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

by Mark Binelli

  The factory, five stories, stretching across two sides of a major road, seemed to have no end. Scott said you could get lost inside, and that even he hadn’t explored every corner. Huge chunks of wall had collapsed to reveal the gray innards of the place, and gangly, stoop-backed trees hugged the walls like ivy. For years after it ceased operation, the Packard had been used as a storage facility. Scott’s new installation made use of a bunch of antique television sets he’d discovered in one of the storage sheds, and had involved his painstakingly hauling the bulky frames to a partially collapsed section of the roof.

  Now he led us through an open bay door. As if in preparation for a public burning, someone had unloaded a dense thicket of tree branches just inside the space, otherwise cavernous and empty. A section of brick had been removed from the base of a far wall, forming a tiny crawlspace. Cartoonish, illegible blue graffiti tagged the circumference of the hole. Crouching so low he practically knelt, Scott led us through the passageway. I wondered if the person who’d cut it had been thinking of Lewis Carroll, or maybe Stalker.

  On the other side of the hole, we entered a stairwell. The stairs had no railing and each step had a coarse, treacherous dusting of rubble. We climbed past broken windows overlooking a snowy graveyard, eventually coming to the top floor, where a huge portion of the roof had collapsed, flooding that end of the space with afternoon light. The covered portion of the floor remained dim and shadowy, though, only enhancing the spotlit quality of Scott’s installation. In the place where the roof had caved, he had arranged his empty television boxes on top of a number of the exposed columns, which looked like the remains of some Doric temple. It was a spectacular vision. Some of the columns had toppled over; others remained stoically upright, surrounded by boulder-sized chunks of concrete and gnarled fingers of rebar.

  We climbed up to the roof for a better look, Scott deriving a perverse pleasure from pointing out the places he suspected would soon collapse, explaining how various support pillars would buckle and the angles at which they might come to ground.3 Corine set up her tripod and took our picture as we peered over the edge. The roof was covered with snow, and in the photo, it looks as if we’re standing on a wintry plain, at the edge of a cliff, but in fact the building had been abandoned for so long that scrub grass and little trees had begun to grow on the roof and now poked up through the layer of whiteness. The post-apocalyptic grandeur of the scene momentarily silenced us, as if we were in the presence of something demanding respectful meditation—but what, exactly? If you manage to slip inside certain Detroit ruins, you are sometimes struck by their sacred aura; like cathedrals, they can feel beautiful and tragic at the same time, monuments to flawed human aspiration that, in an unintentional way, begin to approach the holy.

  It was freezing. Our fingers went numb taking notes and pictures. Faina said if the place were turned into a museum, you could fix up a little space in the corner and put in a café, make that part warm. We could hear scrappers in another part of the plant, the clattering of their equipment. Back inside, we came across another section of the building where an industrious type had dragged a couple of car seats to a scenic overlook. We saw very fresh footprints in the snow near a window.

  On one wall, someone had spray-painted a blue Krishna figure, over which someone else had written FUCK YOU BUDA.

  As we were leaving, a carload of teenage boys pulled up, looking for a way in.

  * * *

  Meditation on ruin is part of a long and noble tradition. In Renaissance Italy, antiquarians such as Leon Battista Alberti and Poggio Bracciolini began to promote the study and preservation of Roman ruins, which, to that point, had been unsystematically pushed aside as the city expanded. In some instances, great marble statues and magnificent columns were quarried and tossed into kilns, where they were burned to make lime.

  There was a contemplative aspect to the antiquarians’ work—Bracciolini’s best-known essay on the topic was called “On Vicissitudes of Fortune”—but, according to Alberti’s biographer, Anthony Grafton, they also “made fun of those who became too depressed” about the ruins, like poor, over-sensitive Cyriac of Ancona, who “seemed to mourn the fall of Rome with excessive emotion,” and who was compared by Renaissance humanist Antonio Loschi to “the man at Milan who began to cry when he heard a cantastorie, or public storyteller, sing ‘of the death of Roland, who perished seven hundred years ago in battle,’ went home still in tears, and was still weeping inconsolably at dinnertime because ‘Roland, the only defender of the Christians, is dead.’”

