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| The 1958 Statue known as the Spirit of Detroit |
I
am in Detroit… well not actually in Detroit.
I am in Livonia, suburb of Detroit, which is the town my parents moved
us to from Detroit in the height of what was then called White Flight. Back then the City of Detroit was in the top
ten largest cities in the United States.
At its peak, Detroit was the fourth largest city in the United States
between 1920 and the mid 1950s.
Detroit's population peaked at about 2 million people.
The
current population, as reported in 2011, of the city is 706,585. Detroit is now ranked as the 18th
largest city in the United States. In
the last census, it was reported that the city lost a whopping 25% of its
population. It is simply
incredible. As a metropolitan area,
Detroit is ranked 13th but even this population has dropped 24% meaning people
have simply left the region.
It
breaks my heart. Almost anything I read
about Detroit is depressing. The number of abandoned and empty homes is
negatively impressive. The number of
homes that have been razed is equally depressing. There is something like forty square miles of
the city that is vacant. That is an
astronomical number. There are stories
of packs of feral dogs roaming some areas and people raising chickens and
farming in some parts of the city. There
is a March 20, 2012 Rolling
Stone article about an
estimated 50,000 stray dogs in the city.
A
few years ago, I was a Wayne State University Alumni event in Skokie, IL. I won one of the many door prizes. My prize was a book about the architecture of
Detroit. It is a gem of a book and I am
happy to have it. In reading it, there
was a very depressing aspect to it. Many
of the buildings featured and photographed in the book were noted to be either
torn down or abandoned. The entire urban
renewal movement seems to have bypassed Detroit.
The
only time I am ever in the city these days is when I drive from my parents’
home in Livonia to either of the two Armenian churches in Metro Detroit. St. Sarkis church is in Dearborn. I drive through Detroit to get there albeit
all on expressways or major streets. When
I go down the Southfield Expressway, see burned out apartment buildings and
closed business. When I go to St.
John’s, I go east on 8 Mile Rd. which is the northern border of Detroit. That stretch of 8 Mile doesn’t look so bad by
comparison.
I
have not really explored the city since I moved away in 1990. I have not been to the neighborhoods were I
grew up. The most I have looked at one
of my childhood homes on Google Maps.
I
should probably make a tour of the city.
I should probably go and see for myself what is happening there. I have had this notion for several years and
have not done it for two reasons. First,
my trips to Detroit are usually weekend trips and often overnighters. I go to visit family and as often or not for
a specific purpose. Thus my schedule is
pretty busy and there is not a lot of free time to do something like this. Secondly, I am a bit tentative about doing it. Yes, that means a little afraid. I am a victim of the negative things I have
read about the city. Is it safe to visit
my old neighborhood and see what kind of shape my old schools and other haunts
look like? One solution I have come up
with is to make such a tour at dawn on some summer day. That is the hour when I have no obligations
and when a majority of people are sleeping.
It should be safe then and it would not interfere with my other
obligations. It is probably safe at
other times and I am just showing my age and demographic.
My
sister Nancy does go into the city regularly.
She enjoys the Techno Music scene which our late sister Laura helped
pioneer. She is downtown often and is
encouraged by what she sees people trying to do. She would probably volunteer to go with me on
this tour.
Not
everything I read is negative. There are
a cadre of folks who are trying to make a go of things. You read and hear about them in the
media. My sister Nancy speaks of some of
the positive things. Mayor Dave Bing
seems to be trying very hard to move the city in the right direction but the
challenges are incredible. There has to
be a revolution and renaissance of homesteaders and entrepreneurs willing to
start up in what are incredibly low real estate costs in the city. I look to the generation of young people I
teach, those that have just graduated and are underemployed. They are the ones
that can take a risk and move into the city and renew the abandoned shells of buildings,
warehouses, factories and even homes. The
new businesses we read about in Detroit are bars, restaurants, cafes, bakeries,
coffee houses, and bakeries are fine and very visible. I am not sure of the numbers. Detroit needs more than this. Detroit needs businesses that create a new industry
and a wave of jobs.
I
am a product of the Detroit Public Schools... at least through tenth
grade. I went to Robert Burns
Elementary, Cadillac Junior High School, and then Cass Technical High School
for half a year. I finished up my last
two and a half years in Livonia. I would
have like to have graduated from Cass Tech which was a renowned magnet school
in the City of Detroit for many years. I
was proud to have gotten admitted. I used
to take the bus down to Cass. I was
excited to do so. I was getting into the
city on a different level. Sadly, it
was only for a semester.
The
last time I spent any real time in Detroit was when I was a graduate student at
Wayne State University in the 1980s. I
enjoyed being downtown part of that great urban university. Universities are insular and I really did not
get a great feel for the city.
I
believe there is a defining point that began the long downward spiral of the
city. It was the 1967 riots. Many cities experienced riots in the second half
of the 1960s. The riots were in poor
black neighborhoods. The riots usually
involved the destruction of property and the looting of stores. I suppose the stores, in those days, were
owned by white folk who no longer lived in the neighborhood. The riots in Detroit were particularly
brutal. They were perhaps the worst of
the hundreds of riots that tore through America's urban landscapes in those
tumultuous years. There was, from my perspective, a feeling of uneasiness that
hung over the city from that point on.
If the riots did not trigger the white flight from Detroit, it certainly
escalated it. That much cannot be
denied.
Jerome
Cavanaugh was the mayor of the city during the riots. He was elected as a young
John Kennedy kind of leader in 1962. The
riots, however, were his undoing. He was
criticized as being slow to react and things got out of hand. 43 people were killed. 5,000 or so became homeless. The riots were only quelled when a large
number of federal troops were called in.
