Detroit City Is the Place to Be (38 page)

Goldman’s talk was necessarily facile (he’d only spent forty-eight hours familiarizing himself with the city) and riddled with empty self-help exhortations (“If you don’t have an Art Basel, make one!”). Still, people in the audience took notes. During the question-and-answer session, an earnest young man asked for book recommendations on the subject of city transformation and was directed toward an author Goldman had “heard about” but never read—Jane Jacobs.
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Goldman’s most concrete proposal was offered during an audience with Mayor Bing, whom he’d advised to give free housing to 100,000 artists.

And yet, self-interested hype aside, Goldman did have a track record for sniffing out and cannily perceiving ways to monetize distressed neighborhoods on the cusp of gaining cultural capital. In Detroit, beyond the anecdotal evidence, empirical indicators of change began to materialize. The 2010 census, for example, revealed a head-turning spike in the number of college-educated Detroiters under the age of thirty-five—up 59 percent in a census when the overall population of the city dropped by 25 percent. By 2012, Midtown, the university district popular with young white newcomers to the city, was actually experiencing a scarcity of rental properties, with 96 percent of units occupied. Cooley’s barbecue restaurant, in nearby Corktown, did $1.8 million in sales in its first year of business and had become the anchor of a Brooklynized block of prime real estate that included a single-origin coffee shop, an artisanal cocktail bar, and a miniature boutique hotel. A youth hostel opened down the street to accomodate all the visitors from Europe and hip North American cities like Montreal and Portland. (When a friend started renting out apartments on the website Airbnb, he quickly became overbooked and started turning people away.) An arts group in the Netherlands now sponsored nine-week arts residencies in Detroit; during a single visit to another arts space in Corktown (a 30,000-square-foot warehouse purchased by Cooley), I met a boat builder from Maine, a video game architect from Copenhagen, an industrial designer from San Francisco, a Los Angeles choreographer, a Detroiter who made coats for homeless people that could be turned into sleeping bags, and an American graffiti artist who’d come to Detroit via Paris.

The economic benefits endowed a city by various arts and cultural institutions can be tricky to calculate with anything approaching precision. In its heyday, Detroit’s other great twentieth-century cultural assembly line, Berry Gordy’s Motown Records, was the largest black-owned business in the country, the aspirational nature of the music
5
contributing as much to the city’s aura as the stylized, evocatively named cars rolling from the factory lots. Today, the Heidelberg Project alone draws an estimated 50,000 visitors annually, and art collectors and curators are beginning to pay serious attention to Detroit’s art output. In an interview, Jay Sanders, the cocurator of the 2012 Whitney Biennial, specifically highlighted a trip to Detroit as “having a big impact” on the emerging vision of the show, ultimately resulting in the inclusion of three Detroit artists,
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more than from any other city beyond New York and Los Angeles.

That said, any potential Detroit arts renaissance remains in its earliest phase of development, more about insane real estate opportunities and the romantic vision of a crumbling heartland Berlin—basically, vicarious wish fulfillment by coastal arts types living in long-gentrified cities—than an overarching homegrown aesthetic. The rise of a new infrastructure catering to the incoming “creatives” in neighborhoods like Midtown and Corktown, such as the planned Whole Foods, had an undeniable tangibility. But the changes felt miniscule in comparison with the problems facing the rest of the city.

Derrick May, my neighbor on Service Street, had a unique perspective on cultural bubble economies, having been a prime instigator behind another of Detroit’s stabs at an arts-driven reinvention. At that time—the late eighties and early nineties—Detroit was becoming known internationally for techno music. May and two of the acknowledged cocreators of the genre, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson, had actually grown up in the semirural town of Belleville (much closer to Ann Arbor than to Detroit), where they’d bonded as African Americans in a predominantly white high school. Later, they’d moved into the city and helped to colonize Service Street, artsy black gentrifiers interested less in Motown than in Kraftwerk, the reclusive German electronic music duo portrayed in their press and album photographs as robotic mannequins.

