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

by Mark Binelli

10. This wise man also warned against mixing the two struggles, advice Young occasionally ignored, as evinced by his fathering of an illegitimate child during his fourth term of office, when he was in his early seventies.

  11. When word of the 1948 assassination attempt on Reuther reached a union meeting at a tool-and-die local, Young immediately wanted to know if the shooting had been fatal. Upon being informed that, no, Reuther would survive, Young said, “Too bad they didn’t kill that motherfucker,” provoking a fistfight.

  12. During his testimony, Young schooled Tavenner on pronunciation (Tavenner: “You told us you were the executive secretary of the National Niggra Congress—” Young: “That word is ‘Negro,’ not ‘Niggra.’” Tavenner: “I said ‘Negro.’ I think you are mistaken.” Young: “I hope I am. Speak more clearly”) and on the connection between Jim Crow and red-baiting (Young: “I consider the denial of the right to vote to large numbers of people all over the South un-American…” Tavenner: “Do you consider the activities of the Communist Party un-American?” Young: “I consider the activities of this committee, as it cites people for allegedly being a Communist, as un-American activities.” Tavenner: “… I understood from your statement you would like to help us.” Young: “You have me mixed up with a stool pigeon”).

  13. Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets.

  14. Even as late as Hard Stuff, Young was disdainfully writing about “bleeding heart, pansy-ass” liberals, noting that “the change I seek for the world around me is a radical one.”

  15. The eminent-domain fight became a national cause, bringing to town the likes of Ralph Nader, whom Young described as a “publicity-grubbing prick.”

  7. Motor City Breakdown

  1. Later I realized that I’d actually seen the car at the much flashier AutoRama (a totally different event).

  2. The veteran, Pete DeLorenzo, writes the website Autoextremist. His father, Anthony, ran General Motors’ public relations department from 1957 to 1979.

  3. During a bar fight, John Dodge reputedly once beat a man with two wooden legs to the ground, using the man’s own cane.

  4. This target date was later delayed to the final quarter of 2012.

  5. He invented, among other things, the electric self-starting ignition, the “Rocket 88” V-8 engine, and leaded gasoline.

  6. Though perhaps this had always been the case. In The Reckoning, David Halberstam’s rollicking door stopper of an account of the decline of the Detroit auto industry in the seventies and early eighties, a former Car & Driver editor characterizes the Big Three as “one big company with three divisions, in which everyone played it safe and no division tried something new unless it was reasonably sure that the other two were going to try it as well.” Another journalist tells Halberstam the automakers possessed a “shared monopoly.”

  7. I wouldn’t either if I made the Chevy Malibu.

  8. One of the most amusing byproducts of this era of Detroit car styling remains the solicitation in the 1950s of poet Marianne Moore by the Ford Corporation for possible new “dramatically desirable” model names. Moore’s correspondence with the company includes such (sadly never used) suggestions as Anticipator, Intelligent Whale, Thundercrest, Silver Sword, Resilient Bullet, Andante con Moto, Varsity Stroke, and Mongoose Civique.

  9. Newt Gingrich being Newt Gingrich, this claim proved false, though the Venn diagram of Volt and gun rack owners probably offers up a slim overlap.

  8. Comeback!

  1. This is a profit modified to not include pension liability, taxes, and interest.

  2. In late 2010, Rattner, a Wall Street private equity investor who specialized in acquiring distressed companies on the cheap and “fixing” them before making a tidy profit on the stock rebound, settled a lawsuit with the state of New York for $10 million following a kickback scandal involving his private equity firm and the state’s pension fund.

  3. “We knew we could function most efficiently by staying put in D.C., yet we realized from the outset that we’d have to make at least one trip to Detroit to avoid more criticism from the heartland. By early March, we could delay no more. All the same, we were determined not to waste more than a day” (italics mine).

  4. At a dinner party, Kahlo mischievously asked Ford if he was Jewish.

  5. “Although Henry did not like it at the time, this new partnership of labor and management would prove to be one of the company’s greatest assets.”

  9. Austerity 101

  1. The plot was eventually leveled when development truly got under way, so today the area is no higher than anywhere else in Detroit.

