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

by Mark Binelli

  That said, any potential Detroit arts renaissance remains in its earliest phase of development, more about insane real estate opportunities and the romantic vision of a crumbling heartland Berlin—basically, vicarious wish fulfillment by coastal arts types living in long-gentrified cities—than an overarching homegrown aesthetic. The rise of a new infrastructure catering to the incoming “creatives” in neighborhoods like Midtown and Corktown, such as the planned Whole Foods, had an undeniable tangibility. But the changes felt miniscule in comparison with the problems facing the rest of the city.

  Derrick May, my neighbor on Service Street, had a unique perspective on cultural bubble economies, having been a prime instigator behind another of Detroit’s stabs at an arts-driven reinvention. At that time—the late eighties and early nineties—Detroit was becoming known internationally for techno music. May and two of the acknowledged cocreators of the genre, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson, had actually grown up in the semirural town of Belleville (much closer to Ann Arbor than to Detroit), where they’d bonded as African Americans in a predominantly white high school. Later, they’d moved into the city and helped to colonize Service Street, artsy black gentrifiers interested less in Motown than in Kraftwerk, the reclusive German electronic music duo portrayed in their press and album photographs as robotic mannequins.

  In Detroit, a local disc jockey called the Electrifying Mojo played Kraftwerk’s 1981 album, Computer World, in its entirety nearly every night when it was released. The group’s biggest (really, only) hit in the United States, “Autobahn,” a Teutonic celebration of the open road—minimalist, repetitive, with a synthesized electronic pulse and the stray cyborg vocal effect—presages techno from a compositional standpoint, to be sure, but also on the pure level of vibe: Detroit techno was driving music, created in the Motor City and tailored perfectly to the city’s endless highways and boulevards. Wildly cinematic, the songs unspooled perfectly alongside the scenes flashing across one’s windshield—all of that empty space, punctuated by the dark shapes of unlit buildings, shadowy figures, strobed bursts of color from the occasional working streetlamp.7

  And for a brief moment it seemed as if this weird microgenre might have a shot at commercial success. The May-produced compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, its title an obvious play on Motown’s old slogan “The Sound of Young America,” came out just as rave culture was beginning to explode in the United Kingdom. Back in the day, May told me, there would be dozens of guys hanging out in front of the studios on Service Street, waiting to drop off demos. Detroit suddenly had new cachet, the city itself becoming a key aspect of the mystique of techno music and its mysterious, faceless creators.

  “We never thought of this music as anything other than our own,” May told me one evening. “The same question I always get asked, in Europe or Asia or wherever I’m traveling, is basically, and it’s never phrased exactly this way, but it’s, ‘How did three black guys from Detroit’—from this shithole of a city—‘make this music?’ They don’t mean it in the way you’d imagine: ‘How did three dumb-ass black niggers do this?’ They sincerely want to know how this music came from us. From this place.”

  But after the initial hype in Europe, which resulted in Saunderson scoring Top Ten hits with his group Inner City and May turning down a chance to appear on Top of the Pops, techno, in the States, and even in its birthplace, Detroit, settled back into its natural place as a decidedly underground phenomenon. While techno has added to the city’s mythic image abroad, it provided little in the way of lasting transformative effects. In past interviews, May would say things like, “If this [techno] happened in New York, everyone responsible would be considered geniuses. But it happened in Detroit, so we get nothing.”

  Today, May no longer seems bitter. He makes a healthy living flying to Europe or Asia nearly every weekend, DJing at some club where nostalgic fans freak out the same way baby boomers would if Eric Clapton showed up to play a local rock bar in Scranton. “What’s happening in Detroit today is almost like Barack Obama being elected president,” May told me. “I love Barack Obama. But he’s only president because George Bush was an absolute fuck-up. In my book, the same level of desperation is happening in Detroit. The powers that be have tried everything else, and they don’t know what to do, so now what they’re doing is nothing. And in the process of doing nothing, the creative class is finally being let free to roam the city for the first time since I was a young kid.

  “I want to try to be optimistic, like everyone else,” he went on. “But the fight here has just begun. A couple of blocks of commerce in Corktown is in no way the resurgence of a city. Detroit is the next Brooklyn? That’s just a false sense of romanticism. That person has not driven here much. Let’s see how these people feel after a couple of winters or when they start having kids—let’s see if they can still hang then.”

