Notes From the Hard Shoulder (14 page)

I never much liked
motor shows. This one's no different save for a few details, such as that the silvery ticket in my hand cost $250. But that's all right because it's all for charity and anyway, someone else paid. The women are largely in little black numbers and the blokes are in what Americans insist on calling tuxedos. This is gala night, the last and most exclusive preview before the doors are thrown open to Joe Six-Pack.

Mounting pressure on the thorax suggests that
Car Magazine
snapper Steve did a rather overenthusiastic job of tying my bow tie, but at least I'm wearing the one piece of clothing actually specified in the bottom right-hand corner of the invitation. Elsewhere, this has been dispensed with in favour of an invariably jewelled collar stud. This is not about cars at all, it's about the great and good of the city putting in an appearance, preferably a memorable one. People gush and so does bubbly, but sadly into that vessel that is so inextricably linked with civic functions and rejoices in a suitably ominous oxymoron – the plastic glass. Later, these will be found abandoned on boot lids or trodden into the carpet, like the aftermath of the school disco. At least Mercedes-Benz has real American beer in real, cool glass, but even here someone overhears our conversation and says, 'You guys are from Australia, right?'

Mustn't be cynical, especially as I got in gratis; look at cars instead. But this only makes things worse. Just what are European car makers trying to say? Everywhere there is fatuous imagery of furry animals and
trendy young people, probably dolphins too if you look hard enough. On the VW stand the fine and handsome
Passat is sidelined in favour of the ridiculous new
Beetle, adorned with flowers and the current Miss Michigan. She has fine teeth, but then it's illegal not to in the US. Tiresome car makers' bicycles are irritatingly evident and the Porsche stand is showing a weird film of microbes and sperm, all to do with great ideas evolving or something. If Henry Ford hadn't hijacked the word for use elsewhere I'd say it was bunk. Now the Chevrolet
Silverado, an awesome V8-engined pile of extended-cab pick-up displayed with funny-hatted and denim-clad chap strumming country songs on his guitar – cheap fuel, big distances and American liberty are all implicit in its unashamed bulk. That's more like it.

But we're not here for the sanitised version of events proffered by a motor show, we're here to discover the truth about Detroit, the cradle of motoring civilisation and the city the car industry built for itself. And the truth is not to be found in the cosy, glitzy surrounds of the
Cobo Center. The truth, as ever, is out there.

The batteries in Steve's camera begin to fade at minus 10, and so do I. Fingers and mechanisms seize and conversation becomes difficult owing to numbing of the face. Detroit in January really frosts my ass, and it's tempting to think the American auto industry made an early blunder in the choice of its location. Michigan is the only state in the US from which, looking south, you can see Canada. Eh? Florida would have made more sense, you guys.

There are good reasons for things working out the way they did. The region belonged to the Wyandot people until 1701, when the white man came. Actually, it was a Frenchman,
Antoine de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, an army captain sent by the king to establish a trading post and stem British encroachment into the area. He reputedly landed at the spot now occupied by the
Renaissance Center, the '70s-built five-tower complex recently bought by GM for conversion to its new world headquarters. Cadillac named his settlement Pontchartrain d'Etroit, source of its current name. Some two centuries later, one
Henry Leland, an admirer of the pioneering spirit and a man prepared to push the boundaries of manufacturing possibility, named his car company after the explorer.

For over a hundred years the tiny settlement – population 1,650 in 1810 – was fought over by the British, the French and the Indians. But by the time it was admitted to the Union in 1847 steam navigation was well established and the Erie canal had been built, which slashed the Detroit-New York journey time by 90 per cent. Detroit became an important shipbuilding centre and, with the opening of the railway to Chicago in 1852, a suitable transfer point for grain and lumber from the American interior. To the old world this promised work and prosperity, and Detroit's legendary immigration began. Towards the close of the century the population was up to nearly 300,000, following the influx of Irish, Italians, Ukrainians and, most numerously, Poles. Detroit was now famous for iron, steel, steam engines and ships, and as a world centre for cast-iron stove manufacturing. The infrastructure that
would be required by mass manufacturing was already in place and with it the necessary technical skills. Walter
Chrysler, after all, worked on the railways. By now Detroit was pretty much gagging for the horseless carriage.