  2. In Highland Park, Ford not only perfected his notion of the assembly line—the number of Model T’s produced annually at the plant soared from 82,000 to two million in the course of a decade—but also announced the doubling of his workers’ daily wages to an unheard of five dollars. John Reed, the radical journalist and future author of Ten Days That Shook the World, wrote after his visit to Highland Park, “The Ford car is a wonderful thing, but the Ford plant is a miracle. Hundreds of parts, made in vast quantities at incredible speed, flow toward one point. The final assembly is the most miraculous thing of all.” In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Year Zero of the AF (After Ford) calendar aligns with the year the first Model T rolled off the Highland Park assembly line. “Like the New Testament story of the loaves and fishes,” writes Ford biographer Steven Watts, “Ford seemed to be creating material sustenance for thousands of people by a superhuman process. His fellow citizens responded with a kind of worship.…”

  3. Beyond some assistance from his sister, a high school English teacher in rural Clio, who helped edit the narrative portion of the proposal.

  4. The first time I visited the Highland Park engine house, they’d just had a benefit for a part-time firefighter who almost died when he’d been overwhelmed by flames while putting out a fire in a vacant house. “His hands, for all practical purposes, are gone,” one of his colleagues told me. “That’s for a guy who makes ten bucks an hour, no benefits.”

  5. The neighborhood, called North Pointe Village, remains one of the eeriest in Highland Park, a miniature ghost town composed of 150 brand-new two-floor colonials with cheap-looking gray siding, most standing vacant and gutted, some partially burned. The majority of the homes had never even been occupied. They were so cheaply built, their basements almost immediately began leaking ground and sewage water, and certificates of occupancy couldn’t be issued by the city. The developer sued the building contractor, who filed for bankruptcy; a group of backers in California who’d bought the homes as investment properties in turn sued the developer, who also filed for bankruptcy.

  10. Murder City

  1. A (trust me) representative passage: “Itol took his people to his temple and he said: ‘Pray to our Bailan to save us.’ But Bailan could not repair the damage of God. The temple was struck with lightning. One stroke of lightning hit Trampol and he dropped dead. When Itol saw his son he tried to help him, but he was already dead. Itol also was struck with lightning and died. The temple was mashed to pieces and the people killed.”

  2. In the words of visiting reporter Ernest W. Mandeville (“Detroit Sets a Bad Example,” Outlook, 1925), whose descriptions of the wild proliferation of blind pigs sound like harbingers of the crack trade of the eighties and nineties. One of his sources estimated eight saloons on every downtown block, adding that enforcement problems stemmed from the fact that “a good many of the policemen are Poles, and drinking liquor to them is a tradition. They can’t understand why liquor should be prohibited.… It strikes them as a prohibition of sugar for our coffee would strike us.”

  3. All manner of illicit drug activity continues to happen in plain sight in Detroit. One evening, a friend of a friend drove me to an unmarked warehouse building not far from downtown. Inside, the place looked like a regular garage, the only unusual feature being the conspicuous closed-circuit TV monitors, its cameras trained on the street outside. But behind a secret panel
, my friend’s friend had set up a massive grow-op, with several hundred marijuana plants flowering at various stages beneath rows of grow-lamps. (“This is not an easy business,” the source told me, shaking his head. “I have to worry about so many things every day. Maybe some kid sees me come in here and decides to rob the place. Am I willing to kill someone for two hundred grand? Some of the people I grew up with, they’d kill someone for twenty grand. I’m not one of those guys anymore. But do you see the dilemma I face? I don’t want to kill some kid over pot. But what would I do? You steal my shit, I can re-gangsta.”)

  4. So much so that, after she took the stand and answered her first question in a barely audible murmur, the judge had spoken to her as if to a child, saying, “Keep your voice up, honey.”

  5. When the prosecutor asked if the news reports had given her pause, Foster replied, “No. Just an everyday activity in Detroit.”

  6. Foster also claimed (less credibly) to have been unaware Howell had been selling drugs. The prosecutor asked if anything else had been said. Foster testified, “That was pretty much all: he killed a man and dismembered his body. After that it was silence.”

