Detroit City Is the Place to Be (14 page)

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Detroiters are rightfully wary of top-down urban renewal plans. The city’s wild budgetary and population woes date back to the peak of the auto industry, when workers from Europe and the rural South flooded the city, hoping to reap the benefits of Fordism. In 1919, James Couzens, the longtime financial manager of Ford, was elected mayor. Couzens had built the company’s extensive dealership network and was the primary architect of the five-dollar workday, which had sparked the mass migration of labor to Detroit in the first place and created a problem for Couzens unimaginable to Dave Bing: a city with far
too many
people. In the ten years prior to Couzens’s election, Detroit’s population had more than doubled, leaving thousands of citizens, according to Robert E. Conot, “packed into leaky and unheated barns and shacks without plumbing” or into slapdash tent cities.

The desire to escape this Boschian tableau was a sensible one. Workers in Detroit also happened to be making enough money to buy the very cars they were building, which promoted mobility, as did the new, rapidly expanding highway system being built in large part because of the lobbying efforts of their employers.

With, of course, the notable exception of one demographic group. Detroit’s African American population, which doubled between 1940 and 1950, was generally restricted, through redlining tactics, to living in packed slum housing in neighborhoods like the roughly sixty-square-block Black Bottom. These neighborhoods had the city’s oldest housing stock—Sugrue again: “tiny, densely packed frame homes jerry-built by poor European immigrants in the mid and late nineteenth century”—and thanks to discriminatory banking practices that severely restricted loans to minorities, black residents had difficulty raising money to prevent the slums from further degrading. Pressure to build new housing projects met with deep neighborhood resistance.

But the builders of Detroit, having radically changed nearly every aspect of the lives of Americans—where we could live, how much we could earn, how far we could travel—believed there was a solution. As far back as 1939, General Motors, in its massively popular Futurama exhibition at the New York World’s Fair, had begun predicting what a techno-utopianist’s “city of the future” might look like. Not surprisingly, GM’s vision included fourteen-lane expressways and elevated civilian walkways to double the available width for car traffic below.
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The film accompanying the exhibit,
To New Horizons
, set in the “wonder-world of 1960,” imagined “an American city replanned around a highly developed modern traffic system,” where “along both banks of the river, beautifully landscaped parks replaced the outworn areas of an older day” and “on all express-city thoroughfares, the rights of way have been so routed as to displace outmoded business sections and undesirable slum areas whenever possible.” As the camera panned over a diorama of the future city, the narrator portentously intoned,
Man continually strives to replace the old with the new!

Directly behind and to the west of my loft is the neighborhood that used to be Black Bottom. Beginning in 1946, Mayor Edward Jeffries condemned 129 acres of Black Bottom in the name of progress, uprooting nearly two thousand black families. As presaged by Futurama—almost to the year!—a freeway was eventually routed through the former neighborhood, “displac[ing]” the bulk of this specific “outdated slum area,” including Hastings Street, the vibrant center of working-class African American life in Detroit (famously name-checked by John Lee Hooker in “Boogie Chillen”). The rest of Black Bottom became Lafayette Park, a cluster of identical podlike “homes of the future” designed in the International Style by Bauhaus master Mies van der Rohe. The stark, glass-fronted town houses and high-rise apartment buildings received mixed reviews as architecture; but in any event, they weren’t built for poor people. As is often the case with the promises bundled into large-scale civic development schemes, construction of its lower-income housing was slated for the back end of the timetable and ultimately wound up dropped altogether.

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I happened upon another failed urban renewal plan by accident, through a young Dutch photographer named Corine Vermeulen. In 2001, Corine had moved to the city to attend Cranbrook, the famous art and design school whose past instructors had included Charles Eames and Eliel and Eero Saarinen. Her work avoided predictable images of grit and decay, instead focusing on what kept the city alive: inner-city beekeepers, lowrider car enthusiasts, storefront mosques, pastoral scenes of the urban prairie. “I feel like Detroit is the most important city in the U.S., maybe in the world,” she told me one night, utterly serious. “It’s the birthplace of modernity and the graveyard of modernity. My American experience is Detroit. Detroit is America for me.”

