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

by Mark Binelli

  Detroit hadn’t been treated to many happy endings, eleventh-hour or otherwise, as unqualified as this one, not in recent memory. The rally still took place, but it went from being an angry wake to a raucous celebration. By the time I arrived, the school’s hay-covered tractor bed had been converted into a stage. The actor and liberal activist Danny Glover showed up to give his support. Standing atop the wagon, he hugged Principal Andrews, who was beaming happily and wearing a giant pink carnation, and declared the caving of Roberts “a significant victory in a long war.”

  A marching band from another school made its way to the center of the gathering. Several of the female band members had doctored their yellow band shirts to reveal brassieres and pierced navels, and their dances incorporated pelvis-thrusting striptease grinds. I wondered if staging this performance at a school for pregnant teenagers constituted a mixed message. But the rally’s collective mood would not be dimmed by such concerns.

  I ran into Tiffini. Her hair looked wilder than before, and she was furiously snapping photos for a website. She told me she was going to Henry Ford Community College, taking her pre-reqs for a physical therapy major. She said, “When I heard the news this morning, and it was official”—and then, instead of finishing her sentence, she touched her heart.

  UAW workers in vests reading “Fight the Attack on the Middle Class” cheered alongside a hipster with a waxed mustache and an old bearded man in overalls. I spotted Rich Feldman from the Boggs Foundation and his son Micah, and my neighbor on Service Street, Ron Scott, the local Black Panther founder, took the stage and announced, “I’m gonna start this speech with what we used to finish up with long ago: Power to the People!” Everyone raised their fists in support. A stray dog wandered through the crowd, some kind of husky, it looked like. One of the UAW guys made a tongue-clicking noise, but the dog ignored him and kept moving.

  * * *

  Not long after that, I found myself on the rooftop of a Detroit apartment complex, gazing over downtown, recalling the wintery afternoon when I’d scaled the crumbling Metropolitan Building with Detroitblogger John. Now, though, I looked upon signs of positive momentum. Quicken Loans had moved four thousand employees downtown and the company’s owner, Detroit loyalist Dan Gilbert, had been purchasing a number of long-vacant buildings, including the Madison Theatre, the planned fulcrum of his “Detroit 2.0” initiative to rebrand the city as a Midwestern hub of tech-savvy entrepreneurial start-ups. New tenants at the Madison (which, in an ill-advised moment of nineties nostalgia, Gilbert had renamed the M@dison) included a graphic design firm, a designer of iPhone apps and a local Twitter office; Chrysler had also announced seventy employees would be migrating downtown from the suburbs. Nearby, the thirty-four story Broderick Tower, vacant since the mid-eighties, was finally in the process of being renovated, thanks to fifty-million dollars’ worth of federal tax credits and private investments. Plans for the building included retail, office, and residential spaces. Another group of investors had picked up the GAR Building, the castle with the boarded-up turrets originally built for Union veterans of the Civil War, for $200,000. After a three-million-dollar rehabilitation, the place would house a media production company.

  The particular rooftop upon which I stood happened to be the communal area of a lovely riverside apartment building on Jefferson. I’d stopped to visit a pair of young senior staffers who worked for Council President Pugh: Quan Tez Pressley, Pugh’s director of communications, and Bryan Barnhill, his policy director. We’d met during Pugh’s campaign and had stayed in touch. Both only twenty-four years old, Pressley and Barnhill been best friends since attending Renaissance High School, an academically excellent magnet school in Detroit, and had independently returned to the city after graduating from Morehouse and Harvard, respectively. Now they also shared an apartment.

  Barnhill was smooth-faced, handsome, and a dapper dresser; he spoke in long, intricate sentences ready for a position paper. The first night we met, over beers and pizza, he said things like, “That’s a typical conservative-behaviorist/ liberal-institutionalist argument. In reality, both are wrong. Complexity demands simultaneous convergence of truths” and “My particular environment and background garrisoned me with a lot of tools that made me a very formidable competitor.” Barnhill’s father was a truck driver and his mother was a registered nurse. “Honestly, I’m from the hood,” he said politely. “I can remember frequent shootings outside my house. A crack house on the block. Abandoned buildings. Some people in my family were involved in these sorts of activities. But there’s a dual story: positive instruction, and positive instruction by contrast. I could see what I didn’t want to be.” His mother used to make him work on textbooks two years ahead of his grade. When Detroit’s African American history museum built its slave ship exhibit, Barnhill, as a boy, was selected to be one of the models. They covered him with plaster squares and made a cast of his body. Today, Barnhill’s ten-year-old self remains in the museum’s permanent collection, perpetually embarking on the doomed voyage.

