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

by Mark Binelli

  At the after-party, in line at the open bar, I ran into one of the curators and asked how Barney’s location scouts had chosen the foundry. “Oh,” she explained, “actually, none of the foundries they looked at were the right size. He built that one.”

  Later, I discovered the blue-collar workers toiling on the viol assembly line were not, in fact, blue-collar workers but art-world types who had helped with the shoot, news that had the effect of making me slightly more depressed.

  * * *

  By the standard of media-friendliness, the only serious competitor to urban farming as a saving-Detroit story was the arrival of the artists: they were scooping up houses for a hundred bucks; they were repurposing defunct Albert Kahn plants as miles of studio space; they came to Detroit from Brooklyn, because Detroit was the new Brooklyn; they came to Detroit from Europe, because Detroit was the next Berlin. Artists froze a vacant house solid and David Byrne showed up at a Mike Kelly opening (and blogged about how much he’d loved cycling around town), and the crème de la crème of single-named street artists (Swoon! Banksy! Retna!) made pilgrimages to tag our aging factory walls. During a talk at Cooper Union, Patti Smith advised young artists in the audience to move to Detroit. (She also mentioned Poughkeepsie, so perhaps she’d just been listing places cheaper than New York. In any case, she said Detroit first.)

  Serious people—most vociferously, urbanist Richard Florida—had long been making the case for the ways in which discarded Rust Belt cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh might obtain tangible economic benefits, could possibly save themselves, by becoming more like Austin and San Francisco. His theory of the so-called creative class linked the success of modern cities to their ability to attract a specific genre of person, not necessarily artists and musicians but tech entrepreneurs, gays, bartenders who happened to dress stylishly or use Apple products—basically anyone who could plausibly be described as being “with it.”

  If there was a syllogism at work here—dynamic and prosperous cities tend to be attractive to urbane creative types who like dynamic and prosperous cities—nobody seemed to care. Quantifiable proof that the “creative class” brought job growth to moribund economies was hard to come by, discounting the job created for one specific person, Richard Florida, who was living in Pittsburgh at the time and who, after the success of his 2001 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, became a highly paid consultant and motivational speaker in cities desperate to soak up the talent and lucre that, according to Florida, inevitably followed the arrival of a critical mass of people who could hum at least three LCD Soundsystem songs.2 In Michigan, then Governor Jennifer Granholm had unveiled a “Cool Cities” initiative promising grants to Michigan towns, Detroit included, for rebranding efforts. On the state’s website, someone helpfully posed the possibilities. What is a cool city? the writer asked rhetorically:

  Is it a leafy, green park and an inviting public square? Or is it a sidewalk bistro and an internet café? Maybe it’s a jazz club or a coffee house that invites office workers to linger in your downtown well past 5:00 p.m. Maybe it’s nothing more extravagant—or more important—than a quality neighborhood school, a job within walking distance and a safe path for getting to both. Whatever your vision of a cool city, we are working to make that vision a reality.

  “Cool” is an amorphous term, but stretching its definition to include “public education,” “employment,” and “not being murdered on the way to work” struck me as—how would a cool person put this?—“diluting the brand, dude.”

  By 2009, however, Detroit’s reputation as a bohemian paradise was beginning to gain cultural traction, along with, increasingly, a burgeoning film scene. Cheap rent and no rules attracted the artists and musicians. The presence of the film industry, on the other hand, had come as a result of a top-down, managed economic undertaking, with the state offering preposterously large tax incentives (a 40 percent rebate of all money spent on a particular production) to filmmakers willing to shoot in Michigan. And so the appeal of Detroit for Matthew Barney—and others shooting movies in and around the city, including the makers of Transformers 3, Scream 4, A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas, and the Miley Cyrus vehicle LOL: Laughing Out Loud—was not merely aesthetic but also financial.

