Detroit City Is the Place to Be (2 page)

And yet Detroit’s almost mythic allure isn’t solely about misery. People have been drawn to The City Where Life Is Worth Living (an actual non-ironical historical nickname
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) since the golden age of the automobile. To commemorate the 1927 rollout of the Model A, for example, the modernist photographer and painter Charles Sheeler was hired by an advertising firm to spend six weeks at Ford’s gargantuan River Rouge plant, the largest factory in the world, with ninety-three buildings, sixteen million square feet of floor space, and 120 miles—miles!—of conveyor belt. Sheeler shot the plant the way an eighteenth-century painter might have depicted the interior of a cathedral, the elemental, almost sanctified vastness a seemingly intentional reminder of man’s insignificance in the presence of God—or, in this case, Mr. Ford. “Our factories,” Sheeler later wrote, “are our substitute for religious expression.”
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While touring America in 1935, Le Corbusier also stopped in Detroit, requesting immediately upon his arrival his own tour of the Rouge. In his book
Cathedrals
, he wrote of being “plunged in a kind of stupor” after leaving the plant. He was convinced Detroit’s factories would be where his mass-produced “homes of the future” might one day be built.

On the opposite end of the reactive spectrum, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, then a young doctor working for the League of Nations, visited Detroit in 1927 to report on the health conditions of workers at Ford’s factories. Appalled by what he witnessed, Céline recorded the degradations of the assembly line in his report and, subsequently, in his novel
Journey to the End of the Night
. The book’s protagonist, Ferdinand, describes the factories where he seeks work as resembling “enormous dollhouses, inside which you could see men moving, but hardly moving, as if they were struggling against something impossible.… And then all around me and above me as far as the sky, the heavy, composite, muffled roar of torrents of machines, hard wheels obstinately turning, grinding, groaning, always on the point of breaking down but never breaking down.” Later, while receiving a medical examination preliminary to being hired, Ferdinand informs the doctor that he, too, is an educated man. “Your studies won’t do you a bit of good around here, son,” the doctor says, shooting him a dirty look. “We don’t need imaginative types in our factory. What we need is chimpanzees.… Let me give you a piece of advice. Never mention your intelligence again!”

In 1929, the New York monthly
Outlook
sent the poet and journalist Matthew Josephson to cover the auto show. A leftist intellectual (and a fierce critic of Henry Ford) who had just published a biography of Zola, Josephson writes of the city with scorn and condescension, but also with undeniable awe, in the same manner one might marvel at the aesthetics and scale of, say, an SS rally as filmed by Leni Riefenstahl. After noting Detroit’s unlikely possession of one of the original castings of
The Thinker
, which still glowers distractedly from the steps of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Josephson proceeds to frolic in the irony of Rodin’s masterpiece brooding at the heart of a city in which thought, to Josephson’s mind, “has somehow been circumvented”: “Something that was automatic, something that ran by an internal combustion engine had taken its place. In fact a new word was needed to express the trance, the fearful concentration with which all men awaited the approaching Automobile Show.… No one thought of the human body, or the body politic. All minds were bent wholeheartedly upon the new Fisher or Chrysler bodies.”

And yet, unhappily, Josephson also recognizes the brute power of a metropolis that he says has “no past … no history.” He calls Detroit “the most modern city in the world, the city of tomorrow.” This is not meant as a compliment.

*   *   *

In January 2009, precisely eighty years after Josephson’s hysterical dispatch, I returned to Detroit on an identical assignment, to cover the approaching Automobile Show—and, more broadly, the collapse of the domestic auto industry—for
Rolling Stone
. My family still lived in the suburbs, so even though I’d moved away in 1993, I had continued to visit regularly. All the while, Detroit had remained Detroit, a grim national punch line. In the eight decades since Josephson’s account of the city’s vulgar ascendance, my hometown had gone from being a place with “no past … no history” to becoming one that barely possessed a present and certainly had no future. At least not the version of the city Josephson witnessed, that city having become
entirely
history by this late date, the very word
Detroit
threatening to turn into one of those place-names that no longer immediately signifies place but rather, like Pompeii, Hiroshima, or Dresden, the traumatic end of one.

