Detroit City Is the Place to Be (5 page)

When location scouts for the movie
Little Murder
were checking out a block in the Woodbridge neighborhood, a pair of bandanna-wearing teenagers with sawed-off shotguns robbed them in broad daylight. The movie was set in New Orleans just after Katrina; apparently, minimal production design would be necessary to make certain neighborhoods in Detroit look as if they’d just been destroyed by a flood.

An off-duty police lieutenant was carjacked at a fast food drive-through window. A white suburban teenager was carjacked at a Quiznos in Eastpointe, not far from where I grew up. His body was discovered in an abandoned home in Detroit about a week later. Incoming police chief Warren Evans spoke with arresting frankness to the
Detroit Free Press
about the number of shootings in the city the previous year. “I don’t know what 1,100 means to someone who figures they’re part of an anonymous 800,000 population,” Evans said. “But over 1,100 people being shot is getting kind of Third World to me.”

In all, it was reported, thirty-five metro Detroit teenagers (and one twelve-year-old) awaited trial for murder in various detention centers. Among them: two boys charged with beating a homeless man to death, apparently for no reason, and the so-called Rib Rack Killer, accused of shooting and killing the night manager of a Rib Rack fast food restaurant during a botched robbery attempt. The accused killer and his two accomplices had also attempted to rob a man named Mr. Cash, known for selling Cartier sunglasses out of the trunk of his car. That robbery had been foiled by Mr. Cash, who was carrying his own gun.

“DETROIT COPS,” we were informed, “LEAD NATION IN SUICIDE.” “TEEN,” they told us, “TOO PREGNANT FOR JAIL.” “DETROIT FIREFIGHTERS HAVE THEIR OWN NAME FOR FORECLOSED HOMES,” began another article. “FUEL.”

*   *   *

None of these headlines had the legs or the national reach of Detroit’s abysmal census showing. The decline should have been no suprise to anyone who’d taken even a cursory tour of the city’s empty streets. And yet, something about the hard numbers—Detroit had shed 25 percent of its population in the first decade of the twenty-first century, putting its population at a pre–Model T low of 713,777—brought a bracing empiricism to the problem and also, conveniently, fit an especially beloved subset of the Detroit-as-failed-state story line, the crazy statistic. Did you know Detroit experienced a
97 percent decline in residential property value
over the past eight years? Or that the Pontiac Silverdome sold for the price of a
Manhattan studio apartment
? Or that a family moved out of the state
every twelve minutes
?

The census story was trumpeted with a mixture of solemn condolence and barely concealed delight. The news raced around the Internet and made the front page of newspapers throughout the country. Local politicians also responded quickly—most, essentially, demanding a recount. The city council president insisted (on his Facebook page) that the count was “way low” and told a newspaper that one of the reasons had to do with the large number of Detroit residents who were serving prison time in other cities, which struck me as a poorly chosen line of argument.

Detroit’s population explosion had begun nearly a century earlier. People came to the city because Detroit represented an idea about America they wanted to believe. Progress was inevitable; personal salvation could be achieved through hard work. Detroit,
New York Times
columnist Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote in 1934, “is twentieth century”:

It belongs to a period of democratized luxuries, with gas stations on every corner, chain stores, moving-picture palaces, glittering automats, broadcast symphonies.… In a way Detroit is the birthplace of this civilization. It is as truly a world capital as any city on earth, more fascinating to the outlander than New York, more influential than Washington, or even Hollywood. Paris dictates a season’s silhouette, but Detroit manufactures a pattern of life. As a capital of revolution, it is far brisker and bolder than Moscow in transforming human habits and communizing the output of the machine.

With the onset of World War II, Detroit’s assembly lines began running three shifts, turning out tanks, jeeps, and fighter planes and becoming the first modern manifestation of the naked profit at stake in what had yet to be termed the military-industrial complex. Postwar, metropolitan Detroit provided a model for the suburbanization taking place across the United States. Southfield was home to Northland Mall, the first shopping mall in the country, built in 1954 by the Austrian-born socialist architect Victor Gruen, who would later denounce his creations as the precursors to hideous suburban sprawl. Warren, home of the General Motors Tank Plant, was, at the time, one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States.

