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

by Mark Binelli

  “Everyone likes to point to the riot as the moment everything went wrong in Detroit,” Cusic went on. “But you have to understand the idea of a nodal point. It’s the same way a tea kettle heats up and heats up and only at the very end does it whistle. It’s easy to look at the riot as that nodal point, but really, you’re ignoring all of the heat that came before.”

  Over forty years later, there was still a row of torched storefronts on one of the corners of 12th and Clairmount, though nothing remained on the corner where the blind pig had stood.

  Cusic wanted to make sure we saw some handsomer neighborhoods, so we continued up through Palmer Park and Boston-Edison, with their mansion-sized homes the equal of anything in Grosse Pointe. We also detoured into Highland Park, and even there she turned up a handful of attractive residential streets lined with immaculate bungalows. This was where Cusic had grown up. When her family had first moved in, she said, the area had been almost entirely white, primarily automobile executives.

  She pulled to a stop at the corner of California and John R, where a two-story wood-framed home was boarded-up and severely burned. “This was my house,” she said. Cusic hadn’t mentioned that we would be driving by her childhood home, or that it had burned. She had actually been living there until fairly recently, with her husband at the time, after her mother had become ill. The place had been damaged in an electrical fire. Luckily, no one had been home.

  “I still have books in there,” Cusic said. She’d begun removing things, but her brother had made her stop. Too dangerous. Part of the roof had already collapsed. Cusic pointed out her bedroom, on the second floor, overlooking the backyard, once lush with trees. “Oh my Lord,” she said, tearing up. After the fire, she’d signed the deed of the house over to a man who lived down the street, wanting to wash her hands of the place. It was too painful to deal with, and this guy had just fixed up another house nearby, so she’d trusted him to do the right thing. But he’d left the house to rot, and since then she’d heard he was moving away. A realtor’s sign hung in one of the windows. She jotted down the number, and then we drove on.

  Eventually, we ended up in Corktown, the formerly Irish neighborhood adjacent to the old train station, which has become a tiny pocket of gentrification. Cusic pointed out a chicken coop in an urban farmer’s backyard. “Chickens in Corktown,” she said. “Some of these neighborhoods, they’re turning back into what people left behind in the South.” We passed a couple of young white guys with beards standing on a corner, waiting for a light to change. “Some of the people coming here bring a sort of bacchanal spirit—like they’re out on the frontier and they can do anything,” Cusic said. I agreed that certain of the new residents carried a degree of arrogance. “There’s a word for it,” Cusic said. “‘White supremacy.’ I don’t care if it’s young people. It’s the same thing. They do it, too.” I brought up urbexing, though did not use that word. “People don’t understand how offensive that is to us. Just the arrogance of it. What do you think would happen if four black kids went into one of those buildings?” Cusic asked. “They’d be arrested. White kids? ‘All right, go home, son.’ Freezing houses. Detroit isn’t some kind of abstract art project. It’s real for people. These are real memories. Every one of these houses has a story.”

  We stopped for lunch at a little French bistro. Cusic told me she had a grown son who moved to Los Angeles for work, and a sister in Atlanta. Cusic still hadn’t visited her sister, and had even been reluctant to go out west to see her son. She worried she wouldn’t want to come back.

  * * *

  Professional photographers, post-Vergara, have continued to follow his lead. The year after the economic crash, the New York Times T Magazine, which covers fashion and design, published a brief article (together with an online sideshow) titled “Ruin With a View” about a pair of Detroit-themed photography books: Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled and Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s The Ruins of Detroit. In his afterword to Detroit Disassembled, which begins with the unfortunate sentence, “My initial visit to Detroit started with a dinner in Paris,” Moore touches on all of the familiar tropes of the ruin tourist: old carpets turned to moss, pheasants flying from the fields behind crumbling Brush Park mansions. He describes Detroit as a city “whose decomposition is barely comprehensible,” a place that has moved “beyond decay into a surreal landscape, where the past is receding so quickly that time itself seems to be distorted.”

  While this line is a nice reference to one of the most famous images in Moore’s book, a close-up of a clock hanging on the peeling wall of the long-abandoned Cass Technical High School, its face half-melted in a real-life imitation of a Dali painting, it also rings false. Detroit, if anything, is a place where the past cannot be shook loose. It hangs on, tenaciously, creeping over the city like a slow-growing mold, until—this begins to seem inevitable, if you get into a certain mood—the entire place will be nothing but past. For Moore, who, according to his afterword, ended up spending “nearly three months” in Detroit over the two-year period following his Parisian dinner, perhaps it seemed as if the decay had happened at some accelerated pace, stealing into the city overnight—when in fact, it’s been an ongoing process for a half-century or more, only the layers of dust getting thicker with each passing year.

  I do love that Dali clock, though. The face is some sort of plastic overlay, with the melting taking place in the upper left and right quadrants, leaving only the latest hours visible. The twelve has been stretched into what now looks like Arabic lettering, or a child’s drawing of a long-barreled gun, and the remainder of the plastic has shriveled and curled, hanging loosely over the hour and minute hands, which are frozen at about seven of four. It’s the color of plaque on teeth or Caucasian skin of a certain shading, a comparison the looseness, the way the face (“face”!) droops, also calls to mind.