  7. At least according to trial testimony.

  8. As Brian Howell testified, “My friend Jermaine Overman tried to take the gun away from me for some odd reason and it went off. I really doesn’t know whose finger hit the trigger, sir.”

  9. The judge, Michael Hathaway, briefly became hung up on the sheer illogic of Overman’s bucket testimony. At one point, when Overman mentioned how the bucket had filled up with rainwater by the time the police got around to searching underneath it, Hathaway interrupted, nonplussed. Had Overman actually placed the gun inside a bucket without a lid? Briefly, they went into a debased Abbott and Costello routine—Hathaway: “So, the bucket is empty?” Overman: “No.” Hathaway: “So you filled it?”—until it became clear that Overman had hidden the gun under the bottom of a right-side-up bucket. When Hathaway finally understood the mechanics of the bucket maneuver, he seemed more disgusted and baffled by the stupefyingly unwise choices of young people than at any other moment in the trial.

  10. Judge Hathaway had spotted me taking notes on the first day of the trial and asked, from the bench, whom I was writing for.

  11. A full arson investigation was never conducted on either structure fire, though one of the homicide detectives, when asked how frequently this sort of fire occurred in a neighborhood like Upper Chene, testified, “Houses like this? Many times. Almost daily.”

  12. Before the trial began, I was standing in the hallway near a small group of Kevin Howell’s friends when Gagniuk walked past. Jermaine Overman cast a skeptical look in his direction and muttered, “If I need a lawyer, I want an old nigga. That nigga look like Jim Carrey. That nigga look like he just got back from spring break.”

  11. Politics

  1. A better-natured satirical collection of the (admittedly eminently) quotable Young, released in 1991, was printed in the style of Mao’s Little Red Book.

  2. For a planned magazine profile, ultimately never published.

  3. Partly, this referred to Kilpatrick’s youth and sartorial flair, but Kilpatrick had certainly lived up to his nickname, inviting Biz Markie to spin at his inauguration party and allowing himself to be sampled by the Detroit rap group Black Bottom Collective, on a ten-second track called “Best Not Keep Da Mayor Waitin’,” on which he exhorted the group to “‘come wit’ it Detroit style.”

  4. Who could say? My friend Stephen Henderson, the editorial page editor at the Detroit Free Press, once witnessed a Kilpatrick performance in which the mayor, near tears, convincingly proclaimed his innocence to an assembled group of supposedly jaded Free Press editors and writers, Henderson among them, who basically walked away believing him.

  As rumors of Kilpatrick’s after-hours partying at the mayoral mansion trickled out, I recalled how, at end of our night together, I’d overheard the mayor ask a member of his entourage, “So she’s gonna be able to come to the mansion tonight?” It was close to midnight. We’d seen the mayor’s wife at an earlier stop, but she had gone home with the children. (The mansion was being renovated, so the Kilpatricks were still living at their personal residence.) Someone noticed me standing there and quickly said, “We just found out a woman who does massages is going to be able to come to the mansion tonight. We go there to work sometimes, and she’ll come out if it’s been a long day.” I nodded, not sure how credulous they expected me to act. I decided to go with “extremely credulous.”

  5. Well, not universally: during an interview, a prominent, politically connected local activist turned off my tape recorder and said, “Gary Brown is a punk bitch. What happens when you investigate your boss? You get fired. That’s what happened. He was serving at the mayor’s discretion. Okay, Kwame was a boner. He was a baller. You get to the position where a hundred and fifty women a year are throwing themselves at you, what do you do? You might hit one or two. If it’s okay with them and okay with your wife, why is it anyone else’s business?”

  6. The shameless number of sports analogies used by Bing in speeches and interviews suggests he remains well aware of the power of his former athletic celebrity and has in fact been flexing those muscles for so long it’s now second nature. During my own half-hour interview with the mayor, he cited, as an analogy for his deliberative style of governance, how he’d always been someone who “makes layups and free throws, not three-pointers.”

  12. Let Us Paint Your Factory Magenta

  1. Though (in flagrant disregard of cultural stereotyping) the infamous appendix-rupturing sucker punch meant to test Houdini’s iron gut came from a Canadian, not a Detroiter, at the previous tour stop in Montreal.

