Detroit City Is the Place to Be (44 page)

  
4
. Author of
American Odyssey
, a masterful, idiosyncratic history of Detroit, unconscionably out of print.

  
5
. Though, writing a decade later, Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville’s coauthor, cautioned against the mistaken belief “that Detroit is very civilized,” noting the occasion, only a year before his visit, in which a pack of hounds bayed a bear out of the forest, sending it down the entire length of one of the main streets of the city, most likely Jefferson or Woodward—“to the entertainment of the Americans,” the French traveler added with apparent fondness, “whose gravity probably did not betray them even on this occasion.”

  
6
. “The manufacture of varnish in itself is an absorbing story,” writes Clarence Burton, unconvincingly.

  
7
. Conot also notes how Thomas Edison, who grew up in rural Port Huron, Michigan, but worked as a newsboy on Detroit-bound trains, often “expressed his frustrations in the explicit language he had learned along the docks of Detroit. ‘Shit! Glass busted by Boehm!’ he wrote in his notebook.”

  
8
. After his home was burned by the mob, Thomas Holton spent the night hiding in the woods with his wife and child, later telling the compilers of the
Thrilling Narrative
, “With frosted feet and all our property destroyed, did the morning sun rise upon us, as destitute as when we came into the world, with the exception of what we had on, and without a friend to offer us protection, so far as we could learn. Oh, Detroit! Detroit, how hast thou fallen! No power in noonday to defend the helpless women and children from outlaws, till they have fully glutted their hellish appetites on the weak and defenseless. Humanity, where is thy blush!”

3. DIY City

  
1
. This was actually true, until a $4.2 million subsidy convinced Whole Foods to open a ministore in the relatively thriving Midtown neighborhood. Still, outside of a few select neighborhoods, the term
food desert
was not by any means a stretch. For those without a car in a city lacking adequate public transportation, many grocery options consisted of grim liquor stores fortified like banks. A 2007 study found that 92 percent of food stamp outlets in the city were, indeed, liquor stores, gas stations, or pharmacies.

  
2
. Covington did eventually gut and remodel the party store, transforming it into a community space.

  
3
. Ford biographer Steven Watts points to Ford’s specific hatred of horses, his charge on the family farm, where, as a teenager, he was once dragged home by a colt after falling off the animal and catching a leg in its stirrups. Watts implies this might have been a possible vindictive factor in Ford’s perfection of the horseless carriage, offering as evidence Ford himself, in one of his notebooks, gloating uncharitably, “The horse is DONE.”

  
4
. Stuffed animals, it turns out, become incredibly unsettling when exposed to the elements for several years.

4. Not for Us the Tame Enjoyment

  
1
. Detroit’s main Metropolitan Airport is actually twenty-five minutes west of the city, in suburban Romulus.

  
2
. These numbers are fairly close to accurate—at least the murder part. (In 2009, there were 361 murders in Detroit and 17,553 violent crimes.)

  
3
. According to Ector, gun instructors joke that if you shoot a guy with a .22 caliber, he’ll probably find out about it.

  
4
. By Rev. Kenn Blanchard, a former cop and Marine who insists gun control is racist.

5. How to Shrink a Major American City

  
1
. John Adamo Jr. owns and operates the biggest demolition contractor in the city, the Adamo Demolition Company. If one family’s immigrant story stands as an allegory for Detroit’s past century, it is the Adamos’. John Adamo Jr.’s grandfather, a builder, emigrated to Detroit from Alcamo, a town in Sicily, in the early 1920s, just as the auto industry was exploding. A newly flush class of workers wanted to expand their homes, many of which had “Michigan basements”—a crawl space beneath the cinder blocks on which the houses rested. Here, Adamo’s grandfather discovered his niche. “He’d get under the houses,” Adamo told me, “jack them up a couple of feet, and put guys under there with shovels and picks to dig a full basement.”

By the time Adamo’s father took over the business in the 1960s, however, expansion had stalled. “At some point,” Adamo said, “he thought, ‘Man, if I had a wrecking license, I could take down a few of these houses.’” Within a few years, the demolition company had grown large enough to be incorporated, while the long-withering construction side of the business was slowly phased out. After the riots, Adamo said, the number of city demolition contracts went through the roof. “Timing is everything, I guess,” he noted drily.