At a certain point, she brought up Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Stalker
, her favorite film, explaining how much of the movie is set in a mysterious postindustrial netherworld called “the Zone”—a desolate, forbidden place that also offers supernatural promises of transcendence, at least according to the titular Stalker, who has agreed to guide the film’s other two main characters, called only the Writer and the Professor, into the Zone in order to fulfill their deepest desires. Yanking a book by the anarchist writer Hakim Bey out of her bag, Corine began to tell me how Bey’s theories of anarchic “temporary autonomous zones” connected with
Stalker
and, ultimately, Detroit, where anything could happen.
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“Detroit is a temporary autonomous zone,” she said.

“Like the Zone in
Stalker
?” I asked.

“No, not all of Detroit. But it has Zones. The dichotomy between the parts of this city that are very magical and the parts that are miserable can be pretty overwhelming. But it’s precisely these extremes that create the urgency to override the existing reality with something completely different. Detroit in the present moment is a very good vehicle for the imagination.” She gave me a curious look. Her face had a mischievous, elfin quality. “Do you want me to take you to the Zone?” she asked.

I said, “I would go to the Zone.”

The following Sunday, Corine picked me up in her ancient, boxy Volvo, a lush Detroit techno track, awash in synthesizer, playing on her stereo.
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We drove past the ruins of the Packard plant, heading deeper into the east side. It wasn’t an especially cold day, but the sidewalks and front yards were mostly devoid of life. We passed a house with no windows or doors; a poster on the front of the house warned “This Building Is Being Watched.” You’d see these posters on forsaken structures throughout the city, their words splashed above a menacing pair of human eyes, presumably meant to scare off scrappers or arsonists, but having the odd effect of making entire rows of ravaged homes resemble scarred, angry faces glowering at passersby, as if the potential home invader were Being Watched by the buildings themselves.

We eventually came to the edge of a cleared space. This was unlike the other fields we had been driving through, in that there weren’t stray houses dotting the renatured yards—here, for a dozen or more blocks, absolutely
everything
was gone. Corine turned down the only street not barred with cement barricades. Strewn with detritus, at points nearly impassable, the block made me think of Humvee footage from the early days of the invasion of Baghdad. We maneuvered around shredded tires, jagged stacks of roofing tile, torn panels of Sheetrock, neat little mounds of broken glass, busted pallets, tangles of tree branches, unspooled cassette tapes, VHS tapes still in the box, a broken television, an empty purse, a pair of blue jeans. You could no longer see the sidewalks, the grass had grown so tall. There were one or two stop signs left, and a light post so stripped to the frame a person from a part of the world without light posts would have been hard pressed to discern its purpose. A cat padded out from between two piles of garbage and stared at us calmly before bounding back into the weeds. The one building still standing was an old school, Jane Cooper Elementary. Workers had begun to demolish it, but the job had been halted for months, so only part of the back wall had been torn off. There were no earthmovers or bulldozers in sight.

The street ended at a fence. Beyond it, we could make out the distant white walls of a factory, still in business. Corine parked the car between a pair of giant earth mounds—the taller of the two rose at least twenty-five feet—and we got out. Nodding, Corine said, “We need to go up there,” and started moving toward the taller of the mounds. Soon I was following her along a sort of goatherd’s path roughed out by previous visitors, which, after dipping into a little valley, eventually climbed a much steeper grade, forcing us to clutch handfuls of grass to prevent ourselves from toppling backwards.

When we reached the top, though, we had a panoramic view of the Zone. Corine said the mound we were standing on had been formed when the city had bought and plowed over the old neighborhood in hopes of transforming the area into a suburban-style industrial park. But the factory had been the only tenant to move in, and the rest of the cleared lots had been overtaken by grass the color of hay. There were also wildflowers, and those spiny nettle weeds that cling to your socks like Velcro, and scattered bushes and midget trees whose leaves had already gone amber. From up here, it was difficult to believe we were minutes from the downtown of a major American city. The homes in the distance, just outside the Zone, looked like farmhouses.

