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

by Mark Binelli

  Pugh wrote down the number and promised the man he would call his mother and tell her that he’d met her son on the bus.

  As we meandered up Woodward, Pugh occasionally switched seats to chat with other passengers. His team members had spread out, too, distributing flyers with information about the council, including phone numbers and Internet addresses related to various city services and departments. The interactions highlighted, in a pitiless way, the difficulties many in the city faced. Pugh approached a pair of weary looking men and handed them flyers, asking brightly, “Y’all know anybody looking for a job?” The flyers contained information about city employment programs.

  “Yeah,” one of the guys muttered, barely glancing at Pugh or the flyer. “Everybody.”

  Another man in a knit Carhart cap took the seat behind Pugh and leaned forward. “I wonder if you can help me,” he asked. “I have a felony, fifteen years old, but they discriminate against me now when I’m trying to get work.” The man was gaunt, in his fifties, with a toothpick in his mouth and a nasty-looking bruise under his left eye. Pugh chatted with him for a few minutes, then asked if he ever used the Internet. The man said yes and Pugh handed him a flyer and told him to go to his website, where there was an entire section devoted to constituents with criminal records.

  And so it went. One teenage boy turned out to be returning from a visit to his lawyer for a charge he didn’t want to discuss; he’d also been temporarily expelled from school. A group of high school girls discussed Raisin in the Sun with Pugh, who recommended various colleges and argued gently with the one who said she couldn’t wait to get out of Detroit. I noticed that one of the staffers, a stocky older man, stuck close to Pugh whenever he moved around, always sure to position himself in a seat nearby, no doubt acting as a sort of bodyguard. I wondered if they thought Pugh was in danger of being mugged while riding a bus in broad daylight.

  During a lull, Pugh told me that he hoped to see more regional cooperation with the suburbs, that he would love for the planned light-rail line to connect Detroit with surrounding communities. Most of the constituent interfacing had gone well up to this point. But then an older man sitting behind Pugh perked up and noticed his famous neighbor. The man had an old-fashioned pair of oversized headphones hanging around his neck, and he reeked of booze. Leaning forward, he introduced himself to Pugh, then said, “I have a lot of questions for you. Why are you hiding back here?”

  A glimmer of annoyance crept into Pugh’s voice, sounding odder because he couldn’t turn off its chirpier inflection. “I’m not hiding!” he said. “You just got on. You don’t know what I’ve been doing.”

  The man nodded and said, “So, in regards to the change issue, I’m wondering, ‘What is our destination?’ For instance, this dumping right here.” The man nodded out the window to his left. On the other side of the street, there was a rubble-strewn lot.

  “No, no!” Pugh said. “See, that’s not dumping. That was an abandoned building. It was taken down. That’s a good thing.”

  The man considered this response, pursing his lips, then said, “So what you’re saying is, I’m not viewing urban blight. I’m viewing urban progress.”

  Pugh didn’t seem to know if he was being messed with or not, but he stuck with his argument about abandoned buildings needing to be demolished.

  “I’m part of your constituency,” the man interrupted. “And what you’re not hearing is, a couple of days ago, I saw trucks illegally dumping. These guys are making sixteen hundred dollars dumping in the city, and they’ve got no overhead. Man, in this area I’m talking about, you see mounds and mounds and mounds. It’s Trumbell and … and … Well, I’m an old man. I forget.”

  “Elijah McCoy Drive?” Pugh asked. As the man spoke, Pugh had taken out his BlackBerry and pecked out a memo regarding the dumping location, or at least pretended to. “There are a lot of abandoned fields over there. It’s not far from where I grew up.”

  “Do you remember Maryanne McCaffery?” the old man asked, referring to a beloved city council member from the Coleman Young era, now deceased. He asked Pugh about a specific bill McCaffery had championed. Pugh obviously had no idea what the man was talking about. “See, I read history,” the man said. “It’s important to know history.”

  As he spoke, we pulled back into the Rosa Parks Terminal, and Pugh rose abruptly, his patience all used up. “When she was elected, I was seven years old, dog,” he noted sourly. “I wasn’t following politics then. Sorry.”