  2. In 2011, Florida conceded that some of the postindustrial cities he’d cited as ripe for creative-class reengineering might, in the wake of the crash, be pretty much screwed. He’d come up with a solution for those who stuck around, though: high-speed rail! Trains would soon be so fleet, Detroit “could be repositioned as a suburb of sorts for Chicago and potentially even Toronto,” and the creative class would now seek gainful employment as a commuter class.

  3. In postproduction, the filmmakers changed the ethnicity of the invaders, making the attacking country North Korea (reportedly in an effort to appeal to the growing Chinese film market).

  4. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities Jacobs described Detroit as “dispirited and dull” and “largely composed … of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.”

  5. The very first Motown hit, written by Gordy himself, was Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want).”

  6. If you include the late Detroit native Mike Kelly, whose showstopping Biennial piece, a film of an exact replica of his childhood home being driven around the city on the back of a flatbed trailer, was commissioned by Detroit’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

  7. Others have pointed out that, at the moment of ascension of that most verbal of African American popular music forms, hip-hop, these three kids in Detroit were moving in the opposite direction, recording largely instrumental rhythm tracks. Techno was dance music in the most avant-garde sense of the term, the imaginary sound track to a science fiction movie: Alphaville, maybe, or one of those Last Man on Earth pictures, only set in present-day Detroit, its creators understanding that the city of the future required appropriately forward-looking music. Juan Atkins, who coined the term techno and produced some of its most enduring tracks under various pseudonyms (Cybotron, Model 500), once said, “Today the automobile plants use robots and computers to make their cars. I’m more interested in Ford’s robots than Gordy’s music.”

  13. Fabulous Ruin

  1. To be fair to Gordy, his assignment was a vexing one, as the inherent jauntiness of the city-song genre was bound to grate against the necessity of acknowledging Detroit’s troubles. At no point in, say, “I Love Paris” did Cole Porter feel as if he had to plead for divine intervention on the city’s behalf, whe
reas one of the couplets of “Hello, Detroit” rhymes “I will always be there for you” with “I will say a little prayer for you.”

  2. Europeans—particularly from Germany, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands—love a ruined American city. Every Detroiter I know who has ever photographed an abandoned building and possesses any kind of Web presence has been contacted by strangers from Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Paris, or Berlin, asking about the best way to sneak into the old train station or offering to pay for a local tour.

  3. Sure enough, by the following summer, much of the section of roof we stood upon had collapsed entirely.

  4. David Kahn, in The Code Breakers, writes of the incredibly still-in-use “Alberti cipher” being one of the first polyalphabetic codes.

  5. In a city weak enough to be routinely pushed around by wealthy power players, Moroun has managed the impressive feat of reigning, undisputed, as the most reviled member of the local oligarchy. A reclusive octogenarian billionaire, Moroun also owns the nearby Ambassador Bridge, which spans the Detroit River to connect the city with Windsor, Ontario, thereby controlling an unbelievably lucrative international border crossing. A quarter of the annual $400 billion in trade between the U.S. and Canada travels across this single bridge. Moroun is estimated to earn $60 million annually in tolls alone, and he has spent the past decade stymying efforts by the U.S. and Canada to build a second, jointly owned public bridge two miles down the river, necessary in part because the Ambassador Bridge is over seventy-five years old and sorely in need of refurbishment, and in part because of the outrageousness of the fact that a single private individual owns the busiest international border crossing in North America. Moroun’s counterproposal—that he will build his own second bridge, right next to the current bridge—has been given a cold reception by everyone but the Republican-controlled Michigan Senate, this despite the Canadian government’s offer to pay up front for the broke state of Michigan’s share of a second bridge. In the meantime, Moroun has gobbled up properties in both Detroit and Windsor, near the sites of both proposed bridges, most of which are maintained as lovingly as Michigan Central. The son of a Lebanese gas station owner who eventually bought a small trucking company, Moroun took over the family business in the seventies and has been widely despised ever since. An article about him in Forbes was titled “The Troll Under the Bridge.” (Moroun is also very short.)