Detroit City Is the Place to Be (10 page)

I met the group in front of the ruins of the old Packard automotive plant. Feldman suggested that I leave my car on a nearby residential street, so I followed him down a leafy block, parking in front of a rundown home. There were no signs of any people. Abandoning my rental car struck me as a potentially irresponsible act, but Feldman seemed to think it would be fine, so I reluctantly climbed into his ride, in my mind cursing the trusting, pigheadedly naive neo-Marxists, or whatever they were, and in fact remaining vaguely preoccupied for the duration of the tour with the certitude that my vehicle was being vandalized or stolen.

In the car, Feldman and Mark Rudd sat up front. I squeezed into the back with a local college professor and Feldman’s son Micah, who had a cognitive learning disability but was attending college and had become a disability-rights activist. Rudd was a hulking, excitable presence, corpulent and white-bearded, with a generous, toothy grin. He wore a corduroy shirt jacket over white pants, and at one point, mentioning how he’d been his wife’s “project,” he gestured to his outfit as evidence that she’d reformed him. I wondered what sorts of clothes he used to wear before his wife came along.

Feldman, a scattered but entertaining tour guide, wore a padded blue union vest and spoke with a slight Brooklyn inflection. I knew that he’d begun working at the Ford Rouge plant after graduation as a political act, in hopes of spreading a radical doctrine to the working class. “Back then, my friends were going to work for car factories the same way people went to work for the Obama campaign in 2008,” Feldman had told me earlier. “I was there because I thought we could make a revolution. I still call someone to change a lightbulb! I came in romanticizing what workers would be like. But the old-timers from the South all hated me. The plant was where people got their paycheck. I started off painting underbodies, myself. The trucks would come out of an oven. They didn’t dip them in rustproofing, because that would have been a capital investment. I painted the underbody with scrap paint, whatever was left over. I’d be standing near a hot oven all day, with paint from the spray gun dripping in my eyes. I’d come out a different color every night. Eventually they moved me to the trim shop. I’d try to get a job that didn’t involve small parts, because I’d drop them.”

We drove by General Motors’ Detroit/Hamtramck assembly plant, one of the few auto factories still operating within Detroit’s city limits, though Feldman wasn’t there to celebrate that fact: he meant to point out the contentious history of the place, how eminent domain had been used to destroy a thriving immigrant neighborhood called Poletown. Then we stopped by a twenty-four-lot farm operated by a Capuchin monastery. They also raised bees and made their own honey. After that, we made our way to perhaps the most visible and enduring symbol of Detroit’s DIY positivity, the Heidelberg Project, the artist Tyree Guyton’s beloved outdoor art installation, which had spread over several residential blocks surrounding the house on Heidelberg Street where he’d grown up.

Guyton had studied at Detroit’s Center for Creative Studies after serving in the army during Vietnam, but his endlessly morphing project had always reminded me of the mad folk art environments I’d seen in the South by untrained artists like Howard Finster. In the eighties, as Guyton watched his neighborhood violently rended by poverty and the drug trade, he began painting bright polka dots on vacant houses on the block. He also decorated the sidewalks with totemic faces and erected plywood sculptures of taxi cabs in empty lots and covered an entire two-story home with stuffed animals
4
and built all manner of other sculptural pieces using old tires, part of a bus, bicycles, rusty oil drums, telephones, decapitated doll’s heads, shopping carts, a men’s room door, broken televisions, football helmets, Camel cigarette signs, vacuum cleaners, and discarded ballet shoes, among other things. The city government loathed the Heidelberg Project for many years. (Two different mayors, Young and Archer, ordered sections of the artwork demolished.) But since then, everyone has pretty much left Guyton alone. I had tried to set up an interview with him but his wife informed me that he would need to be financially compensated for his time, as so many requests from journalists and documentary film crews had been submitted.

In many ways, the Heidelberg Project is the ultimate manifestation of a Boggsian vision of Detroit’s future—a working-class African American artist, through a stubborn, solitary act of imagination, crafting a better world out of his blighted surroundings. Heidelberg Street, once left for dead, has become a regular stop for tourists from all over the world, and you never hear about anyone being robbed or hassled or about Guyton’s artwork being stolen or vandalized, the city’s own efforts at destruction notwithstanding.