  People debated whether doling out such a considerable wad of incentive to Hollywood made sense for a state as revenue-poor as Michigan. Proponents portrayed cash lost in the short term as a necessary investment in exactly the sort of new industry Detroit so sorely needed; the opposition contended the public and its legislators had been dazzled by the glamour of a fickle industry that would bolt as soon as American Samoa managed to slap together an even more generous package of tax breaks.

  Still, the bill passed with bipartisan support, after which over a hundred film and television productions came to the state, with spending by film companies ballooning from $2 million to $224 million in just two years. The $1.6 million Maxsar Digital Studios opened in a retrofitted 60,000-square-foot factory in the west side suburb of Livonia. Pontiac, another suburb—so broke it had outsourced its police and fire departments and announced it would be selling city hall, the library, and two cemeteries—became home to Raleigh Studios, a $120 million facility on twenty-two acres of land, encompassing a vacant GM office building that once housed three thousand engineers, with investors including the William Morris talent agency. A senior vice president at the Motion Picture Association of America called Raleigh, which has one of the largest sound stages in the world, “the premiere studio facility in the U.S.” The place was to become, in the words of the Detroit Free Press, a “destination campus” where “laid-off autoworkers … would undergo training for production jobs.”

  Hollywood’s response to the tax credits had been immediate and high-profile. Celebrity sightings, the lights and equipment and union crew bustle—the spectacle of so many people visibly working in town, often right in the middle of the street—had even the most cynical wondering: “Detroit as the Hollywood of the Midwest: Why not?”

  * * *

  The most lavishly budgeted, surreally conspicuous of all the productions staking out beachheads in the area involved Tom Cruise—more specifically, Tom Cruise’s son, who would be making his screen acting debut in a remake of the 1980s action movie Red Dawn. The original version of the film, a Reagan-era triumphalist fantasia in which a band of American teenagers take up arms in resistance to a surprise invasion by the Soviets, had famously received funding from the National Rifle Association. The remake, which had no connection to the NRA, swapped out the Russians for Red Chinese.3

  The shoot took months, and its evidence was everywhere. One night, I stumbled across a couple of tanks parked in the middle of Fort Street, along with a Cultural Revolution–style tribunal stage and propaganda posters tacked across buildings in varying states of decline. The posters, evoking the empty sloganeering of a totalitarian leader, hailed a regime at work:

  Repairing Your Economy

  Fighting Corporate Corruption

  Restoring Your Country

  Helping You Back on Your Feet

  It all felt very meta—any of the posters could have applied to the current state of the U.S. economy—but also oddly cruel, moving somewhere beyond irony, Detroit being, after all, not merely a set designed to resemble a ruined American city but an actual ruined American city.

  Parts of the filming were scheduled to take place at my alma mater, Notre Dame, an all-boys’ Catholic high school. In 2005, in the face of declining enrollment, Notre Dame had embarked upon a familiar migration, away from Detroit to the farther-flung suburbs—in this case, from Harper Woods, sandwiched between the city proper and St. Clair Shores, all the way out to Pontiac, about thirty miles north. Harper Woods had been declining for years: there was a higher foreclosure rate in the tiny suburb than in Detroit, and the papers reported an alarming increase in home invasions and daylight carjackings. The sign outside the school, which had once alerted passersby that Notre Dame was “Home of the Fightin’ Ir
ish,” now read “99K Sq Ft School On 1.5 Acres,” along with the number of a realtor.

  The producers of Red Dawn did not want reporters around during filming and refused access to the set, but one night I snuck onto the school property, disguised in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt as a member of the crew. Inside, my old high school cafeteria, virtually unchanged since I’d been a student, had been repurposed as a catering hall for the cast and crew. Chinese actors wearing military fatigues chatted at long tables alongside “Americans” in orange prison jumpsuits. A disco ball still hung at one end of the ceiling, a last vestige of high school dances.