  May had invited me to his place to watch the sunset. I’d figured he must have had a rooftop deck I’d somehow never noticed before, but when I arrived, May and his friends were sitting on folding chairs on the sidewalk in front of his building, sipping cava from plastic cups. Only in Detroit, I thought, would twilight at the edge of an eight-lane boulevard strike anyone as a relaxing proposition.

  Behind the warehouses of Eastern Market, though, the sky had gone a lovely, cool shade of pink. Occasionally, a single car would seem to float past on Gratiot, otherwise deserted. The tires, isolated from regular traffic noise, created a soothing tidal sound.

  May told me foreign interviewers, once they got through asking him how techno could possibly have come out of a place like Detroit, always had a second question: So, why didn’t you ever leave?

  The roof of the abandoned Packard automotive plant, winter 2009. The artist Scott Hocking, who created the television installation, is on the left; the author is second from left. [Corine Vermeulen]

  13

  FABULOUS RUIN

  DURING THE FATEFUL SUMMER of 1967, a Chilean electrical engineering student at the University of Notre Dame named Camilo José Vergara read an article in Time about Gary, Indiana, a debased steel town about an hour west of South Bend (and home of rising Motown stars the Jackson Five). Fascinated, to an immediate and unseemly degree, by the salacious descriptions of the lawless-sounding “paradise” (Time’s word) for vice-seeking Chicago businessmen (Chicago’s brothels and illegal gambling dens having been largely shuttered by the first Mayor Daley), Vergara quickly made the drive with a friend, arriving on an uncomfortably sweltering summer afternoon. A foul odor hung over the city—exhaust from the steel plants, which burned Vergara’s eyes. Years later, though, he would recall the day as “one of the most memorable” of his college experience. Eventually returning to Gary “perhaps a hundred times,” in his own estimation, Vergara began to photograph largely ignored sections of the ghetto—fortresslike public housing projects, numbingly decaying storefronts, churches and train stations fallen into ruin—his very alienness (not African American, not even North American) becoming an asset to his sociological observations, to which he bore an untainted curiosity, the willingness of the freshly disembarked to brazenly stare, especially in directions natives no longer bothered to look.

  Vergara spent the next decades photographing on Chicago’s South Side, in South Central Los Angeles, in Harlem and the South Bronx, Camden and Newark, dubbing the growing body of work his “Smithsonian of Decline.” In 1987, he made his first photographs of Detroit, but only added the city to his “collection” six years later, when he began documenting its grand ruins in earnest. His focus remained on the awesome collection of prewar skyscrapers clustered in the city center, most of which now stood hauntingly empty. At night, Vergara noticed how different they looked from historical photographs, when the high-rises were still occupied and lights ornamented their long shafts. By the time he arrived, the only sources of illumination came from street lamps, and maybe, on clear evenings, the moon, casting the towers in a shadowy, enigmatic chiaroscuro, as if dram
atically lit for an old film noir.

  In 1995, in a deadpan, deliberatively provocative essay, Vergara proposed the city “place a moratorium on the razing of skyscrapers, our most sublime ruins, and instead … stabilize them,” setting aside a dozen or so downtown blocks as an “urban Monument Valley” that would act as a “memorial of our throwaway cities,” an “American Acropolis”:

  Midwestern prairie would be allowed to invade from the north. Trees, vines, and wildflowers would grow on roofs and out of windows; wild animals, goats, squirrels, possum, bats, owls, ravens, snakes, insects, and perhaps even an occasional bear would live in the empty behemoths, adding their calls, hoots, and screeches to the smell of rotten leaves and animal droppings.