  * * *

  Dave Bing had initially pledged to serve only a single term as mayor. But by December 2009, in a year-end interview with the Free Press, the mayor reversed himself, declaring, “I never considered myself a one-term mayor. My nature is to finish what I start. Can I do that in this job? I don’t think so. It’s a ten-to-twenty-year process. I don’t know if I have that kind of time, but I’m not coming to this job saying I’m only going to do it for one term.”

  The backpedaling was both unsurprising—he was a politician, after all—but also not, as Bing hardly struck anyone as enjoying his job or being particularly engaged with it. The Detroit News reported that Bing’s workdays rarely extended past 5:00 p.m. As a public speaker, he remained leaden and stultifying, unerringly tone-deaf to the expectations of his audience. Even his storied managerial skills didn’t appear to be so hot. He bragged in an early interview about not “believ[ing] in emails,” preferring to walk down the hall and look a person in the face, which, while presumably meant to convey old-timey virtue and simplicity, came off rather like a stubborn and bizarrely inefficient personal quirk. And in truth, becoming a wealthy auto-parts supplier in Detroit doesn’t necessarily prove any sort of genius-level business acumen, especially when you happen to be a local basketball star potential clients would be eager to meet.6

  The Bing administration’s tepid rollout of the Detroit Works project in the fall of 2010 did nothing to boost the city’s confidence in its mayor. And over the following year, it became increasingly clear that Council President Pugh and Pro Tem Brown recognized Bing’s weaknesses. Brown was said to be exploring a senate run. Pugh, meanwhile, found it less and less necessary to mask his own obvious designs on the mayor’s office. The first time we’d met, shortly before Pugh’s own election, he had tiptoed around his ambition, shifting it over to anecdotal strawmen (“There are people who walk up and say, ‘You should have run for mayor.’ Not right now. Give me four years, as we downsize and get used to that, the innovations that we bring…”), while undermining Bing via backhanded words of support (“He’s got a monumental task ahead of him, in downsizing government—and he’s the oldest man ever elected mayor in Detroit’s history.”). By the time of our bus ride, however, Pugh’s tone vis-à-vis Bing had shifted to open condescension: “All mayors have some growing pains, and obviously, Dave Bing is the quiet, unassuming type. I just don’t think he realizes the power he has. He’s too quiet. I know I would have done the right-sizing meetings a little different. There needs to be more door-knocking. People need hope. I wish Dave Bing would take the lead.”

  All of this naturally decreased Bing’s incentive to assume a conciliatory tone with the council in general and the council president in particular. In the midst of difficult negotiations over the city budget, for example, Bing’s press office coolly announced that seventy-seven public parks would close for the summer because of the council’s fiscal outrageousness—a move that ultimately forced the council to blink and restore nearly $18 million of budget cuts they’d previously overridden a Bing veto to preserve. By most other metrics, though, Bing had few wins after three years in office: crime was up, the most elementary public services (the bus system, the lighting department) remained miserable failures, and a head-turning number of high-profile city hall departures left the impression of an administration in disarray.

  While Detroit’s leadership had bickered, venture capitalist Rick Snyder had settled into the governor’s mansion in Lansing. Even more overtly than Bing, Sny
der made much of his stiffness as a public speaker, proudly describing himself as a “nerd” in his campaign ads—he injected six million dollars of his own money into the campaign, outspending his Democratic opponent four to one—and trading on the public’s stereotypical association of nerdiness with a high I.Q. and a certain level of uptightness, which Snyder implied would act as twin virtues when it came to the governance of a state in desperate need of rebuilding.

  Immediately after taking office, Snyder embraced supply-side economic solutions to address Michigan’s fiscal problems—basically, cutting taxes on most businesses while raising taxes on just about everyone else, in hopes of attracting new private-sector investment in the state. (Specifically, Snyder lowered corporate taxes by more than $1.5 billion a year, making up some of the difference by cutting state aid to colleges and universities by 15 percent, reducing K–12 education funding by $430 per pupil, and raising taxes on pensions.) More alarming still was the adoption of the Emergency Financial Manager law. As critics noted, the bill passed at a time when Michigan still had one of the country’s highest unemployment rates, which in turn was having a steep attritive effect on the state’s population (along with its tax base), the result being that dozens of local government leaders finding themselves staring down potential bankruptcy unless they enacted draconian cuts in basic city services and the unionized civic employees who provided them. At the same time, the federal government, and now the state government under Snyder, was actually reducing local aid.