When Josephson reported his own story, in January 1929, the stock market crash was nine months away. Detroit’s fortunes plummeted during the Great Depression, and it required nothing less than the outbreak of World War II, when the car factories were retooled as tank and aircraft plants and Detroit became known as “the Arsenal of Democracy,” for the city to recover. In the case of my visit to the auto show, on the other hand, the economic free fall had been occurring in real time since the preceding summer. I arrived on the week of Barack Obama’s inauguration, an incautiously hopeful moment, despite the seismic tremors of financial uncertainty. In Detroit, though, all minds were bent wholeheartedly not upon the new Fisher or Chrysler bodies—Chrysler, in fact, debuted no new models at the 2009 auto show and would declare bankruptcy three months later, with GM to follow shortly thereafter—but upon questions of basic survival, as the city faced its worst crisis in decades.

For Detroit, this was saying something. Where to begin? The most recent mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, had just begun serving a three-month jail sentence, having resigned in disgrace following a sex and corruption scandal. Meanwhile, the heads of the Big Three automakers, just weeks earlier, had appeared before Congress to publicly grovel for a financial lifeline—this after personally making the nine-hour drive from Detroit to Washington in hybrid cars, atonement for flying to the initial hearing on corporate jets. (All the humiliating stunt lacked was Burt Reynolds racing them in a souped-up Prius and they might have pulled in some extra cash with a reality TV pilot.) At just over 15 percent, Michigan would have the highest unemployment rate in the nation by the end of the year; in the city, where half of all children lived in poverty and one study identified nearly half of all adults as functionally illiterate, officials estimated the true unemployment figure at closer to 50 percent. The national housing-market collapse felt like old news in Detroit by January 2009, when the
Detroit Free Press
ran a story about a street on the city’s northeast side on which sixty of sixty-six houses had been foreclosed on or abandoned.

The school system remained the worst in the country, its administrators astoundingly corrupt. Crime had also shot back up: Detroit had the highest murder rate in the country (40.7 homicides per 100,000 residents in 2008) and was ranked by
Forbes
as the most dangerous U.S. city overall (based in part on a stunning 1,220 violent crimes per 100,000 residents). Yet the police department’s entire crime lab had been shut down the previous fall, after a state audit found egregious levels of systemic error. Though the Devil’s Night fires that plagued the city in the eighties had tapered off,
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Detroit still reported 90,000 fires in 2008, double the number of New York, a city eleven times as populous. A deep racial animus continued to pit Detroit’s suburbs against the city (the most segregated major metropolitan area in the country)—this despite the fact that the suburban sprawl largely invented by Detroit automakers had begun evincing a structural failure of its own, with foreclosure rates in once-model suburbs like Warren actually higher than Detroit’s.

Detroit’s own population had plummeted from a high of two million to 713,000, with an estimated 90,000 buildings left abandoned. Indeed, huge swaths of the city’s 140 square miles were poised on the cusp of returning to nature. Along with the empty skyscrapers and block-long factories fallen into ruin, entire residential streets, once densely populated, resembled fields in rural Arkansas after most of the houses had either burned to the ground or ended up demolished. A friend’s mother said she now carried pepper spray on her daily walks—not for protection from potential muggers, but from the packs of wild dogs she’d been seeing in the neighborhood. A coyote had just been spotted near downtown.

*   *   *

One afternoon, to get a better sense of the state of the city beyond the confines of the auto show, I met up with John Carlisle, the proprietor of the marvelous
Detroitblog
, on which he filed dispatches from some of the least-visited corners of the city. By day, Carlisle edited a weekly suburban newspaper, but online, writing as Detroitblogger John, he’d become the Joseph Mitchell of the postindustrial Midwest, ferreting out stories about vigilante ex-cops, whites-only hillbilly bars, and an old blues singer doing a healthy side business selling raccoon meat. That afternoon, we drove alongside snow-covered plains where houses once stood, what locals had begun calling the “urban prairie,” and crept around the perimeter of General Motors’ immense Fisher Body Plant, closed since 1984, its six floors of broken windows—hundreds of them,
entire blocks
of them—giving the place an odd beauty, like a dried-out beehive. At the vacant lot where Motown’s headquarters had been left abandoned for years, we observed a moment of silent contemplation, Carlisle recalling the time before the demolition when he’d snuck inside and stumbled across Marvin Gaye’s old desk, with love notes to Gaye’s wife still in one of the drawers.