When it came in 1896, trundling into town under the command of its creators
Charles B King and his mechanic accomplice
Oliver E Barthol, it was just that. It is preserved in the Detroit Historical Museum and really is just an ox cart with an engine lashed in the back. But, unlike Benz's effort, it had a full complement of wheels and that engine was a sophisticated in-line four. Already the American car business was looking cocky. It seems to have been well received, too, but then this was a town that thrived on new technology.

Ransom E
Olds was Detroit's first proper car maker. He would have been Newark's, but a chance meeting on a railway platform with a copper magnate named Smith persuaded him to set up in Detroit in return for financial backing. He built the first car factory in 1899. It burned down two years later, but his timekeeper
James Brady rescued the prototype Curved Dash Olds from the flames. He went on to become the mayor of Detroit, as was only right, for the Olds became the world's first series production car, with 425 built in 1901. Suppliers sprang up to serve the endeavour and Detroit was go.

The Olds was not mass-produced, mind, though it undoubtedly threw the gauntlet down in front of Henry
Ford, who set up shop proper in 1903.
General Motors came in 1908, with
William Durant's
incredibly far-sighted vision that a holding company should be formed to draw together numerous smaller and vulnerable car makers. Chrysler was a latecomer when he went his own way in 1925, but had the sense to buy up the inventive
Dodge brothers and secure a reputation for innovation.

Living and working in Detroit must have seemed fantastic. Prosperity and hope were bolstered by the progress of the car, production of which occupied a quarter of the city's populace by 1929, a population that had grown five-fold since 1904 to 1.6 million. In 1911 Ford began building his
Model T in a way no one had tried before, and in 1913 he brought production to a halt for the day to photograph his entire workforce of 12,000 outside the
Highland Park factory. Times must have been good, for this may just be the world's most expensive photograph. A pristine example of the T is on display in the museum and, unusually, you are allowed to sit in it. Of this ground-breaking car Steve notes: 'The lofty driving position is spoiled by pedals that are too close together, like the Lamborghini Diablo's, and poor weather proofing. The controls do not fall easily to hand.' None of this stopped Ford producing 15 million of them by 1927. In 1920 half the world's motor vehicles were Model Ts.

The lure of Detroit was immense. A photograph surviving from the century's first decade shows a Ukrainian family of four with a few small suitcases. They have just stepped from the train, drawn halfway round the world by the promise of a new, better life in the bosom of the motor industry. After the first war, black families of the southern states flocked north in
their thousands for the same reasons. An alarmist telegram to Henry Ford in 1923 reads: 'We are advised that rumors are in circulation throughout the entire south that the Ford Motor Company is seeking labor.' But then, Ford had doubled his standard labour rate to create the five-dollar day. Today, African-Americans make up around three quarters of the city's population.

Great edifices trumpeting the success of the city, such as the original GM headquarters and the neighbouring Fisher building, rose omnipotently from the low-rise sprawl. The motor barons were the heroes of the day; a picture of the youthful
Alfred P Sloan shows a dashing fellow wearing the expression of a man possessed. In 1934
Clyde Barrow stole a Ford
V8 for bank robbing and felt compelled to write to Henry Ford: 'Even if my business doesn't seem strickly legal, it don't hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.'

Even the Depression could not knock Detroit off course. Labour unrest in 1936 and '37 caused the famous sit-in strikes at GM's factories by the newly formed
Union of Automobile Workers of America, but this, too, is recorded positively in the history books as the most beneficial labour movement of the century. It certainly didn't prevent Detroit becoming 'the arsenal of democracy' during
World War II. Thousands more streamed to the city to make, among other things, 92 per cent of the vehicles, 75 per cent of the aero engines and 56 per cent of the tanks used by the US forces. Tens of thousands were drafted to build the
B24 Liberator alone, which at one point was taking to the air at the rate of one an hour.