  Detroit was the fattest prize, for someone willing to take the most cynical, Machiavellian view of the Snyder administration, of Republicans foaming at the mouth to snatch the city back from the liberals—a racially coded word here—who’d run it into the ground. So, as Bing and Pugh spent a few weeks arguing over control of a city-run public access cable channel (really), others worried that such machinations were soon to become wholly irrelevant. In the end, the city-state consent agreement reached was infinitely preferable to emergency management: the mayor and council would retain their power, though their budgets would now be subject to final approval by the nine-person financial oversight board. Mayor and council would solely or jointly appoint five of the board’s members; the board would not have an emergency manager’s power to discard union contracts completely. Still, the city was basically agreeing to work with the state to slash payroll, sell off city assets, and outsource departments. Though Detroit’s elected leadership remained in place, it felt less relevant than ever; its powers, in the face of unworkable math, had basically come down to managed decline.

  Gary Brown, ever the realist, was quick to declare the consent agreement a “great deal”—if, as he pointed out, “you look at the fact that we don’t have anything to bargain with, we don’t have anything to negotiate with, we’re down to the ninth hour, we don’t have any cash and we don’t have any leverage.”

  Steve and Dorota Coy, the Hygienic Dress League, in Detroit’s Brush Park. [Steve and Dorota Coy]

  12

  LET US PAINT YOUR FACTORY MAGENTA

  ONE OCTOBER MORNING, TWO hundred members of the art world elite gathered for a catered buffet brunch in the Great Hall of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The museum, a Beaux-Arts temple built in 1927, when Detroit’s auto barons had money to spare for such conspicuous cultural displays, had been chosen as the starting point of an epic performance by the contemporary art superstar Matthew Barney, best known for his series of visually ravishing and fanatically art-directed Cremaster films, and also for being the longtime companion of the Icelandic singer Björk. The event was invitation-only; of the guests, most had flown in from New York and Los Angeles, and the list included curators from the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, auctioneers from Sotheby’s, directors of the Warhol Foundation, PS1, and the Dia Foundation, along with various other artists, gallery owners, wealthy and well-connected patrons, and Björk herself.

  The Barney performance, titled Khu, would be part of his first major effort since the Cremaster films, in which the handsome ex-jock had cast himself as a grotesque, unrecognizably made-up satyr figure (Cremaster 4) or as the murderer Gary Gilmore (Cremaster 2), often spending interminable chunks of screen time doing things like (say) squeezing through a narrow tunnel lubricated with what appeared to be Vaseline. Barney’s latest project was a planned seven-chapter adaptation of the Norman Mailer novel Ancient Evenings, which concerned classical Egyptian notions of the seven stages of death and rebirth. Though Mailer’s book had been a decidedly minor late-period work, the choice, at least topic-wise, seemed fitting for Barney, whose own films, like allegorical paintings made animate, arrived coded with enough multilayered references and fraught symbolism as to conjure their own mythology. Unlike Cremaster, this new piece consisted of a series of live, site-specific, one-time-only performances, all to be filmed for some edited future use.

  Part of the reason for the setting of Khu had to do with the local connections of two of Barney’s personal heroes, who were referenced in the production: the performance artist James Lee Byars, who was born in Detroit and died, appropriately enough, in Cairo, and Harry Houdini, who died in Detroit1 and whom Barney clearly considered a sort of proto–performance artist, so much so that the great magician and escapist (played by Norman Mailer!) had already made an appearance in Cremaster 2. Barney had earlier spent time in the city filming a prologue to Ancient Evenings, which culminated with a Pontiac Trans Am driving off the Belle Isle Bridge, an homage to a Houdini stunt, performed in 1906, in which he leapt from the bridge while shackled with handcuffs. The Trans Am was supposed to be a reincarnation of the 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperial used in the smashup derby in Cremaster 3.