Finally, back downtown, we parked in front of the Metropolitan Building, a fifteen-story, neo-Gothic office tower opened in 1924. It was a weekday afternoon, but the street was completely deserted. A block away, I could see Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s main thoroughfare.

The Metropolitan, once the center of the jewelry trade in Detroit, housed a number of jewelry manufacturers and wholesalers, but it had been empty since 1977. Someone had painted a garish football mural on the ground floor, and a filthy brown teddy bear had been tied to a street sign. “Memorial,” Carlisle said. “Someone was shot here.” Walking quickly to one of the building’s doors, Carlisle turned the knob and was surprised to find it unlocked. Then he noticed a woman behind the counter at a carry-out place across the street, eyeing us. “Here, pretend I’m taking your picture,” he said, posing me next to the memorial bear. He snapped a few shots until the woman turned away. Then we slipped inside the building and Carlisle switched on his flashlight.

The room had been completely gutted. Shards of plaster and glass covered the floor, and an icy draft blew through all of the broken windows. Carlisle splashed the walls with beams of light. Other than a single, cryptic graffiti tag, scrawled in Day-Glo orange, even the defaceable surfaces were barren. We began climbing the stairs. It was dark, and the wires dangling from the ceiling looked eerie and weblike. On one of the doors, someone had written, “If You Want 2 Die—” I paused and tried to make out the rest of the sentence, but it was illegible. Carlisle stopped on the flight above me and hissed, “What’s wrong? You hear someone?”

Eventually we made it to the top floor. A couple of rusty radiators had been dragged to the center of the room and abandoned. “Crackheads always try to take them for scrap, but then realize they’re too heavy,” Carlisle said. He led me out to the snow-covered roof. We blinked in the bright daylight, staring up at what we’d come to see: the building’s beautiful stone facade, a carved knight’s helmet topping a coat of arms and ornate fleur-de-lis garlanding each window. Carlisle snapped a few pictures. He had started photographing Detroit’s ruins several years earlier. In his explorations, he had come across homeless encampments, drug addicts getting high, a couple having sex. In another building, eight cops showed up with their guns drawn. After realizing Carlisle had only a camera, they let him go. There was nothing for him to steal, anyway, even if he had been a thief.

“This city is like a living museum,” Carlisle said. “A museum of neglect.”

We moved over to the parapet of the roof, crenelated like the top of some fortress, and gazed out at the city skyline. “That building is empty,” Carlisle said, pointing to the nearest skyscraper. He shifted his finger to the left. “So is that one.” Then, sounding surprised—and the hitch in his voice reminded me that he was not a professional guide, that he didn’t do this every day—he pointed to the next building over and said, “And that one, too.”

In 1995, a Chilean photographer, Camilo José Vergara, had cheekily proposed allowing a cluster of buildings in downtown Detroit to molder and become “an American Acropolis.” Dismissed by many locals as a smirking Ivory Tower provocateur, Vergara turns out to have been a prophet. I hadn’t brought a camera, but I could have been a tourist in the off-season at a scenic overlook.

And yet, standing in calf-deep snow, my hands thrust deep in my coat pockets, staring out at this wintry scene of ruin, I had to admit I didn’t really feel sadness, or anger, or much of anything. Depressingly, perhaps, it all just felt normal
.
For people of my generation and younger, growing up in the Detroit area meant growing up with a constant reminder of the best having ended a long time ago. We held no other concept of Detroit
but
as a shell of its former self. Our parents could mourn what it used to be and tell us stories about the wonderful downtown department stores and the heyday of Motown and muscle cars. But for us, those stories existed as pure fable. It was like being told about an uncle who died before you were born, what a terrific guy he’d been, if only you’d had the chance to meet him, see how handsome he looks in these old pictures …

Would my kids one day grow up thinking the same thoughts about America as a whole, about my ponderous tales of cold war victories and dot-com booms? It was easy to let your imagination drift in melodramatic courses. A malaise spreading through the rest of the country—a creeping sense of dread that, after spending the past eight years doing absolutely everything wrong, this time we really had reached the inevitable end of our particular empire—all of this had the effect of making Detroit, for the first time in my life, feel less like a crazy anomaly and more like a leading indicator. The mood of hopelessness had become palpable. I found myself fleetingly wondering if Detroit, in the end, might reclaim its old title after all—not the Motor City but the city of tomorrow.