  My grandfather Alberti, who traced our family origins back to Florence, insisted that we were related to Leon Battista Alberti, also a Florentine, and one of the great polymaths of his day, the prototypical Renaissance Man: playwright, poet, architect, painter, mathematician, “father of Western cryptography,”4 astronomer, lawyer, and prize-winning horseman, so physically fit that he was able, according to his own possibly unreliable autobiography, Vita Anonyma, to leap over the head of another man from a standing position. Thanks to the efforts of protopreservationists like cousin Alberti, many later generations of painters and poets continued to meditate on the transitory nature of man’s greatest achievements (and their inherent folly) in the shadow of once-majestic edifices like the Baths of Caracalla, built in the early third century by the Roman emperor of the same name (well, nickname—a “caracalla” is thought to be an early form of hooded cloak that the emperor brought into fashion, which makes him sound like a rather likable tastemaker, though in fact he’s widely regarded as one of the worst emperors—Edward Gibbon describes him as “the common enemy of mankind,” despicable enough to be murdered by a member of his own entourage while stopping by the side of the road to urinate) and pretty much entirely destroyed by the sacking Ostrogoths approximately three hundred years later.

  The baths inspired paintings by Giovanni Paolo Panini, for one, who imagined, in his “Statues in a Ruined Arcade” (1738), the ruins of Caracalla with enough gaping holes for small forests to poke through, the classical statues lining both sides of the walk dwarfing the humans wandering past with their dogs and lovers (Panini’s “Ruins of a Triumphal Arch,” part of the collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts, works a similar theme); as well as etchings by Panini’s younger contemporary Giovanni Paolo Piranesi, who depicted the baths in a far more advanced state of decomposition, trees growing from mossy columns and a trio of stave-wielding goatherds leading their tiny flock past toppled statuary and the remains of walls; and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820)—Shelley acknowledged that the poem-in-dramatic-form “was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla,” and in her own notes on the play, Mary Shelley described her husband wandering “among the ruins made one with Nature in their decay.”

  Perhaps not incidentally, Michigan Central Station, the best-known Detroit ruin—the Parthenon of Vergara’s American Acropolis, a towering eighteen-story Beaux-Arts train station with a lavish waiting room of marble floors and a fifty-foot ceiling—was modeled after the Baths of Caracalla. Michigan Central was built in 1913 by the same architectural firms that designed New York’s Grand Central, and it does seem perversely fitting that Detroit’s grandest husk could be interpreted as a public memorial celebrating the irrelevancy of train travel in the age of the automobile. After the station closed in 1988, a developer talked about turning the building into a casino; the current owner, Manuel “Matty” Moroun, had discussed the possibility, with Mayor Kilpatrick’s administration, of selling the station to the city as part of a scheme to turn the place into a combination police headquarters and law enforcement museum.

  Mostly, though, Moroun has allowed the station to steadily molder.5 Sitting nearly a mile and a half from the high-rises of downtown, Michigan Central looms like a Gothic castle over its humbler neighbors on Michigan Avenue. There’s a gray, sepulchral quality to the place. Standing before a ruin as monolithic as the station, it’s hard not to think of other epic-scale d
isasters that seemed engineered from above to illustrate man’s folly—as if the Titanic, after sinking, had washed ashore and been permanently beached as a warning. The ornate ground floor, with its soaring arches—this is the part of the building modeled on the baths—juts from the base of the brick tower, which, up close, draws your eyes along its facade of tightly gridded windows, nearly all broken now, giving the structure an odd, insubstantial affect, that of meshwork, or a scrim, in contrast with its dominating physical presence. In fact, the most striking thing about the train station might be the fact that, approaching from a certain angle, you can actually see right through the building. Trees have begun growing inside the tower, and in the summer, green leaves shimmer in the uppermost windows, their branches flapping so like arms my notebook read after one visit, “Suggested graffiti: Don’t Jump!”