  At the brunch, I ate some fresh fruit and a made-to-order omelet. While I was standing in line for the fruit, a Detroit artist told me how, while taking Björk on a tour of his neighborhood the day before, he’d pointed out a foreclosed home he hoped to buy, with plans of transforming the yard into a skateboarder’s half-pipe. Björk, misunderstanding, had cried, delighted, “You’re turning the houses into pipe organs? What a great idea!”

  After brunch, we filed onto the tour buses that would shuttle us to the first act of the performance. The buses embarked upon a leisurely caravan through the city, pausing in front of the abandoned train station and cruising past the more mundane ruins scarring every other block. A chic British gallerist in her sixties sat beside me for the tour. She said she’d been one of the earliest champions of Barney’s work. When we passed the fourteen-story Wurlitzer Building—built in 1926, empty since 1982—her eyes lit up. She told me the Wurlitzers were old family friends. Turning to one of her traveling companions, a young, long-haired artist who looked like a guitar tech for a heavy metal band, she exclaimed, “Neville! We should buy one of these buildings for a dollar!” Everyone around us laughed.

  Eventually our buses parked on a residential street a mile or so west of downtown. A couple of guys in hooded sweatshirts watched from the front lawn of their dilapidated apartment complex as we exited the tour buses and were directed into a moldering two-story glue factory, where folding chairs had been set up on the main floor, along with standing-room spots on a second-level loft. We entered the scene in medias res: a group of assembly line workers toiled at a long bench, meticulously assembling about a dozen junkyard viols. The workers, for the most part burly men with walrus mustaches, ponytails, and UAW Local 600 T-shirts, looked authentically working class, and the “set,” likewise, felt “real,” from the foreboding hook dangling from the ceiling to the defunct heavy machinery crowding the perimeter. It was unclear which (if any) elements of the set had been found and which had been constructed by Barney, who was known for his fastidious attention to the tiniest sculptural details. I didn’t find it impossible to imagine a team of art interns distressing freshly painted walls with specially designed dust applicators and hand flakers. Barney himself was nowhere to be seen; I was told that he was directing the scene from an undisclosed location.

&n
bsp; On the assembly line, the workers were employing Fordist manufacturing techniques, each applying himself to a single, specific task, from drawing strings along the necks of the instruments to soldering their bodies into place. As each viol was completed, a musician appeared from the wings and began to play a tuneless dirge, the size and cacophony of the band growing with every finished instrument. The workers, meanwhile, remained bent to their individual jobs, proceeding at a punishingly unhurried pace. This continued for at least a half hour, giving viewers plenty of time to absorb every sarcophagal detail of the decaying factory space.

  I wondered if the screeching hideousness of the tune was distracting to the instrument makers, and how it must feel for an hourly worker in Detroit to playact his or her trade in a performance with a reputed budget of five million dollars for an audience of the cultural elite. I noticed that the actor James Franco had fallen asleep in the front row. Maybe one day the only factory work left in Detroit would be stylized performance art—manufacturing as historical reenactment!

  Upon leaving the glue factory, we marched on a gangplank, single file, onto a two-hundred-foot barge that took us on a journey down the Rouge River, through the heart of Detroit’s industrial history—not only past the Rouge plant but under Gothic drawbridges and alongside factory smokestacks spewing actual flame, until it began to feel as if we were traveling back in time to some extinct era. Which, of course, we sort of were. It was a cold and wet afternoon, and the grey midwestern sky looked especially vast and portentous. Aside from Björk, who, being from Iceland, had dressed appropriately for the weather (in a warm-looking parka and headwrap), many of us shivered on the open-air deck, occasionally taking seats on a tiered row of damp girders lining the starboard of the barge like bleachers, while helicopters buzzed overhead to film the forensic investigation of the drowned Trans Am, fished from the water with a massive crane and deposited on the deck. A smaller motorized boat circled in our wake, a horn section on its own deck serenading us with blasts of free jazz. Later, while a pair of male twins sang threatening operatic arias, the remains of the Trans Am were removed from the barge and melted in the furnaces of a gargantuan multistory foundry, as several dozen other laborers swarmed like ants in a yawning quarry. The rain and wind pounded out such a squall by the end that most of us fled to the tour buses, missing the coda, the release of a live vulture.