  Outside, the football field had become an internment camp. Earlier in the production, they’d filmed a football game; presumably tonight’s shoot would be the “after” scene, taking place later in the film, in the wake of the Chinese invasion. Semi-truck trailers, the kind used as temporary housing by FEMA, only here painted red with Communist stars, had been positioned on the field. They’d also erected a guard tower, something out of a prison yard; the American flag fluttering atop the tower had been defaced with a giant red star. The football scoreboard had been covered over with a sign, reading, in marquee-sized black lettering:

  YOU

  DESERVE

  TO BE HERE

  I climbed into the bleachers to watch for a bit. It happened to be Friday, but tonight the lights bathing the football field captured a group of Chinese soldiers with automatic weapons marching American prisoners along the forty-yard line. Someone said the guard tower was going to be blown up, but probably not for several hours. A crew guy from Los Angeles began telling me how much he loved filming in Detroit. I expected him to offer some platitudes about how friendly the locals were, but instead he gushed, “We were setting off major explosions in the middle of downtown! Seriously, man, there’s nowhere else in the country they’d let you do something like this.”

  Setting up each shot took forever, and eventually, I headed back to Service Street, where I bumped into Holice, my neighbor, who proceeded to get me very high. Afterward, I couldn’t fall asleep, and suddenly, very badly, I wanted to see my old high school consumed by a Hollywood fireball. I lay on my bed, contemplating driving all the way back to Harper Woods; with no traffic, it would be about twenty minutes via freeway. But in the end, I wasn’t feeling all that reckless, and glumly accepted the fact that I’d be missing the pyrotechnics. When I finally dozed off, my bed felt adrift on choppy waters, and I had visions of Notre Dame lit up by a string of fiery squibs.

  The next morning, I woke up very early—around 6:30—and decided, before even having coffee, to race over to the school, in hopes that maybe the explosion hadn’t happened yet. By the time I arrived, though, the cast and crew had packed up and left. All that remained were a couple of lighting trucks. The only other sign that any moviemaking had taken place was the watchtower, still standing at the edge of the football field, but in the charred, burst-headed state of a detonated firecracker. The American flag desecrated by our Chinese conquerors no longer fluttered in the wind; now, it hung limply from what was left of the tower’s roof, black and in tatters.

  * * *

  In 2011, Governor Snyder announced that the state would no longer be in the business of “picking winners” when it came to wooing job creators—all job creators would be equally welcome, which meant a phasing out of targeted tax incentives for the film industry. The invisible hand of the market responded swiftly, yanking the brakes on nearly all of the planned film shoots in Michigan. Raleigh Studios managed to stay afloat with a 3-D Disney remake of The Wizard of Oz, but by 2012 the company had defaulted on more than $600,000 in interest payments and retained a staff of only twenty. Since Governor Snyder ended the tax credits, just one other film with a budget of more than $15 million (a comedy starring Jason Segel and Emily Blunt) was attracted to the state. A report by Ernst & Young claimed that every dollar Michigan issued in tax credits generated six times the amount of economic activity (via subsidiary businesses like hotels and catering); the governor’s office countered that each dollar spent brought in only twenty-eight cents.

  The visual arts scene continued to attract attention, though. The New York Times, for example, declared Detroit “a Midwestern TriBeCa” in a front-page Fashion & Style section story illustrated entirely with photos of young white people. This was followed by a visit from Tony Goldman, the developer responsible for the gentrification of SoHo and South Beach, who came to Detroit for the first time to give a talk on how the city could become the next SoHo or South Beach.

  Goldman’s standing-room-only discussion happened to take place on Service Street, at the old Butcher & Packer shop, which had been tranformed into an arts and performance space by a guy from Brooklyn after the owners finally decided to throw in the towel and move their operation out to Madison Heights. Since settling on the block, I’d stopped into Butcher & Packer a couple of times to pick up spices for my dad and uncle, who’d gone on a sausage-making bender in the wake of their mutual retirements, and the end of the business felt like a real loss. But the new owners had done a beautiful job with the redesign: clearing out the shelving, stripping the wood floor, even—and I really didn’t think this would be possible—exorcising the overpowering spice-rack odor of the place. The first event in the new space had been an avant-garde classical music performance on a trio of microtonal pianos.

