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

by Mark Binelli

  The MacDowell Colony. The Corporation of Yaddo.

  Detroit, again: John Adamo Jr., Matt Allen, Asenath Andrews, General Baker, Tiffini Baldwin, Bryan Barnhill, Pete Barrow, Dave Bing, the Blackman, Greg Bowens, Michael Brady, Gary Brown, Rev. David Bullock, Eric Campbell, Dan Carlisle, Shance Carlisle, Kenneth Cockerel Jr., Phil Cooley, Mark Covington, Marsha Cusic, Jai-Lee Dearing, Carlie Dennis, Angela Dillard, Rick Ector, Bishop Charles Ellis, Judy Endelman, Duke Fakir, Andrew Farah, Rich Feldman, Geoffrey Fieger, Vanessa Denha Garmo, Geoff George, John George, Dan Gilbert, Ralph Gilles, Ralph Godbee, Kevin and Val Gross, Francis Grunow, Elena Herrada, Steve Henderson, Eric Hollowell, Greg Holm, Mary Howell, Nate Irwin, Annie Janusch, Saunteel Jenkins, Raphael Johnson, Joseph Kassab, Kwame Kilpatrick, Christine Kloostra, Matt Lee, Kathy Leisen, Caesar Lorenzetti, Derrick May, Toni McIlwain, Kurt Metzger, Toni Moceri, John Mogk, Larry Mongo, Eric Novak, Jermaine Overman, the Pettaway family, QuanTez Pressley, Charles Pugh, Sir Mack Rice, Harold Rochon, Ron Scott, Malik Shabazz, John Sinclair, Edwin St. Aubin, Larry Stone, Jay Thunderbolt, Pastor Steve Upshur, Jerome Vaughn, John Zimmick.

  The MacDowell crew, especially Scott Ingram, Rosecrans Baldwin, Feliz Molina, Emma Schwarcz, John Haskell, and Missy Mazzoli.

  The Atlantic, Keith Gessen and n+1, the Inn at the Oaks, the New Politeness, Cafe 1923, Motor City Brewery, Sara Bershtel, Will Sulkin, Rob Levine, Jim Gill, Deckerville, the Park Bar, the Original House of Pancakes (Grosse Pointe Woods, mom’s paying), the Old Miami, Service Street (2009–2012), the YesFarm, and why are those electroclash zombies carrying a moonshine jug?

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. See, for example, Newsreel LIX, of John Dos Passos’s The Big Money: “the stranger first coming to Detroit if he be interested in the busy, economic side of modern life will find a marvelous industrial beehive … ‘DETROIT THE CITY WHERE LIFE IS WORTH LIVING.’”

  2. The most famous shot in Sheeler’s series, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, evokes neither grit nor noise but instead an almost tabernacular grace. The smokestacks in the background look like the pipes of a massive church organ, the titular conveyor belts forming the shape of what is unmistakably a giant cross. The photograph was originally published in a 1928 issue of Vanity Fair, where the caption read, “In a landscape where size, quantity and speed are the cardinal virtues, it is natural that the largest factory, turning out the most cars in the least time, should come to have the quality of America’s Mecca.”

  3. Surprisingly, Detroit city officials managed to successfully rebrand the night before Halloween “Angel’s Night” in 1995. Thousands of volunteers enlist each year to help patrol their neighborhoods during the last days of October severely curbing the outbreaks of arson.

  1. Goin’ to Detroit, Michigan

  1. The name was not as racist as it sounds: the area was originally named by the French for its dark, fertile topsoil.

  2. The entire city of San Francisco is approximately forty-seven square miles.

  3. Our term for liquor stores in metropolitan Detroit.

  4. All of this is masterfully chronicled by Thomas Sugrue in The Origins of the Urban Crisis, his indispensable history of the decades leading up to 1967.

  5. The quirky local dialect developed, in part, as a means of secret communication between clannish traveling moletas (grinders), who incorporated Italianized versions of stray foreign words into their private language.

  6. By 1971, Sinclair was still doing time, so his supporters organized a “Ten for Two” rally in Ann Arbor, featuring John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Stevie Wonder, and Allen Ginsberg. It was here that Lennon debuted his song “John Sinclair,” featuring the unforgettable lyric:

  Gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,

  gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,

  gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,

  gotta, gotta, gotta set him free.