Detroit demolition guys, Adamo added, were always thinking about how to take down buildings. He and his demo friends, in fact, had a running joke going: if they’d never been to your house before, the first thing they’d do would be to look around and ballpark how many loads of debris the building would yield.
Oh, yeah
, one of them might say.
You’ve got yourself a ten-load house.

  
2
. By the time of Futurama II, the sequel launched for the 1964 New York fair, the future included fantastic “road-building machines” that could cut through the jungle laying concrete and steel highways at the rate of a foot a minute.

  
3
. Corine had never heard of Geoff Dyer, but in his collection
Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It,
he makes the same connection, sprinkling his account of a trip to the first Detroit Electronic Music Festival with references to
Stalker
and the Zone.

  
4
. Being European, Corine had been drawn to Cranbrook in the first place partly out of her fanatical appreciation of techno.

6. Detroit Is Dynamite

  
1
. Baker was not a military man; “General” was actually his first name. Beginning in the late sixties, he organized black autoworkers at Chrysler’s Hamtramck plant as a cofounder of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, or DRUM, and later the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. After being fired and blacklisted in 1973, he obtained a fake ID and got himself rehired at Ford (where he finally retired in 2003) in order to continue agitating from the inside. For more information on Baker, check out
Detroit, I Do Mind Dying
, an absorbing chronicle of radical seventies labor history by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin. Baker also traveled to Cuba as a young man, where he met Che Guevara and played baseball with Fidel Castro. Me: “How was the baseball game?” GB: “Raggedy. We couldn’t hang with the Cubans. We were a bunch of students! We weren’t no ballplayers.”

  
2
. And then there was Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ 1964 Motown hit “Dancing in the Street”—a call to urban dwellers across the country to prepare for a brand-new beat—used as a theme song at rallies throughout those insurrectionary summers by H. Rap Brown.

  
3
.
Guarda
in proper (non-dialect) Italian, imperative of
guardare
, “to look.”

  
4
. Murray since technically became a reverend, though his “church” only had ten members. Child Protective Services removed four adopted children from Murray’s custody, with one of the inspectors noting that Murray’s home was filthy and foul-smelling, with broken windows and a large hole in the ceiling.

  
5
. Not the same New Black Panther Party or Malik Shabazz vilified nationally on Fox News and other right-wing media outlets in connection to an alleged voter-suppression scandal.

  
6
. Twenty years earlier, Malcolm’s father, Earl Little, was found dead near a streetcar track, most likely murdered by the Black Legion, a violent, dark-hooded Ku Klux Klan offshoot. In the 1920s with half of Detroit’s 1.2 million residents foreign-born, and poor Southern blacks and whites also crowding the young metropolis, racial and ethnic tensions flourished, and Detroit became the Black Legion’s unofficial national headquarters and prime recruiting ground. (The hate group also inspired the 1936 film
Black Legion
, starring a young Humphrey Bogart as a Detroit auto worker lured into committing behooded hate crimes after being passed over for promotion in favor of a Polish coworker.)

  
7
. Though Fard’s birth name remains in dispute, it seems more than coincidental that his adopted prophet’s name is only a vowel away from Ford, the most famous and successful businessman in the world when Fard began preaching. (Fard recommended his followers read Henry Ford’s autobiography alongside the Koran and the Bible.)

  
8
. Shabazz did not have an easy childhood, its difficulties compounded by a mother with a drug problem and a parade of boyfriends and husbands. “Some of them I liked, and some were just no good, low-down dirty Negroes,” he says. “One of the stepdaddies started forcing me to do drugs or whatever.” I asked how old he was. “Six,” Shabazz says. “That’s all I want to say on that.” His mother ended up participating in the murder of a later husband as part of an insurance scheme. She’s currently serving a life sentence in prison. Shabazz was in his early twenties when this happened.