  Pressley, taller and skinnier, comes from an auto family: his father worked at Chrysler for thirty-five years. Going back only a single generation, his father’s brother was murdered and his mother’s brother was beaten to death in a case of mistaken identity. Pressley’s parents wouldn’t allow him to spend the night at his grandmother’s house because she was an alcoholic. At Morehouse, he majored in political science and religion. He’d begun preaching at age four; by six, his mother had given him his pastor’s anniversary.

  “My message at that point,” Pressley, blinking from behind chunky, stylish glasses, told me, “was—”

  “Wait till you hear what it is,” Barnhill interrupted.

  Pressley: “‘You may be going up, but you might not be getting in.’”

  After leaving for college, they’d both missed Detroit. Barnhill’s background seemed so unusual at Harvard, he was profiled in the Crimson on three separate occasions. For Pressley, Atlanta was “a city void of obstacles.” He said that while he loved Morehouse, it also “felt false, like a false sense of security. Like I didn’t have to try hard.”

  Pressley had been thinking of joining the Peace Corps and working in Jordan; Barnhill, of moving to New York and working for an investment bank. But after the financial collapse, with various job offers rescinded, they both ended up back in their hometown, unemployed and sleeping in their childhood bedrooms. Pressley admitted, “There was a point where our parents were questioning our decisions.”

  Barnhill’s girlfriend brought up fresh lemonade; strangely, the roof was carpeted with green AstroTurf. Barnhill said he’d come out here the night before, around three in the morning, just to think and pray. Today, the river shimmered in the light of a bright autumn afternoon, and from this distance, it was impossible to tell which of the buildings in the downtown core were occupied or vacant, or slightly less vacant than when I’d first returned.

  Despite my reservations about their boss, Barnhill and Pressley both struck me as youthful embodiments of the possibility for positive change in the city. I wondered if their time on the job had curdled their idealism. They admitted to having been disappointed more than once, when that idealism met realpolitik; in a city like Detroit, the council has limited power.

  “We created Charles’s platform, essentially,” Barnhill said. “We had all these grandiose ideas. But,” he paused, quoting educator Geoffrey Canada, “we were confronted by the system.” For the local government’s senior staffers, Pressley noted that “new ideas were an affront to their authority. But Charles gave us room.”

  Recently, Barnhill helped Pugh craft Detroit’s amended consent agreement with the state and has also been working on moving up the city’s threat-level status when it comes to possible terrorist attacks, which would mean more federal homeland security money. (Detroit is a border town, and amazingly, Barnhill claimed, no one had requested additional funds before.) “Some people thought us sticking around Detroit would be a gamble on ou
r future, a gamble on the fate of the city,” he said. “But it’s allowed us to experience a fructifying or manifestation of our talent. Young people are coming to Detroit because they want to be part of a movement. I just came from a meeting with the governor. We are some of the most influential people in this city, in terms of how things get done.”

  I wasn’t sure if this was true, but the possibility comforted me.

  “I didn’t grow up with that post-nineteen-fifties drop to compare everything to, so from my perspective, Detroit has always been improving,” Pressley told me. That said, he went on, smiling, “If you come to Detroit, you’re probably someone who likes challenges.”

  * * *

  Even Service Street was changing. The building next door to mine, uninhabited the entire time I’d lived there, had been purchased by a Brooklyn artist. Three of the haggard storefront facades overlooking Gratiot were in the process of being restored. And Steve and Dorota Coy, the Hygienic Dress League, had moved from their studio to a foreclosed loft in Brush Park, the depopulated neighborhood of robber baron mansions just off Woodward. A few of the mansions had been meticulously restored; others clung to verticality in assorted states of collapse. The Coys had bought their loft, over twice the size of my Manhattan apartment, for the cost of about eight months’ rent on that same apartment.