All of this, of course, simply left Detroit better equipped with skill and plant to begin, post-war, a new era of car building. This was the indulgent age of affordable muscle cars and
Harley Earl's tailfins, themselves inspired by the warplanes that Cadillac had helped build through its work on Allison aero engines.

To many, the following 30 years are the golden age of the American car. My favourite exhibit in the Henry Ford
Museum – not a collection of old Fords, but the legacy of the old man's efforts to record the history of the American people through the things they made – is Chrysler's obscure 1964 turbine car. Commercially it was not a success, but stylistically it is a masterpiece, festooned with turbine imagery in such details as its vaned headlamp bezels and wheel centres and the nozzle-like design of its rear lamps. It is the work of an industry still rejoicing in itself. But though Detroit's car business may have been on a roll at the time, problems were surfacing in the city which it had created and which served it.

Three years after the turbine car, the tragedy of Detroit was burned on to the world's conscience. It's been there ever since.

As we wait at the lights on Woodward, a beat-up '70s Chevy
Camaro pulls alongside, engine throbbing. Green comes suddenly on American traffic lights, and as it does the Chevy's rust-ravaged bootlid squats and, with a squeal of rubber and a whiff of burned oil, it lunges for the next junction, just up the road. All the lights are red. He does it every time.

This sort of behaviour is not without precedent. In the '50s, Detroit's streets were the amateur drag-racing
centre of the world, where young men in modified V8-engined cars wowed the crowd, often with the clandestine help of GM engineers keen to test engine developments in the white heat of downtown competition.

After a while I'm tempted, and the Seville STS's Northstar V8 burbles encouragingly. As the light changes I slam the pedal down, the exhaust note hardens and, whooping deliriously, we touch 80mph on the short drag to the next red before bringing the whole pointless, gas-guzzling charade to an ABS-assisted halt. We've beaten him by about 0.25 seconds.

Childish? Certainly, and pretty unfair given the 20 years that separate the cars. But hardly dangerous. This is downtown Detroit on a Wednesday afternoon and the pavements are deserted. Given that this is the epicentre of the world motor industry, the roads, too, are suspiciously free of cars.

'Donut development', as the Americans call and spell it, is not a phenomenon unique to Detroit. Happens in England too, that people move out to the suburbs and the shops and services follow. What we call the inner city ends up poor, underfunded, problematic. But Detroit is something else.

Turning from the main road to a deathly silent side street, we find rows of magnificent turn-of-the-century houses where once the captains of industry and commerce dwelt, and elegant '30s apartment blocks. All are derelict, some burned out. It is the occasional intact house that looks incongruous here. An abandoned wind chime sounds eerily from some long-ruined garden. The destruction, once you look, is everywhere
– cinemas, shops, commercial premises. Even Hudson's department store in the town centre, remembered by every old person we spoke to as the hub of the city's good feeling, stands as a multi-storey testament to Detroit's decay. The new shop is in the suburbs too. 'They couldn't lease that place for one dollar,' says a scarred Vietnam veteran I met in its shadows, who, tragically, is living on the street.

Postwar affluence has something to do with it. The GI Bill gave returning soldiers cheap loans to build new houses, and they did it in the suburbs. The car industry was wealthy, and wealth migrates outward, too. The very product that made the city, the car, allowed people to commute from afar. The suburbs are thriving still. Drive north to the inappropriately named Birmingham and you find an attractive and prosperous town of its own. Drive – there's no bus – east to Grosse Pointe and see fabulous mansions.
Edsel Ford built one of them.

But the summer of 1967 was the turning point. Legend has it the famous riot started in an after-hours drinking den near the old Tiger Stadium, with a slanging match between aggrieved blacks and the predominantly white police force. 'It was a feeling that kinda burst out,' says one who, returning to the city that evening, couldn't even get to his street. 'It was a hot, sticky day. The sort of day when you might want to riot.' Inevitably, the rioters ended up destroying their own neighbourhoods. By the end of it 43 were dead, Detroit's 'nicely integrated' social fabric had come unstuck and age-old racial tensions were unfettered. On the streets you can canvass opinions from
people of all parties, but their views are predictable and not worth repeating.