  The final image in Moore’s book remains my other favorite. It’s the old Cooper Elementary building, the school where Corine and I took refuge in the Zone, shot by Moore as a distant shell on the horizon, gray clouds amassed above and a marshy field of tall grass and flora blanketing the landscape in every other direction, the building’s gaping, two-tiered windows suggesting columned Senatorial antiquity. Most of the flowers, Corine had told me that afternoon, were wild, but if you walked around in warmer months, she said, you could still find remnants of once-tended gardens. One afternoon, Corine had even stumbled across a patch of tulips. Being Dutch, she plucked them; they reminded her of home.

  The following spring, I returned to the Zone. I was crossing a field when I heard what, later, I realized must have been the sound of water running into a sewer drain covered by grass. Just for a moment, though, I found myself looking around and thinking, “Wow, there must be a stream nearby. Someone should really get a picture of that.”

  CONCLUSION

  THE WRITERS, THE BUILDERS, the hydroponic farmers—we all came to see the future, but three years later, none of use could say which version of the city would win the day, which Detroit would prove the more useful harbinger. With the shortfalls of capitalism on garish display around the world, logging datelines in, well, close your eyes and spin the globe like a roulette wheel, it doesn’t matter—Athens, Cairo, Montreal, Santiago, Stockton, Jefferson County, Zuccotti Park—I knew the obvious choice: Detroit the cautionary tale; Detroit the forsaken; Detroit the city of outlaws and eviction and perpetual fire.

  But as the recession ground on, I noticed a fascinating reversal of fortune taking place. As the country felt increasingly shrouded by a dark, pessimistic mood, Detroit had begun to receive its best press in decades. President Obama, quite understandably, had decided to make the auto-industry bailout a centerpiece of his reelection campaign. (When Obama made an appearance at Chrysler’s Jefferson Avenue assembly plant, I watched from the press scrum, wondering when they would be unfurling the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner.) But the Detroit comeback narrative was proving infectious, even if people who lived here knew better
. Americans, it turned out, wanted uplifting stories now, stories of the Horatio Alger variety. We craved miracles: Ford inventing the twentieth century in a backwater called Highland Park, a kid from the Brewster Projects figuring out a way to make black music the Sound of Young America, Houdini emerging from the frozen Detroit River long after he should have drowned.1

  The notion of a Detroit rebound became Chicken Soup for the Post-American Soul. And it made a kind of sense; upon receipt of a cancer diagnosis, one yearns to hear about the woman who not only licked it but ran a marathon the following spring, the guy whose doctor informed him he had six months to live twelve years ago. Advertising copywriters, our savviest modern myth-makers, understood this. It was no coincidence the most praised and widely dissected commercials during the Super Bowl, for two years running, cannily played upon the Detroit comeback theme. Handsome Chrysler automobiles made cameos in both spots, along with Eminem and Clint Eastwood, but what the ads really meant to pitch us had far less to do with cars than an elemental, nearly lost sense of American optimism. People who once might have looked condescendingly upon the Paleolithic “Buy American” manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy suddenly found themselves becoming misty-eyed and patriotic as Coach Eastwood (it was the Super Bowl, remember) ordered us to get out there and give 110 percent, just like Detroit had done.

  My favorite example of the comeback narrative run amok arrived in the fall of 2011, when the Detroit Lions, a team that, only three short years earlier, had played the worst season of any National Football League franchise since World War II, losing all sixteen of its regular season games, managed to rebound all the way to the playoffs. The Lions’ losing streak had taken place during the season of the contentious auto-bailout hearings and thus had served as useful symbolism for Detroit’s larger socioeconomic hard-luck story. Now, the boys were winning again. Coincidence?

  Clearly, yes! But that didn’t prevent an embarassing number of journalists from marshalling the victories on Ford Field, along with the Detroit Tigers’ concurrent trip to the American League Championship Series, as bullet points for a trend piece: “Lions, Tigers and Cars: Detroit on the Rebound?” to quote an actual blog headline. Or, as a CNN columnist wrote, “History has shown that when the city’s sports teams start doing well, it’s a sign of healing in Detroit.”

  And really, who wanted to be the one to splash cold water on such magical thinking? I, for one, no longer felt above accepting signs. Even if the upswing had begun as media hype, it no longer mattered, because the rest of the country had bought the story. Friends from other towns had always promised to visit me in Detroit but rarely followed through. As my time in the city came to an end, though, people emailed to ask: Should I consider moving there? Justin was thinking about opening a bakery; Coco, of launching a newspaper written entirely by underprivileged high school kids; Eric, of rehabbing an old dive bar and living upstairs. Why not in Detroit?

  * * *

  Yet three years on, the local headlines still failed to reflect the new, inspirational national narrative.

  By the end of February 2012, the newspapers reported, there had been one murder every day of the year, including a six-year-old (shot by a pair of fifteen-year-old would-be carjackers) and a nine-month-old baby. It had taken the 911 dispatcher nearly a half-hour to get an ambulance out to the nine-month-old’s house, after the place had been shot up with an AK-47 assault rifle.