  Now I recall my Detroit home with no small tint of nostalgia. Mostly, I remember the late nights spent listening to music and staring out of my huge front windows. Gratiot always lay empty and dark, except in winter, when steam from the manholes would swirl cinematically outside the glass, as thick as mist in a Gothic novel. The neon sign of the meat market across the street backlit the septic fog, giving it an otherworldly glow. Occasionally a car would drive by, but otherwise, in the downtown of a major American city, I felt totally alone.

  Of course, it would be easy to end this book on a different note. Any number of the city’s grisly headlines could be plucked and highlighted, and not unrepresentatively, either. But if I did that, it would only be to make sure you understand I’m not a soft touch. The truth is, my optimism was proving tenacious. I couldn’t say why.

  And even when it faltered, all I had to do was turn to the bulging Detroit section of my bookshelf and pluck out something old—say, All About Detroit: An Illustrated Guide, Map and Historical Souvenir, with Local Stories, a handbook to the city written in 1899 by the historian Silas Farmer. Once upon a time, I would have thrilled at the cheap ironies therein, especially in the endlessly quotable section Farmer titled “Dictionary of Detroit.” The very first entry, “Advantages,” reads, in full: “Because of our location on the Detroit River, our advantages are many and exceptional.”

  I could go on, almost at random: “‘Homes, Attractive’: Are very numerous in all parts of Detroit …

  “‘Air and atmosphere’: Our skies are as fair as those of Italy …

  “‘Geographical Position’: The position of Detroit is favorable for constant growth …

  “‘Floods’: We have none. Our river never overflows nor dries up. Residents along the margins of other streams should make a note of this fact…”

  It’s difficult to stop. “‘Shady streets’: We have an unusual number …

  “‘Morals’: Of Detroit will compare very favorably with any city of its size …

  “‘Burial caskets’: Are produced in large quantities…”

  Okay, I’ll stop. Well, one last personal favorite: “‘Italians’: Judging by the frequency with which we hear their street cries, our Italian friends are not at all an insignificant portion of our population. That cry of ‘Banan, nicey banan’ is heard in every part of the city and their two-wheeled, flat-topped carts laden with the fruit are pushed energetically into the way of probable purchasers.”

  But something changed in me, somewhere along the way, and Farmer’s sentiments no longer felt worthy of mockery. All About Detroit had been published two full years before Henry Ford scraped together enough capital to start the Ford Motor Company. Yet Farmer, a laughable booster, had already been indulging his readers with bigger dreams. His book read like that of a naif, yet he’d engaged in a touching and prescient leap of faith, one that had paid out far beyond any odds he or his contemporaries might have ever thought to set. So, who knows? Why not again?

  Now, I’m struck by the way certain passages jump out like lines of verse—reminders of how long people had been wanting to believe this city was blessed, and of the poignant distance between that need and our reality, and I feel like I could be reading about Detroit at the turn of the twentieth century, or about any number of cities at the cusp of their grandest hours—Paris, Beijing, New Orleans, Buenos Aires, Bombay, Addis Ababa, St. Clair Shores, Madonna di Campiglio, Manhattan—or maybe even about your town, right now; about cities of memory and cities of desire, trading cities and hidden cities and cities of the dead, lost forever; about Detroit tomorrow, and about everything we allow ourselves to dream our places could become.

  The city is really remarkable in this respect.

  Unusually numerous and beautiful.

  Admittedly the most attractive city on the northern continent.

  First class the year around.

  Not excelled by any other city.

  Visitors cannot fail to notice the beautiful complexions.

  Never a menace.

  Always a joy and blessing.

  Our skies are as fair as those of Italy.

  Progress is manifest.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Adler, William M., Land of Opportunity: One Family’s Quest for the American Dream in the Age of Crack (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995).

  Bergmann, Luke, Getting Ghost: Two Young Lives and the Struggle for the Soul of an American City (New York: The New Press, 2008).

