telling commentary on the power of his charismatic pull, even in exile and disgrace, and especially compared with those who had replaced him. Voters had declared their preference for the dull but steady Bing, Pugh the effervescent anchorman, Brown the crime-fighting Boy Scout—but still, they couldn’t tear their eyes from the larger-than-life figure born to command a room.

  Part of the reason, of course, had to do with the soap operatic pull of scandal involving sex, all manner of corruption (shakedowns, nepotism, general kleptocratic rot), even murder. (Rumors had circulated about wild parties the mayor had thrown in the Manoogian Mansion, including one in which his wife arrived unexpectedly and allegedly assaulted an exotic dancer named Tamara “Strawberry” Greene. Later, the twenty-seven-year-old dancer was shot and killed at four-thirty in the morning while sitting in her car with her boyfriend on the city’s west side, feeding lurid but wholly unfounded conspiracy theories that had Greene snuffed by a mayoral hit man in order to prevent her from speaking publicly about the alleged party incident.) But there was an extra sting to Kilpatrick’s downfall precisely because, once upon a time, he truly had struck many as an energetic and even visionary leader who might alter Detroit’s trajectory through the sheer strength of his personality.

  Kilpatrick came from a politically connected family—his mother, Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick, was a U.S. Representative—and when Kwame was elected in 2001, at the age of thirty-one, he was the youngest mayor in Detroit’s history. I spent two days shadowing Kilpatrick in 2002,2 when he was celebrating his first year in office with a 75 percent approval rating, having already logged an impressive list of early-term accomplishments that included five thousand new housing starts and balancing the city budget, despite the inheritance of a seventy-five-million dollar deficit. At the time, the comedian Chris Rock gave an interview about preparing for his role as the first black president in the 2003 film Head of State; he didn’t cite Barack Obama, the obscure state senator from Illinois, as a model for his character, but Kwame Kilpatrick.

  “Kwame got it—he was brilliant,” Kurt Metzger, Detroit’s most respected demographer, told me later, after everything had gone wrong. “He just understood data. Whenever I threw a number at him, he’d know it, and could respond with numbers of his own. And he’d be right!” Metzger smiled sadly. “Unfortunately, he was also a sociopath. But other than that…”

  Almost immediately, I took to the mayor. Despite his size, he moved with a relaxed, ambling gait. His head looked small atop such a bulky presence, his ears tinier still, with a slightly crushed quality, as if they’d been stuck to either temple as globs of half-baked dough. But Kilpatrick was a handsome man, with an easy, confident smile, and he backed his storied personal magnetism with obvious intelligence and a quick wit. He also possessed the natural charm advantage of the physically imposing, whereby little more than a reassuring nod or welcoming grin from a person twice your size triggers, on some dank evolutionary substrata, an involuntary rush of gratitude. When I heard rumblings about “immaturity” and “arrogance,” I was quick to write off the objections as generational, stylistic. Kilpatrick and I were close in age, and when journalists dubbed him “the hip-hop mayor,”3 I didn’t see it as an epithet, but, rather, a milestone.

  Still,
the cockiness of his administration—“swagger,” in hip-hop terms—was evident. One evening, when I joined Kilpatrick on an Angel’s Night patrol, the mayor’s press secretary, Jamaine Dickens, casually popped a CD into the stereo of his blue Crown Vic as we drove to meet the mayor. “Do you like Ludacris?” he asked. “This was our unofficial campaign song, just because we spent so much time on the road.” The rapper boomed, “You got to MOVE, bitch! Get out the WAY!”

  Dickens smiled, flinched, and went on: “You know what? Our real song was ‘You Scared.’ You know that one?” To refresh my memory, he shout-rapped, in the manner of Lil’ Jon, the song’s auteur, its bullying chorus: “You SCARED! You SCARED! Bee-AAAAA bee-AAAAA!” “Bee-AAAAA” was short for “bitch.” (The actual title of the song was “Bia Bia,” with other choice lines including “Stop acting like a BITCH and get your HANDS up!”) Adding clarification, Dickens explained, “That was our song because it seemed like everybody was scared to endorse us.”

