Detroit - On a Positive Couple of Notes

I have been harsh if not apocalyptic in some recent posts about the future of Detroit. The national media has taken on Detroit as the poster child of urban decay and urban renewal. Decay is certainly an apt moniker for the city but renewal - not hardly. However, recently suggestions have been made of a revisioned form of urban recovery. Even Mayor Dave Bing has suggested that saving parts of the city is a better plan than attempting to save it all. Indeed, almost no one still holds to the idea that Detroit can be restored to what it once was.

Current thinking includes urban gardens, urban forests and urban green belts. In Detroit this has been encouraged by perhaps the one city program that has worked well in the past decade - the removal of burnt out and falling down houses. Now there is an adopt-a-lot program which allows taking over abandoned lots with no cost, to plant an orchard or a garden; perhaps even to save an entire block once the abandoned structures have been removed. One or two houses are restored on their own mini-estate in formerly side-by-side-by-side neighbors.

The belief is that Detroit as it once was is gone. The large industrial base is not only not coming back - they don't want it back. The population may continue to fall for the near future but less is more seems to be a welcome future. The new Detroit motto is "We can do better than this." In fact, I suggest renaming the city, if only calling it - New Detroit. 

Two excellent articles cover these smaller is better options in a newer, greener Detroit. A New York Times piece focuses on the greening of Detroit through local food production, while the Atlantic did a profile of what they are calling the Upper-middle-class survivalists. 

I hold to my view that attempts to restore Detroit are doomed but this idea of New Detroit emerging phoenix-like from the well deserved ashes of Old Detroit, that I find interesting as an urban model for all of the midwest rust belt.

Detroit Redux

I was surprised after my series on the ruin of Detroit that I did not hear from the few friends I still have there. I did hear a lot from many; family, friends and strangers. The comments were from both sides of the Detroit Decline. Some felt I was too harsh, others agreed and most of those had lived there and since moved away. But no one still fighting the good fight has turned up to defend the soot-covered Motor City.

Summer 1967

The New York Times did a silver-lining piece on Detroit. How some residents are attempting to hold on to selected portions of the city. How even the new mayor has stated that saving the whole city is folly, while encouraging residents to concentrate themselves in salvageable corridors. Neighbors are doing citizen patrols and paying private companies for services the city can no longer provide.

I would like to find some reason to jump on the Save Detroit bandwagon, but the logic of saving certain neighborhoods necessarily means abandoning others. It is indeed a triage situation, which when extended to the country as a whole would mean saving certain cities and letting others go.  Detroit is going to be on everyone's list to let go.

R.I.P Motor City, let the wild flowers bloom, let the grasses cover over the scars of what once was.

Imported From Detroit (IV)

Isn't that a great skyline, those gold-speckled black towers right on the edge of a beautiful blue river. It's stunning, it's beautiful, it's Detroit and it's an illusion. Detroit is never going to be a thriving urban center again. 

Never.

Yes, it's time for my commentary on the city of my birth. There is one word I have to say about Detroit -- downsize. Stop this insane belief that the city will ever regain the prominence and population it once had. Ain't gonna happen. I don't care how many fine young millennials say they are 'up on the city,' 'high on the potential,' or simply 'pro-Detroit.'

The industrial based is destroyed. The skilled workforce is gone. There is a worldwide recession and if you subscribe to the rhetoric from my last Detroit post, the American Empire is decaying from within. There are far too many other pressing needs to spend billions on saving the rusted hulk that was Detroit. Too many other urban areas need help and they can be salvaged, cut your losses when it comes to the Motor City.

Go small -- downsize. Go Green and local. Try the whole urban farm thing, why not? Make those massive boulevards and highways bicycle friendly. Urban park, urban forest but no more towers. The industrial north is over, hell big industry in the US might well be over and if we are going to be an information age workforce, would you really pick Detroit as the placed you wanted to be plugged in? I've been there, I know what it's like -- move on.

Urban renaissance is not going to happen. Urban conversion or retroversion sure; whatever that looks like. There are a lot of creative people with multitudes of ideas for what Detroit could be, but the one to reject and forever bury is a Detroit like it was in the good old days. Those days are long gone and for quite some time the days and nights haven't been anywhere near good. Don't listen to those people who talk about the decline of the last decade or how twenty years of neglect did this or that to the city. 