In Detroit, a local disc jockey called the Electrifying Mojo played Kraftwerk’s 1981 album,
Computer World
, in its entirety nearly every night when it was released. The group’s biggest (really, only) hit in the United States, “Autobahn,” a Teutonic celebration of the open road—minimalist, repetitive, with a synthesized electronic pulse and the stray cyborg vocal effect—presages techno from a compositional standpoint, to be sure, but also on the pure level of vibe: Detroit techno was driving music, created in the Motor City and tailored perfectly to the city’s endless highways and boulevards. Wildly cinematic, the songs unspooled perfectly alongside the scenes flashing across one’s windshield—all of that empty space, punctuated by the dark shapes of unlit buildings, shadowy figures, strobed bursts of color from the occasional working streetlamp.
7

And for a brief moment it seemed as if this weird microgenre might have a shot at commercial success. The May-produced compilation
Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit
, its title an obvious play on Motown’s old slogan “The Sound of Young America,” came out just as rave culture was beginning to explode in the United Kingdom. Back in the day, May told me, there would be dozens of guys hanging out in front of the studios on Service Street, waiting to drop off demos. Detroit suddenly had new cachet, the city itself becoming a key aspect of the mystique of techno music and its mysterious, faceless creators.

“We never thought of this music as anything other than our own,” May told me one evening. “The same question I always get asked, in Europe or Asia or wherever I’m traveling, is basically, and it’s never phrased exactly this way, but it’s, ‘How did three black guys from Detroit’—from this shithole of a city—‘make this music?’ They don’t mean it in the way you’d imagine: ‘How did three dumb-ass black niggers do this?’ They sincerely want to know how this music came from us. From this place.”

But after the initial hype in Europe, which resulted in Saunderson scoring Top Ten hits with his group Inner City and May turning down a chance to appear on
Top of the Pops
,
techno, in the States, and even in its birthplace, Detroit, settled back into its natural place as a decidedly underground phenomenon. While techno has added to the city’s mythic image abroad, it provided little in the way of lasting transformative effects. In past interviews, May would say things like, “If this [techno] happened in New York, everyone responsible would be considered geniuses. But it happened in Detroit, so we get nothing.”

Today, May no longer seems bitter. He makes a healthy living flying to Europe or Asia nearly every weekend, DJing at some club where nostalgic fans freak out the same way baby boomers would if Eric Clapton showed up to play a local rock bar in Scranton. “What’s happening in Detroit today is almost like Barack Obama being elected president,” May told me. “I love Barack Obama. But he’s only president because George Bush was an absolute fuck-up. In my book, the same level of desperation is happening in Detroit. The powers that be have tried everything else, and they don’t know what to do, so now what they’re doing is nothing. And in the process of doing nothing, the creative class is finally being let free to roam the city for the first time since I was a young kid.

“I want to try to be optimistic, like everyone else,” he went on. “But the fight here has just begun. A couple of blocks of commerce in Corktown is in no way the resurgence of a city. Detroit is the next Brooklyn? That’s just a false sense of romanticism. That person has not driven here much. Let’s see how these people feel after a couple of winters or when they start having kids—let’s see if they can still hang then.”

May had invited me to his place to watch the sunset. I’d figured he must have had a rooftop deck I’d somehow never noticed before, but when I arrived, May and his friends were sitting on folding chairs on the sidewalk in front of his building, sipping cava from plastic cups. Only in Detroit, I thought, would twilight at the edge of an eight-lane boulevard strike anyone as a relaxing proposition.

Behind the warehouses of Eastern Market, though, the sky had gone a lovely, cool shade of pink. Occasionally, a single car would seem to float past on Gratiot, otherwise deserted. The tires, isolated from regular traffic noise, created a soothing tidal sound.

May told me foreign interviewers, once they got through asking him how techno could possibly have come out of a place like Detroit, always had a second question: So, why didn’t you ever leave?