  My exchange with Kilpatrick himself that night felt raw and honest, more so than the majority of interactions I’ve had with public figures. Earlier in the day, Kilpatrick had addressed a council of Baptist preachers (telling them, “The next wave of the Civil Rights movement is access to capital”); he’d since changed from a suit into brown Timberland boots, grey jeans, and an Angel’s Night sweatshirt the safety-orange shade of a deer hunter’s anorak. The night was proceeding smoothly and the mayor lapsed into a decided informality between stops. At one point, while a small group of us rode in the back of the black mayoral Suburban, Kilpatrick absently picked up one of the flashlights being passed out to volunteers and announced, “I wanna flash some people.” He began shining the light out the window. Then he illuminated his own face, like one of the ill-fated teenagers from the movie The Blair Witch Project, only instead of telling a campfire story, he began to imitate a man being hassled by a police officer.

  “‘What you doin’, man?’

  “‘Well, I’m blind, now. Could you take the flashlight out of my face? I ain’t going nowhere.’

  “‘You being smart?’

  “‘I’m always smart. I went to school, man. I’m just hoping you’ll take that flashlight down so we can have a conversation.’”

  Shifting back to his own voice, Kilpatrick said, “They used to hate me.” He meant the cops. After falling silent for a moment, he turned to me and asked drolly, “Mark, have you had positive experiences with police officers?”

  I said, “Positive? I don’t know. Probably not.”

  The mayor said, “Heh.”

  I said I guessed my experiences had been pretty neutral. Then I asked, “What about you?”

  “I was getting hassled during the campaign,” Kilpatrick said. “The police department was against me. Vehemently against me. So that was going on. But I had a real bad experience with a police officer once. I thought he was going to kill me for no reason.”

  I asked what happened. The mayor went quiet again, and seemed to be considering whether or not to tell the story. When he spoke, his tone had become more serious. “It was about three years ago,” he began slowly, “He told me I robbed something. This is Seven Mile here,” he said to the driver, before continuing: “I was standing in my driveway. I was trying to tell him that I lived there. A house down the street had been robbed. I was coming outside with my friend and we were about to go to the store and get some food. My wife was going to cook dinner. It was after church, so I was pretty well dressed.” The mayor cleared his throat. “The police pulled up and, to make a long story short, he put a nine-millimeter gun to my head, told me to get on the ground, or he was gonna shoot me.”

  There was a long silence. Finally, I began, “So when he figured out you weren’t the guy—”

  “No apology,” the mayor interrupted. He gazed out the window, shadows flickering across his broad face. “There were like four police cars by that point. Matter of fact, he was yelling, ‘I was following procedure, I didn’t do nothing wrong!’ He was such a bad officer. He’d been cussing at me the whole time. ‘I swear to God, you move, I’m gonna kill you.’ Another officer grabbed my friend and threw him in the car. I was this calm, talking to him just like this, but with a gun in my face. I said, ‘Just put the gun down. My license is in my pocket. This is my house.’ It was like three or four in the afternoon. Kids were riding their bikes, skipping up the street.” Kilpatrick chuckled mordantly. “It was a nice day.” Kilpatrick said the reason he didn’t get on the ground right away was because his two-year-old twins were standing in the doorway.

  Later, of course, I wondered how much of the story had been bullshit.4

  * * *

  I visited Gary Brown one afternoon at his home in Sherwood Forest, a neighborhood of handsome brick estates with its own private security patrol. Brown’s political career had been the one thing Kilpatrick had inarguably bequeathed to the city, and the council president pro-tem was certainly the most impressive of the new lot of Detroit politicians. We chatted in a sunny Florida room in the back of the house, where African masks hung on the wall above a Bose stereo system. Brown, dressed like a suburban dad, wore a zippered sweater and a pair of loafers with no socks.