Detroit has not been thriving for over fifty years. Half a century of clear and constant indicators have made it clear that this city was not going to survive, yet the politicians, the corporations, even the citizens kept the feeding tube connected despite all the obvious signs and cultural near death signposts. Time to pull the plug and turn our attention to what can be saved, call it urban triage.

Imported From Detroit (III)

Ruin Porn brings out some strong responses from both sides of the story. Those who believe that "the city shall rise from the ashes" often feel that those who shoot and publish ruin porn are praying on the city and the citizens at their lowest. The advocates, of course, speak to the art and the documentation of the decline. They aren't anti-renewal but only making visual commentary on the current state of the city. 


The central focus of ruin porn for at least two decades if not more has been Detroit. Sure Cleveland has some crumbling infrastructure and Flint was abandoned by GM as documented by Michael Moore. Anywhere in the country you can get a shot of a decrepit bridge or a dam that will fail in the "next ten years" or so. As a nation we have been woefully negligent of infrastructure and just plain normal maintenance. 


But only in Detroit has ruin porn been taken to the level of high art. And why not, Detroit has been in decline long before the auto industry disappeared. Remember the riots of 1967? White Flight equaled Detroit well before then. The city has been a canvas for decay and abandonment for decades.

The entire range of ruin porn advocates and dissenters is covered with some truly in-depth reporting from Guernica magazine last month in an article titled Detroitism. Not surprisingly there are those who believe Detroit is beginning an urban renaissance; though they don't used that term as it would be harshly contrasted with the Renaissance Center build on Detroit's waterfront in 1977. Others believe that Detroit is in fact that old, grey canary in the mine of industrial collapse of the rust belt. A canary, which by the way, has been lying on the bottom of its cage for decades.


The Guernica article lays out the dichotomy: "Detroit figures as either a nightmare image of the American Dream, where equal opportunity and abundance came to die, or as an updated version of it, where bohemians from expensive coastal cities can the the one-hundred dollar house and community garden of their dreams."


Community gardens indeed, there are serious conversations and even pilot projects to turn vast areas of Detroit into urban farms. Not those vacant lot gardens that dot many urban landscapes but wide fields of urban vegetation to sustain the survivors of the post-industrial wasteland.

There is another article that seeks to attack the purveyors of ruin porn from Vice magazine. It's subtitled: Lazy Journalists Love Pictures of Abandoned Stuff. Nevermind that they use some of the photographs from those lazy journalists to illustrate their story quite effectively, the piece ends with a quote from one of those ruin porn artists they are criticizing: "It's a problem with the culture. I don't know why you'd want to be in China or Russia, because it's happening here. We're in the center of the empire now, and here's where you can see the collapse of the empire starting."


For those who do not fear the photography police finding your ruin porn links. Here are some of the best and most vilified offerings.


Forgotten Detroit is perhaps more of a nostalgia website for those who may actually remember some of these old buildings from their glory days. The photographer is a local and provides interesting historical tidbits.

Detroit Disassembled by Andrew Moore may be the most well known of the ruin porn books. There is also a streaming PBS piece on his work. This from a positive review:

"Photographer Andrew Moore takes us beyond the individual toll of a failed economy to something more Pompeiian in scope. To an empty city falling in upon itself, in unspeakable tragic beauty. Andrew writes in the book of his own excavations: of a grove of birch trees literally growing from rotting books, of a homeless man frozen head first at the bottom of a flooded elevator shaft, of pheasants with entire city blocks to themselves to roost and nest, of the surreal re-ruralization of what was once America's fourth largest city, now covered in ivy and moss. Moore's spectacular photographs take us to places where the outside has come in and where the inside, quiet and soaring as a cathedral, has become sacred in its desolation."


The other book I must mention is the Ruins of Detroit. A five year collaboration resulted in an at times visually stunning collection of images. This is, if nothing else, the height of ruin porn as seen in the decline of Detroit. From their website:


"Detroit, industrial capital of the XXth Century, played a fundamental role shaping the modern world. The logic that created the city also destroyed it. Nowadays, unlike anywhere else, the city's ruins are not isolated details in the urban environment. They have become a natural component of the landscape. Detroit presents all archetypal buildings of an American city in a state of mummification. Its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great Empire."


And finally, for those who see differently, there is Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City. Here Detroit is seen as a smaller but better city.