I later learned that the total size of the Zone was 189 acres. Its official name, the I-94 Industrial Project, hinted at the big plans once held for the place, a federally designated tax-free “Renaissance zone.” Looking to convert the already largely barren neighborhood into a more development-friendly area, the city had spent $19 million buying up some two hundred properties and plowing them under. Over the course of ten years, beginning in 1999, only one new tenant (Exel Logistics, the white factory) had moved in. Now, with soaring vacancy rates in the city, there was no demand for industrial space, and work on the Zone had come to a halt.

An article in
Crain’s Detroit Business
estimated that 130 private parcels remained scattered across the site, making it impossible for the city to market larger parcels of land to developers, barring eminent domain. Beyond that, a prominent local realtor noted in the article, industrial vacancy rates had risen so precipitously that even if developers were given the land
for free
, it wouldn’t make economic sense to embark upon any new construction. Conrad Mallet Jr. of Detroit’s Economic Development Corporation, the body that initially spearheaded the project, told
Crain’s
, “Let’s call a 4-H club and say, ‘Plant some corn.’ There is no one coming to an I-94 industrial park.”

As Corine and I climbed back down to her car, the clouds hung low, shifting their weight at a sluggard’s pace and doing funny things with the light. It was getting ready to storm. We drove over to Jane Cooper Elementary to look around and just then the sky opened up, so we ran inside to take cover. The part of the school that had not been demolished was still largely intact. The hallways, emptied, felt like tunnels, and despite the middle-school-yellow paint job, now faded and dusty with plaster, I thought of the noirishly lit chase scene in the sewers at the end of
The Third Man
. A fluttering noise came from one of the classrooms. Corine poked her head inside. There was a math book lying open on the floor, and when the wind gusted into the room—the back wall of the classroom was completely missing—it made the pages flap like the wings of a bird.

Other signs of the school’s past life hung on, all through the building. We saw shattered trophy cases, and piles of textbooks still neatly stacked on shelves, and another book on the floor, titled
Critical Thinking That Empowers Us to Choose Nonviolent Life Skills
, and a flooded gym, the climbing rope still hanging from the ceiling, only now over water, which captured ghostly reflections of the denuded basketball hoops, “like a meditation pool,” Corine said, tossing in a pebble.

By the time we made it back outside, not only had the rain passed completely but the sun had reemerged, astonishingly bright after the storm. We had exited from the back end of the school, where the demolition had begun. What had once been the rear of Cooper Elementary was now piled into an enormous heap of brick and rubble. From here, we could stare back into the school’s rooms as if it were a doll’s house opened in cross section. Suddenly it felt quite warm in the sunlight. In the rubble, I saw a giant bucket of Elmer’s Sno-Drift Paste, empty. “Man, in spring?” Corine said. “It’s crazy what starts blooming.” She had thought of making a sound recording of the birds and insects. “Even today,” she said, “just listen.” Corine cocked her head and we took in the shrill, chirrupy hum all around us.

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While all that vacant land failed to make Detroit attractive to developers, it did further the city’s reputation as the nation’s premier urban laboratory. Politicians from
other
cities began weighing in: Dan Kildee, a county treasurer from Flint, with a push for “land banks” that would amass, bundle, and ultimately redevelop delinquent properties; New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, with the suggestion that Detroit swell its population ranks with immigrants. A local nonprofit had a similar idea to Bloomberg’s, only with college-educated young people, launching a plan called “15x15” meant to lure 15,000 new residents under the age of 35 to Detroit by 2015. The American Institute of Architects proposed clusters of dense “urban villages” surrounded by green space. In a more radical vein, Lansing public policy consultant Craig Ruff called for “repurposing” the city as “the world’s greatest bio-urban hub,” with bicycle paths instead of highways, green space where factories once loomed, and locally grown food and handcrafted goods replacing anything you could buy at Walmart. Other farm-related proposals involved a winery on Belle Isle. The prize for most symbolically problematic solution must be awarded to Jai-Lee Dearing, a City Council candidate I’d gone to high school with (though we hadn’t known each other at the time) who suggested bundling a bunch of the plots and selling them to black-owned cemeteries.