  Brown’s lawsuit had made him a well-liked public figure in Detroit,5 and once in office, Brown proved to be the most hard-headed of the new council, training the forensic obsessiveness he’d honed as a narcotics and internal affairs investigator on Detroit’s budgetary crime scene. Almost single-handedly, Brown pushed the council to propose far deeper annual spending cuts than the Bing administration—in 2011, $50 million more than Bing had proposed—not out of right-wing austerity-mindedness but because Brown understood the very real threat of a state takeover of Detroit.

  By April 2012, when it became clear that Detroit, drowning in $12 billion of debt, would have to accede to some form of state control, Brown and Charles Pugh led the council in crafting a responsible compromise “consent agreement” in which a nine-member financial oversight board would oversee budgetary reforms. The consent agreement opened the door to more public-service union concessions and deeper governmental cuts, but also staved off the appointment of an emergency manager, which would have sidelined elected representatives like Bing and the council. Brown and Pugh came off especially well in comparison to Bing, who spent much of the budget crisis either engaging in dubious accounting tricks or seemingly angling to be appointed emergency manager himself, and to longer-serving council members like Kwame Kenyatta and JoAnn Watson, who played to their base with righteous-sounding but ultimately fatuous obstructionism.

  At times, Gary Brown and Charles Pugh felt like two sides of the Kilpatrick persona, Brown embodying the wonk, Pugh the great communicator. If Pugh seemed weak discussing specifics of policy—the first time we met, he brought up his idea to bottle and market water from the Detroit River—he nonetheless assembled a smart, young team, and was generally upbeat and forward-looking rather than fixated on the racial and geographical battles of the past. In a city like Detroit, where so many citizens had felt disenfranchished for so long, the ability to clearly and effectively speak to one’s constituents, as Pugh could, masterfully, struck me as no superficial tool.

  To that end, Pugh spent an hour or two most Friday afternoons riding the city buses and mingling with the electorate. Using public transportation as a means of proving “relatability” has always been an easy PR stunt, but in Detroit, the very act of riding the harrowing, unreliable bus system became a deeply empathetic act of shared sacrifice. One Friday, when Pugh invited me to join him in the field, a woman at the bus stop glanced at us as she wandered by, then came to a full stop. “Hi, Pugh!” she called out. “What you doing out here?”

  “Talking to people like you,” Pugh said enthusiastically.

  When one of Pugh’s staffers informed him of the arrival of his bus, a look of concern spread over the woman’s face. “You gonna catch the bus, Pugh?”

  “I ride the bus every week!” he called over his
shoulder.

  The woman snorted, seeming both skeptical and anxious for the young man.

  On board, the driver recognizing the council president, evinced similar incredulity. Staring back at us in his wide rearview mirror, he shouted, “When was the last time you been on the Iron Pimp?”

  Pugh said, “I ride the bus two or three times a month.”

  “For real?”

  Pugh said, “The very first time we rode the bus, it broke down on Woodward! Just so you know.” Then he added, “I love it because it keeps us connected.”

  The driver said, “You about to get connected with some kids in a minute.”

  Pugh’s staff laughed nervously.

  We’d started at the central bus terminus, named for Rosa Parks, one of the few examples of ambitious and aesthetically pleasing new architecture to appear in downtown Detroit in the past several decades—most strikingly, the curved white awnings sheltering each bus stop, looking from the street like the billowing sails of a grand seafaring vessel, and appearing from directly below like the underside of a row of dirigibles, docked and awaiting take-off, either conjured image working as a fitting tribute to Parks, hinting as they did of the moment before an epic journey.

  Over the course of our two-hour ride, I was the only white passenger, save for a single man with a ponytail and camouflage jacket who boarded for a brief stretch near Highland Park. On the bus, Pugh took a seat near the middle. It was not very crowded yet. One of the first passengers we picked up, a middle-aged man, took a seat in the handicapped area near the front, then spotted Pugh and shouted back a greeting. He told Pugh they’d met once at Eastern Market. Pugh asked if the man shopped there. “No, I work there,” the man said. When they’d met, he told Pugh, he’d been fixing a broken HiLo (a type of forklift), which seemed to puzzle Pugh.

  “Hey, you got a pencil?” the man called out. “Write down this number. I want you to call my mama.”