"Though the book focuses on Detroit, the challenges outlined here are readily applicable to other, post-industrial cities that are struggling to reimagine themselves in the 21st century. For those interested in cities, particularly in how to turn them around and re-imagine them, there is no better lab than Detroit.

More on the Motor City soon, I have yet to express my own thoughts on the future of Detroit.

Imported from Detroit: Part II
Imported from Detroit: Part I

Imported From Detroit (II)

Over twenty years ago I was visiting back in Michigan and took my mother to visit my Aunts Alice & Doris in Detroit. We decided to go out to dinner but discovered it was prom night and all the local restaurants were full of high school students in limos. The ladies suggested an old hangout they used to go to, a Hungarian family style restaurant, so off we went. The place was as they remembered it - long wooden tables, huge plates of food served family style. I was fascinated listening to the stories from their youth. When the waitress overheard one story she spoke up and it turns out she was the granddaughter of the restaurant's owner they all knew fifty or more years ago.

What visually stuck with me from that evening was the view from the two story ceiling to floor windows. We were on the second floor and across the street was a narrow strip of land on the bank of the Detroit river. There posed on the very edge of the river was a former five story receiving building for offloading raw materials headed for the auto plants. I say "former five story" because the top three floors had collapsed and crushed the floors below. I was stunned both at the decrepitude and at the lack of governmental action to force the demolition and clean-up. This was probably 1988 or '89. Today there is small industry of photographers and journalists engaging in what is being called "ruin porn", chronicling the erosion and deconstruction of the great cities of the rust belt.

If you remember there was a derogatory line in the Eminem/Crysler ad about writers who "have never even been here" telling the story of the city. I am going to deal with ruin porn in my next Detroit post. But for now let me just establish my own street cred - I do know Detroit and I have been thinking about that city for most of my life. I am guessing my opinion of its future will not be enjoyed by everyone, but that also is for a later post.

What is clear is that Detroit has been leading the way in how this country will deal with its industrial decline. At this moment the response has been dismal. Neglect and corruption have contributed to the slow but steady abandonment of what was once the 4th largest city in the United States. We cannot say: "As goes Detroit, so goes the nation" that is simply not true. But it might be enough to say Detroit is the big, soot-stained canary in the mine of America's previous industrial might. Some would say the future is a slow burial.

More to come soon as I ponder further on the city of my birth.


Imported from Detroit Part I

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The photograph at the top is of the old Michigan Theatre in Detroit. As you can see it has been turned into a parking lot but in the demolition process the decision was made to preserve the outer walls and towering ceiling of what was once a theatre that could seat four thousand. It makes for an interesting or harrowing juxtaposition which speaks to the condition of the city.

Imported From Detroit (I)

I admit it, I watch the Super Bowl for the commercials; I just am not a sports fan anymore. Unfortunately, since the recession the super ads haven't been that super. No one wants to spend the big bucks make those great ads like they used to. All the way back to the 1984 Apple MacIntosh ad, super sunday has been the place to make big announcments, remember during the dot com boom when over half the ads were for companies you never heard of and didn't know what they did even after you viewed the commercial. 


But this year not so much, a few CG animations that were interesting, a bunch of trailers for summer blockbuster wanna-be movies and then came the Detroit ad - "Imported from Detroit" - if you didn't see it go here. If there is such a thing as a great ad, this is it. You may have already run across it, the Chrysler ad with Eminem. It really is a two minute piece of art or at least an ode to Detroit. And it sets out the basics of the larger critique of fate of the city that is Detroit.

The reason I bring it up is because I too am imported from Detroit. I was born there and for the first 25 years of my life, Detroit was the large metropolitan area that filled the niches for what big cities do. Sure I had Ann Arbor for lots of things, but Detroit was the big city and many of my relatives lived there, holidays were celebrated there and when family stories were told they all happened in Detroit.

For nearly a year I have off and on had a curiosity with the current state of the city and yes it is a bit of a morbid fascination. I have collected some stories, some pictures and some memories I have had them queued up in the draft folder. The super bowl piece brought it all out into the open. Time to write about Detroit.

I probably have three or four posts worth of Detroit material, but we start with the Eminem/Crysler ad, it really is a masterpiece. Please take a look and I will continue with this in a few days after a bit more reflection on the place of my birth.

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Art: Joe Louis' Fist sculpture from downtown Detroit
Video link: youtube.com has been removing some links to the ad, I will attempt to keep an alternative link open here