The roof of the abandoned Packard automotive plant, winter 2009. The artist Scott Hocking, who created the television installation, is on the left; the author is second from left.
[Corine Vermeulen]

13

FABULOUS RUIN

D
URING THE FATEFUL SUMMER
of 1967, a Chilean electrical engineering student at the University of Notre Dame named Camilo José Vergara read an article in
Time
about Gary, Indiana, a debased steel town about an hour west of South Bend (and home of rising Motown stars the Jackson Five). Fascinated, to an immediate and unseemly degree, by the salacious descriptions of the lawless-sounding “paradise” (
Time
’s word) for vice-seeking Chicago businessmen (Chicago’s brothels and illegal gambling dens having been largely shuttered by the first Mayor Daley), Vergara quickly made the drive with a friend, arriving on an uncomfortably sweltering summer afternoon. A foul odor hung over the city—exhaust from the steel plants, which burned Vergara’s eyes. Years later, though, he would recall the day as “one of the most memorable” of his college experience. Eventually returning to Gary “perhaps a hundred times,” in his own estimation, Vergara began to photograph largely ignored sections of the ghetto—fortresslike public housing projects, numbingly decaying storefronts, churches and train stations fallen into ruin—his very alienness (not African American, not even
North
American) becoming an asset to his sociological observations, to which he bore an untainted curiosity, the willingness of the freshly disembarked to brazenly stare, especially in directions natives no longer bothered to look.

Vergara spent the next decades photographing on Chicago’s South Side, in South Central Los Angeles, in Harlem and the South Bronx, Camden and Newark, dubbing the growing body of work his “Smithsonian of Decline.” In 1987, he made his first photographs of Detroit, but only added the city to his “collection” six years later, when he began documenting its grand ruins in earnest. His focus remained on the awesome collection of prewar skyscrapers clustered in the city center, most of which now stood hauntingly empty. At night, Vergara noticed how different they looked from historical photographs, when the high-rises were still occupied and lights ornamented their long shafts. By the time he arrived, the only sources of illumination came from street lamps, and maybe, on clear evenings, the moon, casting the towers in a shadowy, enigmatic chiaroscuro, as if dramatically lit for an old film noir.

In 1995, in a deadpan, deliberatively provocative essay, Vergara proposed the city “place a moratorium on the razing of skyscrapers, our most sublime ruins, and instead … stabilize them,” setting aside a dozen or so downtown blocks as an “urban Monument Valley” that would act as a “memorial of our throwaway cities,” an “American Acropolis”:

Midwestern prairie would be allowed to invade from the north. Trees, vines, and wildflowers would grow on roofs and out of windows; wild animals, goats, squirrels, possum, bats, owls, ravens, snakes, insects, and perhaps even an occasional bear would live in the empty behemoths, adding their calls, hoots, and screeches to the smell of rotten leaves and animal droppings.

Acknowledging the Swiftian nature of his essay, Vergara called it “an immodest proposal.” At the time, Detroiters were predictably outraged. John Slater, the head of Detroit’s Planning Commission, insisted, “For [Vergara] to suggest that this is an empty ghost town is bizarre.”
The New York Times
managed to find an actual Greek, Constantine Roumel, to say—even better: “sputter”—“American Acropolis! It’s an insult to America, to what America stands for. It’s an insult to the classical Greeks.” Roumel was one of the owners of the David Stott Building, a gorgeous thirty-seven-story art deco tower built in 1929 and taking its cues from Eliel Saarinen’s famous second-place proposal for Chicago’s Tribune Tower; at the time, Roumel was attempting to lure tenants with office rents as low as ten dollars per square foot. “For a city to set itself as the world’s symbolic ruin—that is not going to attract tourists from Peoria, Illinois,” Michael Goodin, a writer at
Crain’s Detroit Business
, told Vergara. “The Romans, that is a dead civilization. Americans [
sic
] are not a dead civilization.”