  2. The Town of Detroit Exists No Longer

  1. There was a muddy, often impassable road running along the base of the river, but the settlers simply slipped a canoe into the water and paddled up- or downstream if they wanted to visit the fort or a neighbor. Most of the farms were basically orchards: apple, cherry, and pear trees.

  2. Edwin St. Aubin, a direct descendant of one of Cadillac’s original one hundred men, lived in the suburbs and, appropriately enough, sold real estate. We met for lunch one afternoon at an Italian restaurant in a strip mall past 17 Mile Road. A group of old Italian men were playing cards in a side room decorated with a mural of Rome; a poster on the wall advertised a Christmas concert with Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and (inexplicably) Roy Orbison impersonators.

  St. Aubin was in his fifties, with a thinning bush of white hair, along with a mustache and goatee that added to his catlike appearance. He drank three glasses of wine with lunch, the effusiveness of his storytelling increasing with each round. St. Aubin said he had grown up not knowing about his rich ancestry, but then one afternoon he had somehow ended up in the basement of the Detroit Public Library flipping through historical documents, where he discovered his grandfather’s name in direct lineage from the original St. Aubin. Since then, he and his brother had immersed themselves in early Detroit history.

  “You know,” St. Aubin told me, “there’s a whole France-mafia parallel?” He glanced around the room. “I’ve got to be careful what I say in here. But there was a group back then called the Red Poppy Society. St. Aubin was a member. They were basically enforcers, like mafia guys. If you didn’t donate to the church, they’d shake you down. They’d break your fucking legs.” An old man with floridly dyed hair and a cane walked by. St. Aubin mumbled, “Bookie.” Then he went on, “There’s a book called Frontier Metropolis that mentions selling land for two cents an acre. Which is about what it’s selling for now in Detroit.” He ate a forkful of salad, then said, “It’s funny how Detroit was originally encased in a fort to protect the city. Now you don’t need a fort. You can’t pay people to go down there.”

  3. Around this same time, Hamilton’s justice of the peace handed down a death sentence to a Detroit couple for stealing six dollars from the cashbox of a trading firm and starting a small fire. No one could be convinced to perform the execution; finally, the woman (a slave who had been having an affair with her accomplice) agreed to hang her partner in exchange for a pardon. A public outrage followed, and the Hair Buyer, who it turned out had had no authority to mete out capital punishment, was charged with murder and ended up fleeing Detroit and being captured by Americans. Hamilton’s replacement, Colonel Arent De Peyster, published his own verse, which was not very good, despite such promising titles as “To a Beautiful Young Lady, Who Had on One of Those Abominable Straw Caps or Bonnets in the Form of a Bee-Hive” and “The Ghost of Old Cocosh (a Pig). Shot by the Guard in the King’s Naval Yard at Detroit.”

  4. Author of American Odyssey, a masterful, idiosyncratic history of Detroit, unconscionably out of print.

  5. Though, writing a decade later, Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville’s coauthor, cautioned against the mistaken belief “that Detroit is very civilized,” noting the occasion, only a year before his visit, in which a pack of hounds bayed a bear out of the forest, sending it down the entire length of one of the main streets of the city, most likely Jefferson or Woodward—“to the entertainment of the Americans,” the French traveler added with apparent fondness, “whose gravity probably did not betray them even on this occasion.”

  6. “The manufacture of varnish in itself is an absorbing story,” writes Clarence Burton, unconvincingly.

  7. Conot also notes how Thomas Edison, who grew up in rural Port Huron, Michigan, but worked as a newsboy on Detroit-bound trains, often “expressed his frustrations in the explicit language he had learned along the docks of Detroit. ‘Shit! Glass busted by Boehm!’ he wrote in his notebook.”

  8. After his home was burned by the mob, Thomas Holton spent the night hiding in the woods with his wife and child, later telling the compilers of the Thrilling Narrative, “With frosted feet
and all our property destroyed, did the morning sun rise upon us, as destitute as when we came into the world, with the exception of what we had on, and without a friend to offer us protection, so far as we could learn. Oh, Detroit! Detroit, how hast thou fallen! No power in noonday to defend the helpless women and children from outlaws, till they have fully glutted their hellish appetites on the weak and defenseless. Humanity, where is thy blush!”