  In the Detroit essay in Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, Geoff Dyer visits Michigan Central Station and runs into some tourists photographing the place. In a funny exchange prompted by one of the tourists remarking on how bustling the train station must have been at the height of Detroit’s production, Dyer disagrees, arguing:

  Ruins don’t encourage you to dwell on what they were like in their heyday, before they were ruins. The Coliseum in Rome or the amphitheater at Leptis Magna has never been anything but ruins. They’re eternal ruins. It’s the same here. This building could never have looked more magnificent than it does now, surrounded by its own silence. Ruins don’t make you think of the past, they direct you towards the future. The effect is almost prophetic. This is what the future will end up like. This is what the future has always ended up looking like.

  It’s true, while vacationing in Rome, after I’d spent about a year back in Detroit, I certainly didn’t find myself mentally restoring the Senate or the various temples or filling out the scene with centurions and charioteers and vestal virgins. But the past was nonetheless on my mind—the past of Keats and Shelley, when a consumptive poet might wander the same sites without security guards and throngs of German tourists, without seeing a single camera, a time when the ruins were still ruins, but desolate, abandoned, free of caretakers, not so horribly crowded. That was the heyday I dwelt upon, and I found myself feeling strangely grateful that I’d been able to experience Detroit’s ruins in their unmediated state, before someone in power wised up and appointed Vergara Minister of Tourism.

  I’m joking, but not. If the Packard, Michigan Central, and a few other iconic structures were stabilized enough for safety purposes, official guided tours would immediately become one of the most popular tourist activities in the city. Of course, there is a greater likelihood of Ford announcing, tomorrow, that the company has been pouring all of its F-150 profits into a top-secret program to develop a zero-carbon flying car, which will be built in the Packard plant and ready for market by the first quarter of 2014. Surely, though, such preservation could be managed tastefully and in a way that didn’t exploit. Beyond the stark appeal of the ruins themselves, the passing of the industrial Midwest—or at least of a certain version of the industrial Midwest, if we’re not prepared to concede its wholesale demise—is undeniably of deep historic significance. As Francis Grunow of the Detroit Vacant Property Campaign told me, “I don’t see the ruins as a negative. I’ve never been to Rome or Athens. But the only thing I know about Rome is the Forum and the Coliseum and the only thing I know about Athens is the Acropolis. Could some of the buildings in Detroit become sculptural—say, lit at night? But it’s a tough argument here. This is the city where we invented the mechanism by which history has no meaning, where last year’s model has no value.”

  Detroiters themselves would likely be split over such a proposition, along racial and generational fault lines. Anecdotally, though, I suspect this might hold up if actual ruin-related polling were conducted, black Detroiters tend toward the unsentimental when it comes to the old buildings and battles to save them. University of Michigan professor Angela Dillard, a black Detroiter in her forties, once told me, “When people come to town, I won’t do the ruins tour anymore. I’m an advocate for tearing that stuff down. That old Packard building? That could come down in an afternoon. I think they ought to mail the train station to some Scandinavian country, if they love it so much.”

  But the tours go on, in an unofficial capacity. One afternoon at the Packard plant, I ran into a family from Paris. The daughter said she’d read about the building in Lonely Planet; her father had a camcorder hanging around his neck. Their previous stop has been Michigan Central. Another time, while conducting my own tour for an out-of-town guest, a group of German college students drove up. When queried as to the appeal of Detroit, one of them gleefully exclaimed, “I came to see the end of the world!”

  * * *

  One evening, I went to hear a talk on the ruins of Detroit taking place in a warehouse and occasional performance space in Eastern Market. The speaker, Jim Griffoein, authored the thoughtful local blog Sweet Juniper. His writing centered on life as a stay-at-home-dad in Detroit. Prior to moving back to Michigan, where he’d grown up (in Kalamazoo), he’d worked as a lawyer in the Bay Area, but he had quit his job to write and take care of his children. His wife still practiced law, and on the blog, he described his family as “just two more yuppies raising their kids in the most dangerous city in America.” Close to two hundred guests packed the warehouse, most seated on folding chairs. Griffoein, a thirty-something white guy with a scruffy beard dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt, was introduced by the academic who had organized the event, a statuesque blond woman from Germany.