  Goldman was introduced by Phil Cooley, a bearded ex-model who owned a successful barbecue restaurant and had since become the unofficial mayor of white Detroit hipsterdom. Cooley had also been charged with giving Goldman a tour of the city, and he told the audience Goldman had been “respectful” to “the community,” unlike a number of other “people from the outside” he’d shown around. Goldman himself was dressed casually, but in clothes so obviously expensive their very casualness became another unobtainable luxury; you might one day find yourself wearing an outfit this loose-fitting yet perfectly comfortable, but it was deeply unlikely. He told us how South Beach had been a shithole (I’m paraphrasing) the first time he’d visited, but he’d had the foresight to envision “an American Riviera.” He called the oft-cited forty square miles of empty land in Detroit “scary” then added, “But what a canvas!” He also warned, ominously, of “greedy bastards” who liked to swoop into burgeoning art scenes like Detroit’s, and called his own version of gentrification “gentle-fication.”

  Goldman’s talk was necessarily facile (he’d only spent forty-eight hours familiarizing himself with the city) and riddled with empty self-help exhortations (“If you don’t have an Art Basel, make one!”). Still, people in the audience took notes. During the question-and-answer session, an earnest young man asked for book recommendations on the subject of city transformation and was directed toward an author Goldman had “heard about” but never read—Jane Jacobs.4 Goldman’s most concrete proposal was offered during an audience with Mayor Bing, whom he’d advised to give free housing to 100,000 artists.

  And yet, self-interested hype aside, Goldman did have a track record for sniffing out and cannily perceiving ways to monetize distressed neighborhoods on the cusp of gaining cultural capital. In Detroit, beyond the anecdotal evidence, empirical indicators of change began to materialize. The 2010 census, for example, revealed a head-turning spike in the number of college-educated Detroiters under the age of thirty-five—up 59 percent in a census when the overall population of the city dropped by 25 percent. By 2012, Midtown, the university district popular with young white newcomers to the city, was actually experiencing a scarcity of rental properties, with 96 percent of units occupied. Cooley’s barbecue restaurant, in nearby Corktown, did $1.8 million in sales in its first year of business and had become the anchor of a Brooklynized block of prime real estate that included a single-origin coffee shop, an artisanal cocktail bar, and a miniature boutique hotel. A youth hostel opened down the street to accomodate all the visitors from Europe and hip North American cities like Montreal and Portland. (When a friend started renting ou
t apartments on the website Airbnb, he quickly became overbooked and started turning people away.) An arts group in the Netherlands now sponsored nine-week arts residencies in Detroit; during a single visit to another arts space in Corktown (a 30,000-square-foot warehouse purchased by Cooley), I met a boat builder from Maine, a video game architect from Copenhagen, an industrial designer from San Francisco, a Los Angeles choreographer, a Detroiter who made coats for homeless people that could be turned into sleeping bags, and an American graffiti artist who’d come to Detroit via Paris.

  The economic benefits endowed a city by various arts and cultural institutions can be tricky to calculate with anything approaching precision. In its heyday, Detroit’s other great twentieth-century cultural assembly line, Berry Gordy’s Motown Records, was the largest black-owned business in the country, the aspirational nature of the music5 contributing as much to the city’s aura as the stylized, evocatively named cars rolling from the factory lots. Today, the Heidelberg Project alone draws an estimated 50,000 visitors annually, and art collectors and curators are beginning to pay serious attention to Detroit’s art output. In an interview, Jay Sanders, the cocurator of the 2012 Whitney Biennial, specifically highlighted a trip to Detroit as “having a big impact” on the emerging vision of the show, ultimately resulting in the inclusion of three Detroit artists,6 more than from any other city beyond New York and Los Angeles.