Just as we parked, Guyton himself, who no longer lived on the block, happened to be pulling up in his Ford pickup truck. Feldman knew Guyton, and they greeted each other warmly. Guyton was drinking a fruit smoothie he’d made at home, sipping it through a straw from a plastic cup. He had a short, military-style haircut, almost entirely shaved in back, and wore jeans and Timberland boots and a blue University of Detroit Titans sweatshirt.

He’d come by to check on a flag he’d draped around one of the Heidelberg houses. The flag was so oversized, you only saw its stripes if you looked at the house head-on. The stars had ended up hanging somewhere on the roof or in the backyard. It was a windy morning, and the flag billowed dramatically.

Mark Rudd said, “You’re the Detroit Christo!”

Guyton said, “People have called me lots of names.”

We paused in front of the polka-dot-covered house. Guyton told us he’d grown up there. He said he could remember sitting on this very porch as a kid and listening to his grandfather tell stories about the lynchings he’d witnessed during his own boyhood in the South. Guyton had asked his grandfather, “But what, exactly, did you see?” And his grandfather had said, “I saw their soles blowing in the wind.” These stories inspired Guyton to decorate the great oak tree in front of the house with dangling pairs of shoes, hundreds of them. Guyton said when people who’d visited the Heidelberg Project died—one lady was murdered in a crime and another guy, an aspiring artist, hung himself, and afterwards this aspiring artist’s father hung himself as well—sometimes the families would bring a pair of the dead person’s shoes to Guyton and ask him to add the shoes to the tree.

Guyton had just returned from a show in Berlin. He talked about wanting to unite all peoples, and how, when he first started the project, his neighbors despised it. Some of them didn’t appreciate the fact that it was bringing white visitors to the block. Guyton spoke with a very precise, slightly nasal diction. He said some tourists from China had recently stopped by. He said that when he was in the army he’d been ordered to get rid of a bunch of the marijuana the government had been growing as part of an experiment about the effect of pot on soldiers during times of stress. He said he’d sampled some first. He said he was not surprised by anything the government might do.

Then he said, “I know you guys are in a hurry, but let me ask you,” and he gestured toward the sky. “Do you believe in a Divine Creator who made everything?” Earlier, he’d made reference to a Creator’s having put him here for a purpose, but no one had said anything. The topic of religion had not come up during our car ride. We all shifted around uncomfortably. I muttered something unsatisfying about being a nonpracticing Catholic. The college professor said he believed in more of a “source,” something that we could all tap into, but not so much a divine being. Mark Rudd said that he believed in something but didn’t like to talk about it and didn’t really know how and that talking about God at all was a form of blasphemy, and for good reason, because once you started naming God, you got into religious wars. Feldman said he was into the cultural traditions of Judaism but not the idea of a divine being looking over us. Micah said he
was
God, at least that’s what his sister always said, because he was always smiling and that struck her as godlike.

Guyton said he’d been pondering why he did what he did, and how he got to this point in his life. Waving his arms skyward again, he said he believed in a purpose for all of us. The sky did look strikingly beautiful this morning. It felt miserly, somehow, to argue with our host.

When we got back to my car, everything was fine. I’d worried all morning for nothing. A few blocks earlier, a pheasant had dashed in front of our path. We seemed to all cry out at once, delighted. One so inclined might have interpreted the moment as auguring something good.

*   *   *

On Sunday afternoons during the summer, if you drive up St. Aubin, passing a few grim-looking light industrial buildings (one called Elevator Technology), several fields threatening to overtake dilapidated wooden houses, and a boxing gym for kids run by a former gangbanger, you will eventually notice cars tightly lining either side of the street, a highly unusual sight for this part of town. If you happen to have a window cracked, you will also hear amplified blues chords echoing over the prairie. Finally, you will arrive at the corner of St. Aubin and Frederick, where, in a field taking up nearly the entire block, a man named Pete Barrow has erected a crude stage and begun hosting weekly blues concerts.