  
9
. He goes on to basically spend the rest of the short opening chapter teasing out similarities between Detroit and the old church, the latter a tenacious final remnant of a neighborhood long destroyed by urban renewal, and “somehow … Detroit,” too, “like St. Joseph’s Church, has managed to survive the schemes to bring it down.”
Hard Stuff
is a wonderfully readable autobiography, in large part because Young’s cowriter, Lonnie Wheeler, does such a fine job of capturing the mayor’s distinctive high-low manner of public speech, at once rarefied and ornately cussed, for example: “This much is apparent: Detroit will never be the city it once was. By virtue of compounded and confounded federal policies and of the unsympathetic cycles of social and industrial evolution—of such damn things as decentralization and white abandonment and the Toyota Corolla…” Or even better, this passage, the music of which merits quoting at length:

The popular way to explain the decline of Detroit—that is, the one so ardently talked up within certain white circles and the media, if I may risk being redundant—is to pin it all on me. The reasoning goes something like this: Detroit has had nothing but problems since the white people got the hell out, which goes to show that black people can’t run anything by themselves, much less a major city, especially when it’s in the hands of a hate-mongering mayor like the one who’s been entrenched there for twenty goddamn years.…

This, as one might imagine, is a school of thought to which I take exception.…

As with the church bit above, Young (or Wheeler, but you get the sense this is coming straight from Young) is also fond of portentous imagery. For instance, in the next chapter, describing his family’s departure from Huntsville, Alabama, via train, for the promised land of Detroit, “on a rainy day in 1923,” the five-year-old Young espies a dead mule lying on its back beside the railroad tracks, just as the train is pulling out of the station, “his feet sticking straight out like the legs of a kitchen table on its side”—ominously foreshadowing both the Great Migration’s large-scale snuffing of a rural, Southern way of life and the further hardships to come in the fabled free North.

10
. This wise man also warned against mixing the two struggles, advice Young occasionally ignored, as evinced by his fathering of an illegitimate child during his fourth term of office, when he was in his early seventies.

11
. When word of the 1948 assassination attempt on Reuther reached a union meeting at a tool-and-die local, Young immediately wanted to know if the shooting had been fatal. Upon being informed that, no, Reuther would survive, Young said, “Too bad they didn’t kill that motherfucker,” provoking a fistfight.

12
. During his testimony, Young schooled Tavenner on pronunciation (Tavenner: “You told us you were the executive secretary of the National Niggra Congress—” Young: “That word is ‘Negro,’ not ‘Niggra.’” Tavenner: “I said ‘Negro.’ I think you are mistaken.” Young: “I hope I am. Speak more clearly”) and on the connection between Jim Crow and red-baiting (Young: “I consider the denial of the right to vote to large numbers of people all over the South un-American…” Tavenner: “Do you consider the activities of the Communist Party un-American?” Young: “I consider the activities of this committee, as it cites people for allegedly being a Communist, as un-American activities.” Tavenner: “… I understood from your statement you would like to help us.” Young: “You have me mixed up with a stool pigeon”).

13
. Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets.

14
. Even as late as
Hard Stuff
, Young was disdainfully writing about “bleeding heart, pansy-ass” liberals, noting that “the change I seek for the world around me is a radical one.”

15
. The eminent-domain fight became a national cause, bringing to town the likes of Ralph Nader, whom Young described as a “publicity-grubbing prick.”

7. Motor City Breakdown

  
1
. Later I realized that I’d actually seen the car at the much flashier AutoRama (a totally different event).

  
2
. The veteran, Pete DeLorenzo, writes the website
Autoextremist
. His father, Anthony, ran General Motors’ public relations department from 1957 to 1979.

  
3
. During a bar fight, John Dodge reputedly once beat a man with two wooden legs to the ground, using the man’s own cane.

  
4
. This target date was later delayed to the final quarter of 2012.

  
5
. He invented, among other things, the electric self-starting ignition, the “Rocket 88” V-8 engine, and leaded gasoline.

  
6
. Though perhaps this had always been the case. In
The Reckoning
, David Halberstam’s rollicking door stopper of an account of the decline of the Detroit auto industry in the seventies and early eighties, a former
Car & Driver
editor characterizes the Big Three as “one big company with three divisions, in which everyone played it safe and no division tried something new unless it was reasonably sure that the other two were going to try it as well.” Another journalist tells Halberstam the automakers possessed a “shared monopoly.”