  That same spring, Council President Pugh’s $385,000 Brush Park condo went into foreclosure for the third time in five years. This time, Pugh decided to walk away from the mortgage. “These are the tough choices Detroiters make every day,” he wrote his supporters in an email, “and I am no different.” Shortly thereafter, he announced that he would not be running for a second City Council term, but that he would be weighing a mayoral bid. Mayor Bing, meanwhile, proposed a budget that would cut the city workforce by 2,500 (one-quarter of its employees) along with a 10 percent across-the-board cut in wages for those remaining on the payroll.

  On the day when former Detroit police chief Stanley Knox was robbed while mowing his lawn, a pair of teenagers shot and killed an 84-year-old security guard in the parking lot of a church where a Bible study group was taking place. One week later, it was reported that Pastor Marvin Wayans, of the famous gospel-singing Wayans family, was beaten and carjacked while pumping gas at a Detroit Citgo station on a Wednesday afternoon, the assailants not only stealing Wayans’s luxury Infiniti sports utility vehicle, but also a $15,000 Rolex watch.

  Details regarding the Detroit Works plan had still failed to materialize, but the Detroit Free Press reported on the Bing administration’s stealth attempts at coerced shrinkage, by quietly denying the most distressed neighborhoods basic services (new streetlights, home improvement grants, tax breaks for developers, abandoned-property demolitions, road repair) in order to entice those residents to decamp to more stable locations. “There are some areas where we are not going to invest,” Mayor Bing told the newspaper. “It makes little sense…” According to the report, developers were being informed that if they chose to build new properties in certain neighborhoods, “the city will not provide sewer lines, sidewalks, lighting or any other amenities.”

  In other words, the bold reinvention of the city had devolved into an austerity plan that would impose sanctions on its poorest citizens. I did notice one major new construction project, just down Gratiot Avenue from my apartment, striking because you basically never saw cranes in the city proper, only wrecking balls. But upon closer examination, it turned out to be a new jail, an upgrading of the old one, right across the street.

  * * *

  And yet, secretly, surprisingly? It didn’t make rational sense, I knew, but I found myself edging over to the side of the optimists. I couldn’t say why; it happened gradually, on the level of anecdote: I caught myself noticing and relishing slight indicators that in aggregate (or perhaps viewed through lenses with the proper tinting) couldn’t help but make you feel like Detroit’s luck, despite such unimaginable obstacles, might still turn.

  One evening, I stopped by the Highland Park firehouse. Everything looked the same: guys like Marvin and Lt. Hollowell cooling out in their folding chairs in the mouth of the loading door, chain-smoking and drinking coffee. But when Sergeant Irwin emerged, he struck me as … happy. Apparently, a group called Michigan Arson Prevention, backed by insurance companies, had begun paying the salaries of a prosecutor and multiple investigators to focus on insurance fraud. Irwin had obtained his license and become a qualified fire investigator, and Michigan Arson Prevention had awarded him a grant for tools the city of Highland Park could never otherwise afford, including a special camera and the best fingerprint equipment on the market.

  Since then, Irwin had four cases accepted by the prosecutor’s office, unprecedented for Highland Park. The city had also received grant money to subsidize aggressive demolitions of vacant houses. All of these factors had conspired to make for a drop in the number of fires over the past summer. Irwin smiled shyly and shrugged, unsure if he should believe it himself. “I’m actually feeling good about things here,” he admitted.

  Even bad news contained some reason for optimism. The Detroit public school system had been making national newscasts since Roy Roberts, a former vice president at General Motors, had been appointed to replace Bob Bobb as emergency manager. His variation on Bobb’s efforts to privatize a number of Detroit schools was sounding like a public-sector version of the auto bailout—specifically, of the structured, private-equity-style bankruptcies foisted upon Chrysler and General Motors, in which the most toxic, irredeemable portions of the respective companies were split off into their own separate holdings, effectively quarantined. As applied to a school system, such a plan meant removing forty or so of the 137 schools in the regular (failing) district and converting them to charters. This new, all-charter district would receive the per-pupil funding of whichever students migrated over from DPS, while DPS’s budget would shrink according
ly—but “legacy costs,” like old debt and money owed to pensioners, would not be carried over to the new “clean slate” district, so it was easy to foresee a scenario in which the best DPS schools would bleed students and money as the charters pressed their advantages.

  More immediately distressing, one of the schools slated for closing in the fall of 2011 was the Catherine Ferguson Academy. Several students, including Tiffini Baldwin, had been arrested after refusing to leave the school during a sit-in protest, and the image of pregnant black teenagers being led away by cops while handcuffed wound up replayed endlessly on The Rachel Maddow Show. A final rally was scheduled to take place on the front lawn of the school on the last day of class.

  But then, that very morning, as activists gathered in the street facing the school, a dramatic reversal occurred: Roberts, apparently sensing the public relations disaster on his hands, announced that Catherine Ferguson Academy would remain open as a charter school, with its current curriculum and administration, including Principal Andrews, intact.