  Bingay, Malcolm, Detroit Is My Own Home Town (New York: The Bobs Merrill Company, 1946).

  Bjorn, Lars, and Gallert, Jim, Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit, 1920-60 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).

  Boyle, Kevin, Arc of Justice (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004).

  Burton, Clarence, The City of Detroit, Michigan, 1701–1922 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2005).

  Carlisle, John, 313: Life in the Motor City (Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2011).

  Chafets, Zev, Devil’s Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit (New York: Random House, 1990).

  Conot, Robert E., American Odyssey (New York: Morrow, 1974).

  Downs, Linda Bank, Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999).

  Dunnigan, Brian Leigh, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838 (Great Lakes Books, 2001).

  Farmer, Silas, All About Detroit: An Illustrated Guide, Map and Historical Souvenir, with Local Stories (Detroit: Silas Farmer & Co., 1899).

  Farmer, Silas, The History of Detroit and Michigan (Detroit: Silas Farmer & Co., 1884).

  Fine, Sidney, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989).

  Gallagher, John, Reimagining Detroit (Wayne State University Press, 2010).

  Gavrilovich, Peter, and McGraw, Bill, The Detroit Almanac (Detroit: Detroit Free Press, 2006).

  Georgakas, Dan, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975).

  Halberstam, David, The Reckoning (New York: William Morrow & Co, 1986).

  Hersey, John, The Algiers Motel Incident (New York: Bantam Books, 1969).

  Jones, Butch, Y.B.I.: The Autobiography of Butch Jones (Detroit: H Publications, 1996).

  Lichtenstein, Nelson, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

  Moore, Andrew, Detroit Disassembled (Damiani/Akron Art Museum, 2010).

  Parkman, Francis, The Oregon Trail/The Conspiracy of Pontiac (New York: The Library of America, 1991).

  Sicko, Dan, Techno Rebels: The Renegades
of Electronic Funk (New York: Billboard Books, 1999).

  Smith, Suzanne E., Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

  Sugrue, Thomas J., The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, revised edition, 2005).

  Taylor, Carl S., Dangerous Society (Ann Arbor: Michigan State University Press, 1990).

  Vergara, Camilo José, American Ruins (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999).

  Vergara, Camilo José, The New American Ghetto (Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995).

  Watts, Steven, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

  Widick, B. J., Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972).

  Young, Coleman, Hard Stuff (New York: Viking, 1994).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MOM, DAD, PAUL, JULIE.

  My Detroit players: Corine Vermeulen (urbex! techno! vacano!), Steve and Dorota Coy (and Bob, and that kid in the XXL “Made in Detroit” T-shirt), Courtney Smith, John Carlisle, Brian Merkel, Holice P. Wood, Ara Howrani, Marvin Vaughn, Bertram Ferrell, Brandon Walley, Djallo Djakate, Scott Hocking, Chef Las.

  Jim Rutman. Riva Hocherman. The best.

  Jason Fine and Will Dana, my great friends and fabulous longtime editors at Rolling Stone (and now Men’s Journal), and assigners of the original story that became this book.

  Jann Wenner, Sean Woods, Eric Bates, Nathan Brackett, Mark Healy, Coco McPherson (and the entire research crew), Tom Walsh (ditto for copy), Marielle Anas, Alison Weinflash.

  Jessica Lamb-Shapiro (off-season innkeeper par excellence), Julia Holmes and E. Tyler Lindvall (together forever on “Islands in the Stream,” L. J.’s Lounge, Halloween 2010), Dinaw Mengestu (scholar, gentleman, confidant, midnight chef, procurer of birthday Ocean), Jonathan Ringen (one of the five great colocataires of Western history! [along with Stendahl, Proust, Flaubert, and Brad Pitt]), Bill McIntyre (former Governor Engler wants his sign back), Jonathan Hickman (I concede the married lawyer might also have been a grifter), Mac McClelland (R.I.P. Giant Cat Binelli), Steve Dollar, Chad Post, Caroline Shepard (Massapequa in the house!), Esther Haynes, Kira Henehan, Alex Mar, Wells Tower, Diane Dragon, John Brumer.