It was ugly and had a lasting impact on the city.
Cavanaugh
did not run for re-election in 1970.
Roman Gribbs became the next mayor.
Gribbs ran again Richard Austin a black man and won. Gribbs was mayor for only one term and from
what I can remember basically treaded water.
He declined to run for another term.
In 1974, Detroit elected their first black mayor, Coleman Young. Coleman Young was truly polarizing. Blacks loved him and most whites did not care
for him at all. He was mayor for five
terms. In that time, the city lost half
of its population and had a soaring crime rate.
Was the decline of Detroit inevitable or was Coleman Young a catalyst of
it. Probably it was a fair measure of
both.
During
this same time, the auto industry went from its post war monopoly to having to
compete with the Japanese imports on quality, price, and fuel economy. The industry that was the lifeblood of the
Motor City was losing market share and trying to redefine itself just when the
city needed it most. The solution in the
auto industry was not favorable to Detroit or the state of Michigan. The industry needed new plants and those
plants were not built in Michigan but rather in other parts of the country and
in Mexico.
As
a result of the changes in the city and the auto industry, jobs and the tax
base left the city in droves. Coleman
Young, to his credit, tried to re-vitalize downtown with building projects
designed to bring business and consumers into the heart of the city. Under his administration, the Renaissance
Center, Joe Louis Arena, a People Mover, and the General Motors Poletown
plant. These were good ambitious
projects that were just not enough to turn the tide.
I
know I should not generalize, but I do not think I am making a wild conjecture
when I say that black folk in large part supported Coleman Young and white folk
in general did not. Detroiter's support
for Coleman Young was clear from the length of time he served as mayor: 1974-1993.
He was elected the same week that Maynard Jackson was elected mayor of
Atlanta. They were both the first black
mayors of their cities. The cities could
not have taken more opposite paths. This
lead credence to the argument that it was more socio-economic trends than
Young's regime that contributed to the decline of a great American city.
In
the early, 1970s, I spent a summer or two working with my Uncle Ozzie. He had left General Motors where he was a
machine repair specialist to open his own home repair and modernization
business. This was around the time when
people began to abandon their homes in the city in greater numbers. Most of these homes had Department of Housing
and Urban Development (HUD) mortgages.
As these homes were abandoned, HUD took ownership of them. The homes were being abandoned faster than
they could be sold. So, HUD had them
boarded up. My Uncle was lucky to get a
contract boarding up these homes. It was
a pretty good business for him and grew to dominate his business.
I
helped him. We cleaned out the houses of
trash and whatever else was left behind.
Full refrigerators were the worst!
We winterized the plumbing by pouring anti-freeze in each drain. Then we boarded up the windows and doors
making the house an eyesore in the neighborhood. We padlocked the front door. My uncle got to where we could do one house
in less than a day. He used to cut the
plywood on-site but later moved to taking measurements, cutting the boards in
his shop, and thus minimizing the time on site.
The
houses could be broken into but one would need more than a crow bar to do it. The plywood on the outside was braced by 2x4s
on the insides for the windows. The
houses we boarded were quite secure.
They would be relatively intact until HUD got around to cleaning them up
and selling them.
It
was a great experience working with my Uncle.
I will never forget those times.
Back then, I thought we were doing a good thing. It was bad that houses were being abandoned
and that we had to board them up. But, I
really believed it was a temporary thing.
It was not. The number of boarded
up houses grew out of control.
These
homes were eventually vandalized, some were burned down in the fires Detroit
became infamous for, and the great majorities of them have been or are being
bulldozed. This accounts for the amount
of open land in the city. It is a sad
bit of history that I had a small role in.
Detroit
and Pittsburgh define the American cities that drove the industrial growth of
the country. Pittsburgh was the steel
capital of the country. Their football
team is named the Steelers. Their team
logo is based on the Steelmark logo of the American Iron and Steel institute
and was created by US Steel Corporation.
Detroit was the car capital of the US if not the world. Detroit's basketball team is named the
Pistons. The hockey team is the Red
Wings whose logo is spoke wheel with a wing.
Both were gritty and tough towns, a reflection of their primary industries.
Both
cities suffered in the 1970s and 80s.
Steel left Pittsburgh and surrounding areas. I used to travel there in those days. The company I worked for had a plant in
Newcastle half way between Pittsburgh and Youngstown. I witnessed old factory after old factory
being shut down and left to decay. To
me, there is nothing uglier than a shut down factory.
I
used to believe that the decline was pretty fast for Pittsburgh and the decline
in Detroit took longer. I was right and
wrong. I just read that Pittsburgh lost
100,000 jobs from 1978 to 1982. I
witnessed the tail end of this era. What
I did not know was that the city had lost 100,000 jobs from 1945 to 1978. It was more likely an exponential decay. It started slow and then accelerated
rapidly. I would say the same kind of
thing happened in Detroit.
The
jobs both cities lost were the high paying blue collar job that defined the
status and strength the lower middle blue collar workers enjoyed from the end
of World War II until 1980 or so. These
folk worked hard but were compensated well.
They owned houses. It was not
surprising to see people have boats and summer cottages "up north" in
the working class neighborhood in Detroit where I grew up. That is all gone: the jobs and the lifestyle.
I
have an old friend that I know of who still lives in the City proper. He is a reader of this letter. His commitment is greater than that of anyone
I know. He will not move. His political views have changed with
time. He was a liberal back in the day
when we worked together and saw each other almost every day. Over the years, he has become more
conservative in direct proportion to the intensity of his Christian faith. His love for the city and what it can be is
unwavering. Perhaps the first stop on
the tour ought to be to visit him. He
would also be a great tour guide.