  3. DIY City

  1. This was actually true, until a $4.2 million subsidy convinced Whole Foods to open a ministore in the relatively thriving Midtown neighborhood. Still, outside of a few select neighborhoods, the term food desert was not by any means a stretch. For those without a car in a city lacking adequate public transportation, many grocery options consisted of grim liquor stores fortified like banks. A 2007 study found that 92 percent of food stamp outlets in the city were, indeed, liquor stores, gas stations, or pharmacies.

  2. Covington did eventually gut and remodel the party store, transforming it into a community space.

  3. Ford biographer Steven Watts points to Ford’s specific hatred of horses, his charge on the family farm, where, as a teenager, he was once dragged home by a colt after falling off the animal and catching a leg in its stirrups. Watts implies this might have been a possible vindictive factor in Ford’s perfection of the horseless carriage, offering as evidence Ford himself, in one of his notebooks, gloating uncharitably, “The horse is DONE.”

  4. Stuffed animals, it turns out, become incredibly unsettling when exposed to the elements for several years.

  4. Not for Us the Tame Enjoyment

  1. Detroit’s main Metropolitan Airport is actually twenty-five minutes west of the city, in suburban Romulus.

  2. These numbers are fairly close to accurate—at least the murder part. (In 2009, there were 361 murders in Detroit and 17,553 violent crimes.)

  3. According to Ector, gun instructors joke that if you shoot a guy with a .22 caliber, he’ll probably find out about it.

  4. By Rev. Kenn Blanchard, a former cop and Marine who insists gun control is racist.

  5. How to Shrink a Major American City

  1. John Adamo Jr. owns and operates the biggest demolition contractor in the city, the Adamo Demolition Company. If one family’s immigrant story stands as an allegory for Detroit’s past century, it is the Adamos’. John Adamo Jr.’s grandfather, a builder, emigrated to Detroit from Alcamo, a town in Sicily, in the early 1920s, just as the auto industry was exploding. A newly flush class of workers wanted to expand their homes, many of which had “Michigan basements”—a crawl space beneath the cinder blocks on which the houses rested. Here, Adamo’s grandfather discovered his niche. “He’d get under the houses,” Adamo told me, “jack them up a couple of feet, and put guys under there with shovels and picks to dig a full basement.”

  By the time Adamo’s father took over the business in the 1960s, however, expansion had stalled. “At some point,” Adamo said, “he thought, ‘Man, if I had a wrecking license, I could take down a few of these houses.’” Within a few years, the demolition company had grown large enough to be incorporated, while the long-withering construction side of the business was slowly phased out. After the riots, Adamo said, the number of city demolition contracts went through the roof. “Timing is everything, I guess,” he noted drily.

  Detroit demolition guys, Adamo added, were always thinking about how to take down buildings. He and his demo friends, in fact, had a running joke going: if they’d never been to your house before, the first thing they’d do would be to look around and ballpark how many loads of debris the building would yield. Oh, yeah, one of them might say. You’ve got yourself a ten-load house.

  2. By the time of Futurama II, the sequel launched for the 1964 New York fair, the future included fantastic “road-building machines” that could cut through the jungle laying concrete and steel highways at the rate of a foot a minute.

  3. Corine had never heard of Geoff Dyer, but in his collection Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, he makes the same connection, sprinkling his account of a trip to the first Detroit Electronic Music Festival with references to Stalker and the Zone.

  4. Being European, Corine had been drawn to Cranbrook in the first place partly out of her fanatical appreciation of techno.

  6. Detroit Is Dynamite

  1. Baker was not a military man; “General” was actually his first name. Beginning in the late sixties, he organized black autoworkers at Chrysler’s Hamtramck plant as a cofounder of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, or DRUM, and later the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. After being fired and blacklisted in 1973, he obtained a fake ID and got himself rehired at Ford (where he finally retired in 2003) in order to continue agitating from the inside. For more information on Baker, check out Detroit, I Do Mind Dying, an absorbing chronicle of radical seventies labor history by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin. Baker also traveled to Cuba as a young man, where he met Che Guevara and played baseball with Fidel Castro. Me: “How was the baseball game?” GB: “Raggedy. We couldn’t hang with the Cubans. We were a bunch of students! We weren’t no ballplayers.”