  On Sweet Juniper, Griffoein had posted a number of ruin shots: “feral” houses almost completely overgrown with vegetation, a decommissioned public school book depository in which trees had begun growing out of the piles of rotting textbooks. But he apparently possessed a special license to publish such images, as he spent much of his talk denouncing lazy out-of-town journalists who use Detroit’s ruins as a convenient recession-year symbol for the end of the American Dream. (In fact, Griffoein might have been the one to coin the term “ruin porn,” in an interview with Vice magazine.) The lecture included a funny story about a call Griffoein had received from a Hollywood producer regarding an idea for a television pilot (in which a group of Canadian autoworkers win $38 million in a lottery and decide to buy Detroit) and a discussion of the fact that Germans actually have a specific word for the love of ruins, ruinenwert.6 Griffoein could also be exasperatingly self-congratulatory, as when he exhortated the crowd to “take ownership of these ruins,” adding, “We’re not gonna let New York City reporters come here and define us!”

  During the question-and-answer period, a stylishly dressed African American woman in her fifties stood up to make a contrarian point: that devotees of the ruined buildings should be aware of the way in which the objects of their affection left “retinal scars” on the children of Detroit, contributing to a “significant part of the psychological trauma” inflicted on them on a daily basis. “I appreciate the humility with which you approach this topic,” she told Griffoein, but then added, “It’s one thing to romanticize this level of destruction. But to live with it is very psychically traumatic.” Glancing around the lily-white audience—there were four other black people in the room—she went on, “I don’t want to insult anybody. But when you talk about how ‘we’ need to take this city back, I look at this room, and I’m not sure what ‘we’ you’re talking about.”

  After the talk, I introduced myself to the woman, whose name was Marsha Cusic. It turned out we were practically neighbors: she lived in one of the Lafayette Park townhouses. Cusic wore round, chunky framed glasses and a colorful wrap, and her hair spilled out in long, thin locks from under a matching head scarf. She’d grown up in Highland Park, but her father, the late Joe Von Battle, had been in the music business in Detroit, running a much-loved record shop on Hastings Street. John Lee Hooker, as an aspiring bluesman, had frequented Von Battle’s shop, where Von Battle made t
he first recording of a young Aretha Franklin, as well as a number of sermons by her father, the Reverend C. L. Franklin, and records by Hooker, Jackie Wilson, and Sonny Boy Williamson, among others. Cusic, who worked as an executive assistant to a Detroit judge, was writing her own book about her father, so she was reluctant to say more on the topic, but she agreed to take me on a driving tour of the Detroit of her youth.

  We met up on a Sunday afternoon. Cusic drove us by the location of her father’s original store—roughly on a stretch of Interstate 75 that runs through the former Black Bottom neighborhood. En route to the site of his second store on Rosa Parks Boulevard (12th Street in Von Battle’s day), we passed the house (now museum) on West Grand Boulevard where Berry Gordy founded Motown Records, “Hitsville U.S.A.” still scrawled in cursive on its white frame.

  “My father hated that shit,” Cusic said. “We would drive past here every time I came to work with him. I’d try to play the Supremes. He’d tell me to turn it down, that they couldn’t sing. Same kind of things I say when I hear rap music.”

  We turned onto Rosa Parks. Cusic pointed out the vacant lots on both sides of the boulevard. “At the time, all of this was stores and businesses,” she said. “There would have basically been another whole row of buildings between us and those houses back there.” She pointed to a row of residential homes set far back from the street. “All burned. It’s missing an entire layer of history.”

  The intersection of 12th Street and Clairmount had been the epicenter of the 1967 civic unrest, the location of the blind pig raided by police on the night of July 23. Cusic’s father’s record store was just a few blocks south. Cusic said that the morning after the riot began, you could see the smoke in Highland Park, three miles away. “It started up past that light,” she said, pointing north. We had pulled over at Euclid, near where her father’s store had stood. “And then it started moving this way. My father came down with his gun, but the National Guard eventually moved him out. He assumed the guards would be protecting his store. And it wasn’t burned. But it was completely trashed and destroyed. There was lots of water damage from the fire hoses, because there were so many other burning buildings nearby. He’d written ‘Soul Brother’ on the window, which was discomfiting.” Cusic paused, then said, “I felt embarrassed for him, that he felt like he had to do that. He was older. He hated all of that black nationalism. I was thirteen at the time, and I was already getting into it. But if he saw Muhammad Ali on TV, he’d say, ‘I’m not calling him that—it’s Cassius Clay!’