Actually, the stage is just a bunch of pallets nailed together and covered in carpet. A sizable crowd gathers by late afternoon, with spectators forming a U around the field’s perimeter, leaving a large, open expanse of grass between themselves and the stage. The standing room, kibitzing portion of the crowd mingles behind the seated folk and spills all the way down Frederick—it being pretty much all field around here, so no private homeowners to bother. A couple of early arrivers set up tents to protect themselves from the sun and Pete Barrow has constructed a wooden outhouse. Other people bring lawn chairs, coolers, and little grills to cook out on. You can also buy tamales from the tamale guy working out of the back of a van or peanuts from the peanut man, who moves around the crowd in the manner of a ballpark vendor, except instead of a neck-slung hot dog or beverage container he carries a brown duffel bag stuffed with hand-baggied portions of peanuts, the bag itself—the duffel, not the individual baggies, which would’ve likely been prohibitively labor intensive for his pricing structure—helpfully marked PEANUT MAN.

Barrow, a retired autoworker, never sits in with the band. “Well, I sing once in a while,” he says, “but there ain’t nothing to it.” You see him working the crowd between sets, exhorting people to “chuck it in the bucket,” “it” meaning cash money, “the bucket” meaning the bucket he hauls around to collect the optional cover charge. “I need money to cut this lawn, people!” Barrow also shouts, when he’s not telling people to chuck it in the bucket. What he doesn’t say, not until the very end of a long conversation, and then only as a casual aside, is that he happens to be related to one of the neighborhood’s most famous sons. His first cousin was Joe Louis Barrow, who grew up in Black Bottom, worked after school at Eastern Market, and learned to box at a recreation center near the Brewster-Douglass projects.

The corner of Frederick and St. Aubin could be an historical reenactment of the very rural Southern past left behind by the ancestors of so many African American Detroiters, and however temptingly easy and perhaps even inevitable the romanticization of such a scene might be, it’s nonetheless not unreasonable to worry about how the best and the brightest diligently taking their pencils to the map of Detroit with the intention of “rightsizing” the place might fail to budget for this sort of thing, unthinkingly squeezing out the cherished alchemic components necessary to make a truly great city: the messiness, the clamor, the unplanned jostlings and anarchic eccentricity. Raising any sort of gentrification fears at this earliest stage of Detroit’s would-be comeback feels like an academic luxury. And yet, when phrases like “the most potentially ambitious urban planning initiative in modern history” are being bandied about (to describe Bing administration’s rightsizing efforts), it’s hard not to grimace at the thought of the plasticized, deadening nature of planned communities.

Many would consider nearby Lafayette Park, the Mies van der Rohe development that partly replaced the razed Black Bottom neighborhood, one of the more successful residential areas in Detroit: middle class, diverse, safe. Even the chilly architecture, by this date, has aged into an appealing
Alphaville
sort of retro chic. And yet, I’d venture to guess you could spend as much time in Lafayette Park as you fancied and you would never see a house band jamming on a stage made of pallets while a singer in his seventies named Kenny Miller, dressed casually in a tan windbreaker, gray denim pants, and white Fila sneakers, his only nod to show business being his gold-rimmed brown-tinted glasses, performed “Paying the Cost to Be the Boss.” Nor would you be able to wander among a standing-room crowd and spot a guy dressed in the official-looking vest of a casino employer dealing out a poker game. You wouldn’t have seen thirty people move into the center of the field to join an elaborate step dance to a song called “Wobble” and you wouldn’t have noticed the number of men arriving on motorcycle and seemingly affiliated with one of the city’s many black biker clubs, their leather jackets, per custom, signifying which club precisely, e.g., the Black Dragons, the Outcasts, the Black Gentlemen, the Sons of Zodiac, and (a personal favorite) the Elegant Disciples. You wouldn’t have the opportunity to shake the hands of one of the Outcasts or to be the recipient of the salutation “They call me Satan. But my name is Joe.” You wouldn’t hear Satan’s thoughts on the Bing rightsizing plan (“I think it’s a bunch of bullshit. Let people do what they want to do, live where they want to live”), nor would you learn that Satan, who just turned sixty and has massive arms and long silver hair and a light, almost South Asian complexion, used to work as an underwater welder on oil derricks in the Gulf, doing commercial deep diving—he was certified at two hundred feet—and that he’d also been a cop, briefly, in Louisville, though he didn’t like it, and now he mostly builds and fixes Harleys, having lost one of his legs after being hit by a drunk driver in 2001 while riding his motorcycle and left for dead. You also wouldn’t get to ask a stupid question like
So how did losing your leg affect your riding?
nor would you receive a response combining a good-natured slap of the prosthetic with a cry of
It didn’t make it easier!