  Acknowledging the Swiftian nature of his essay, Vergara called it “an immodest proposal.” At the time, Detroiters were predictably outraged. John Slater, the head of Detroit’s Planning Commission, insisted, “For [Vergara] to suggest that this is an empty ghost town is bizarre.” The New York Times managed to find an actual Greek, Constantine Roumel, to say—even better: “sputter”—“American Acropolis! It’s an insult to America, to what America stands for. It’s an insult to the classical Greeks.” Roumel was one of the owners of the David Stott Building, a gorgeous thirty-seven-story art deco tower built in 1929 and taking its cues from Eliel Saarinen’s famous second-place proposal for Chicago’s Tribune Tower; at the time, Roumel was attempting to lure tenants with office rents as low as ten dollars per square foot. “For a city to set itself as the world’s symbolic ruin—that is not going to attract tourists from Peoria, Illinois,” Michael Goodin, a writer at Crain’s Detroit Business, told Vergara. “The Romans, that is a dead civilization. Americans [sic] are not a dead civilization.”

  * * *

  For decades, a succession of city officials had struggled mightily to rebrand Detroit’s battered image. Their schemes had included casino gambling, an Eighties festival mall, new ballparks, hosting a Grand Prix, hosting a Super Bowl, even commissioning (this was Mayor Young, in 1984) Motown Records founder Berry Gordy (who had fled Detroit for Los Angeles in the early 1970s, taking the entire Motown operation with him) to write a theme song for the city modeled after Frank Sinatra’s “Theme from New York, New York,” which had been a hit a few years earlier. It being Detroit, a blacker member of the Rat Pack, Sammy Davis Jr., was conscripted to handle the vocals, but sadly, Gordy’s song, “Hello, Detroit,” failed to burn up the charts. (Except in Belgium, where, inexplicably, it reached number one.)1

  But now much of the attention being showered on Detroit from the trendiest quarters came in no small measure thanks to the city’s blight. Detroit’s brand had become authenticity, and a key component of this authenticity had to do with the way the city looked.

  Would fixing the very real problems faced by Detroiters, I began to wonder, mean inevitably robbing Detroit of some part of its essential Detroitness?

  This is not exactly a question of gentrification: when your city has seventy thousand abandoned buildings, it will not be gentrified anytime soon. Rather, it’s one of aesthetics. The Quicken Loans CEO Dan Gilbert had been an active proponent of finding uses for the very buildings Vergara had suggested turning into a homegrown Acropolis, but most of the other big-money developers in Detroit (such as they were) had brought with them a suburban vision, made manifest in the dated mall architecture of the new Compuware Headquarters or the MotorCity Casino’s Reno manqué attempts at high roller gaudiness. The latter complex, seventeen stories tall, with green and purple and pink bands of neon slashing its girth, throbbed every night on the nonexistent skyline like an epic, failed art installation, maybe something by Donald Judd’s cousin from South Beach. The MotorCity Casino was owned by the Ilitch family, the local Little Caesars Pizza tycoons, who had also bought and beautifully restored downtown’s grand Fox Theatre—while, at the same time, leveling countless other historic buildings (like the old Motown Headquarters) to make more parking lots for their baseball and hockey arenas. (The Ilitches owned both the Tigers and the Red Wings.)

  In Detroit, you can’t talk aesthetics without talking ruin porn, a term that had recently begun circulating in the city. Detroiters, understandably, could get quite touchy about the way descriptions and photographs of ruined buildings had become the favorite Midwestern souvenirs of visiting reporters. Dateline: NBC had devoted large portions of a particularly derided hour-long special on the city to sweeping aerial shots of ravaged neighborhoods. Even my own Rolling Stone story on the auto industry had opened with a two-page photo spread, the uppermost panel depicting an antique postcard image of Ford’s Highland Park plant in 1916 (identical rows of open-topped Model T Fords spread across the lot, the gold-tinted steering wheels looking like the raised shields of a brutally disciplined chariot army maintaining tight formation), while below, a row of junked, snow-covered cars foregrounded a present-day shot of the same plant from the same angle.

  Ruin porn was generally assessed the same way as the other kind, with you-know-it-when-you-see-it subjectivity. Everyone seemed to agree that Camilo Vergara’s work was not ruin pornography, though he’d arguably been the Hefner of the genre. Likewise, the local artist Lowell Boileau, who, around the same time Vergara proposed his American Acropolis, began posting his own photographs on a website called the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, also received a pass, perhaps because he approached his subject from a native’s perspective, and with unabashed nostalgia. Photojournalists, on the other hand, were almost universally considered creeps pandering to a sticky-fingered Internet slide-show demographic. To some extent the critique had been just: as with stories about misbehaving teenage starlets, editorial love of Detroit came with obvious exploitative commercial reward: a link to a titillating shot of Detroit’s architectural dishabille could always be counted to rise to the top of your website’s “most emailed” lists, which was, of course, the bottom line.