  2. And then there was Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ 1964 Motown hit “Dancing in the Street”—a call to urban dwellers across the country to prepare for a brand-new beat—used as a theme song at rallies throughout those insurrectionary summers by H. Rap Brown.

  3. Guarda in proper (non-dialect) Italian, imperative of guardare, “to look.”

  4. Murray since technically became a reverend, though his “church” only had ten members. Child Protective Services removed four adopted children from Murray’s custody, with one of the inspectors noting that Murray’s home was filthy and foul-smelling, with broken windows and a large hole in the ceiling.

  5. Not the same New Black Panther Party or Malik Shabazz vilified nationally on Fox News and other right-wing media outlets in connection to an alleged voter-suppression scandal.

  6. Twenty years earlier, Malcolm’s father, Earl Little, was found dead near a streetcar track, most likely murdered by the Black Legion, a violent, dark-hooded Ku Klux Klan offshoot. In the 1920s with half of Detroit’s 1.2 million residents foreign-born, and poor Southern blacks and whites also crowding the young metropolis, racial and ethnic tensions flourished, and Detroit became the Black Legion’s unofficial national headquarters and prime recruiting ground. (The hate group also inspired the 1936 film Black Legion, starring a young Humphrey Bogart as a Detroit auto worker lured into committing behooded hate crimes after being passed over for promotion in favor of a Polish coworker.)

  7. Though Fard’s birth name remains in dispute, it seems more than coincidental that his adopted prophet’s name is only a vowel away from Ford, the most famous and successful businessman in the world when Fard began preaching. (Fard recommended his followers read Henry Ford’s autobiography alongside the Koran and the Bible.)

  8. Shabazz did not have an easy childhood, its difficulties compounded by a mother with a drug problem and a parade of boyfriends and husbands. “Some of them I liked, and some were just no good, low-down dirty Negroes,” he says. “One of the stepdaddies started forcing me to do drugs or whatever.” I asked how old he was. “Six,” Shabazz says. “That’s all I want to say on that.” His mother ended up participating in the murder of a later husband as part of an insurance scheme. She’s currently serving a life sentence in prison. Shabazz was in his early twenties when this happened.

  9. He goes on to basically spend the rest of the short opening chapter teasing out similarities between Detroit and the old church, the latter a tenacious final remnant of a neighborhood long destroyed by urban renewal, and “somehow … Detroit,” too, “like St. Joseph’s Church, has managed to survive the schemes to bring it down.” Hard Stuff is a wonderfully readable autobiography, in large part because Young’s cowriter, Lonnie Wheeler, does such a fine job of capturing the mayor’s distinctive high-low manner of public speech, at once rarefied and ornately cusse
d, for example: “This much is apparent: Detroit will never be the city it once was. By virtue of compounded and confounded federal policies and of the unsympathetic cycles of social and industrial evolution—of such damn things as decentralization and white abandonment and the Toyota Corolla…” Or even better, this passage, the music of which merits quoting at length:

  The popular way to explain the decline of Detroit—that is, the one so ardently talked up within certain white circles and the media, if I may risk being redundant—is to pin it all on me. The reasoning goes something like this: Detroit has had nothing but problems since the white people got the hell out, which goes to show that black people can’t run anything by themselves, much less a major city, especially when it’s in the hands of a hate-mongering mayor like the one who’s been entrenched there for twenty goddamn years.…

  This, as one might imagine, is a school of thought to which I take exception.…

  As with the church bit above, Young (or Wheeler, but you get the sense this is coming straight from Young) is also fond of portentous imagery. For instance, in the next chapter, describing his family’s departure from Huntsville, Alabama, via train, for the promised land of Detroit, “on a rainy day in 1923,” the five-year-old Young espies a dead mule lying on its back beside the railroad tracks, just as the train is pulling out of the station, “his feet sticking straight out like the legs of a kitchen table on its side”—ominously foreshadowing both the Great Migration’s large-scale snuffing of a rural, Southern way of life and the further hardships to come in the fabled free North.