  At the same time, it wasn’t fair to automatically condemn all such photography. As often as portraits of the city’s ruins might be distorted and sensationalized, blanket condemnations felt equally disingenuous. Ignoring the blight altogether would have been reportorial malpractice akin to writing a travel piece about Malibu and failing to mention the Pacific Ocean.

  Far more noxious, to my mind, than the commercial carpetbaggers were the hobbyists. One of the more fascinating Internet-age curiosities marking the rise of ruin-as-aesthetic-object were the number of websites dedicated to the so-called “urban explorer,” or “urbexer” for short. Urbexers snuck into abandoned urban structures (or shopping malls, or subway tunnels) and took photographs of what they found, the use of the term “explorer” being especially telling: like the gentlemen explorers of yore (Stanley and Fawcett and Livingstone, or their fictional counterparts Allan Quatermain and Indiana Jones), who braved the darker continents for untold riches, the urbexers tended to be white and (at least the ones I met) from relatively privileged socioeconomic backgrounds. Unlike their predecessors, though, the only treasures the urbexers hoped to bring back to civilization were high-res digital camera images to post on Flickr streams and anonymous message boards as proof of their spectacular stealth missions, often presented with startling incuriosity as to the human history of the places being explored, if not outright ghoulish glee.

  One group of urbexers began calling themselves the Survival Crackas, after they discovered an old can of Civil Defense “Survival Crackers” in the ruins of the Packard plant; they posted videos of themselves smashing through abandoned housing complexes, theaters, even psychiatric hospitals and prisons, all set to aggressive heavy metal and hip-hop sound tracks. Another white urbexer in his twenties once regaled me with the story of the time he’d been startled by a homeless man passed out in a room of a long-vacant high-rise apartment. Only later, he noted coolly, did he think to wonder if the guy might have been dead.

  For all of the local complaints about ruin porn, outsiders were not alone in their fascination. Among my circle of frien
ds and acquaintances, Phil staged secret, multi-course gourmet meals, prepared by well-known chefs from local restaurants, in abandoned buildings like the old train station. John and his buddies played ice hockey on the frozen floors of decrepit factories, and occasionally watched Tigers games from the roofs of empty skyscrapers nearby. (Well, they listened to the games on the radio. From such a distance, the players, they said, looked like little moving dots.) Travis was hired to shoot suburban wedding photographs in the ruins of the Packard plant and a woman who had moved to Detroit from Brooklyn began to take nude photographs of herself in wrecked spaces (thrusting the concept of ruin porn to a less metaphorical level). The Cupcake Girls, a coed arts collective originally from Portland, or maybe it was San Francisco, arranged an installation of little cupcake statues in the window of a long-shuttered bakery in Upper Chene. A few days later, someone firebombed the place. People debated whether or not this was a coincidence.

  * * *

  One afternoon, I tagged along on a tour of the Packard plant with Scott Hocking, an artist who had been exploring Detroit’s ruins for years, and who had been asked to show around a young visiting scholar from Denmark. The scholar had striking, pale-blue eyes and a bird’s face. Her thesis focused on creative ways the residents of cities like Detroit attempted to reclaim their postindustrial detritus. Scott, precisely the sort of person she had in mind, built wild installations in abandoned buildings, using only material found onsite.2

  Scott had recently assembled a new piece in the Packard. We walked over there with Corine Vermeulen, the photographer who had taken me to the Zone, and Faina Lerman, a Latvian performance artist whose family had moved to Detroit in 1980. It was December, so we all wore puffy winter coats as we marched down the middle of the street, our boots crunching the surface of a deeply impacted layer of snow and ice. We eventually reached the train tracks that had once carried freight directly in and out of the sprawling complex. Scott made a joke about finding a dead body, a nod to the movie Stand By Me, but none of the foreign-born members of our party seemed to get the reference.