All of which put unique pressure on the city proper. Just as various factors converged perfectly to make Detroit the Motor City, so did harsh new realities conspire to steal the title away: the automakers’ desire to escape the strong local unions, which benefited southern states; the lure of the low business taxes offered by the new suburbs, which could get by with less revenue, having far fewer expenses than an aging city like Detroit, with its larger, more impoverished population; pressure from the Pentagon for industry to move, with cold war leaders, afraid of nuclear strikes, convinced that the cluster of American military production in Detroit posed a threat; and the simple need for more land. It was much more difficult to expand a preexisting plant, let alone build a modern new facility, in a congested, older city, as opposed to the open fields of the suburbs. This problem led to a stronger push for “slum clearance” to make room for housing developments and factories, which, like today’s downtown stadiums, were basically state-subsidized giveaways to corporations in exchange for their willingness to locate in the city. In the end, as businesses and working-class whites with means gained increasing mobility, all but the most elite of blacks had less and less.
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Racial tensions had already been growing in the overcrowded city. In the August 17, 1942, issue of
Life
, amid ads for Colgate (“No Male … For the Girl Who Has Bad Breath”) and a cartoon in which Dagwood Bumstead makes himself a tongue-onion-mustard-sardine-horseradish sandwich, an article titled “Detroit Is Dynamite” described a city “seeth[ing] with racial, religious, political and economic unrest.” “The news from Detroit is bad this summer,” the piece began, ominously. “Few people across the country realize how bad it is.… Detroit can either blow up Hitler or it can blow up the U.S.” Detroit’s roiling citizenry, now numbering two million, “give their loyalty to their own group, creed or union.… In this melting pot flourish demagogues of every persuasion—Communists, Fascists, Ku-Kluxers, Coughlinites, pro-Nazi leaders of the National Workers League.”

In fact, six months before the
Life
article, the opening of the Sojourner Truth housing projects in a predominantly white neighborhood had prompted armed resistance, and by the summer of 1943, a full-blown race riot erupted on Belle Isle, spreading throughout the city for thirty-six hours. Thirty-four people died, including an Italian doctor who drove into a black neighborhood on a house call (dragged from his car, beaten to death) and a fifty-eight-year-old black man waiting for a bus (shot by a gang of white youths). Twenty-five of the dead and the vast majority of the eighteen hundred people arrested were African American. Six thousand federal troops were eventually called in to quell the fighting, and the city remained occupied for the next six months; it was the worst case of civic unrest in the United States since the New York City draft riots of 1863.

Republican Albert Cobo was elected mayor in 1950 by playing on racial fears and running on, essentially, an anti–public housing platform. As mayor, Cobo ignored the advice of all public policy experts and clustered low-income minority public housing in isolated ghettos rather than attempt any sort of integration. Not that that would have necessarily worked. White flight was well under way by the 1950s, when real estate appraisers labeled any neighborhoods with blacks “hazardous.” As late as 1970, according to the census numbers cited in B. J. Widick’s
Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence
, Warren and Birmingham had five black residents each, Grosse Pointe two, Dearborn, Hazel Park, and Harper Woods one.

*   *   *

You rarely saw any black people in St. Clair Shores, the blue-collar suburb where I grew up, at least when I was a kid. There were a handful of black students at my all-boys Catholic high school (in nearby Harper Woods), but they commuted from Detroit proper. A nasty rumor circulated around that time regarding a supposed police-band code used by Grosse Pointe cops: “NOMAD,” short for “nigger on Mack [Avenue] after dark.”

St. Clair Shores had been the sticks when my mother and her family emigrated from Italy in the late forties. Back then, the roads were still dirt, and even though my grandparents were desperately poor, they managed to scrape together enough money to purchase a corner lot on which one could fit at least three normal-sized suburban homes. As kids, my cousins and I would run around my grandmother’s yard, which felt to us like a park, chucking crab apples at one another and snapping the branches off the weeping willow tree for use as whips in obscure games involving slavery.

My father, Italo, arrived in Detroit in 1959, when he was twenty-six years old. He came from Pinzolo, a village in the Dolomites. While he was still a teenager, his parents pulled him out of school and sent him to Trieste to apprentice in a butcher’s shop. One of his jobs involved massaging the blood of freshly slaughtered pigs (by hand) as it drained into a tub (preventing coagulative jellying apparently being a crucial preliminary step in the production of blood sausage). He’d always been good with machines and dreamed of becoming a mechanic, but at that time, with the postwar Italian economy reduced to rubble and my paternal familial economy long an austere one—my grandfather, Clemente, a bit of a drinker, had mostly worked a string of odd jobs, including plastering homes, tending cows, and delivering mail to neighboring mountain villages via horse-drawn cart—his parents had impressed upon him the unshakable necessity of making his way across the Atlantic to seek fortune, or at least a steady job, in America.

For years, one of the primary exports of Val Rendena, the mountain valley where my dad grew up, had been knife sharpeners. According to local lore, the heavily forested valley was originally famed for its lumberjacks, but then at some point one of them hit upon the marketability of a key secondary skill of their trade: keeping one’s axe sharp. And so, during the long winter off-season, they began hauling their whetstones to balmier climes, where they would find work as itinerant knife grinders.
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The first knife sharpeners to make their way to the Detroit area had been Binellis from Pinzolo—although, in an unsettling twist, they came from the maternal side of my dad’s family. My father unconvincingly insists this line of Binellis bears no relation to the paternal Binelli line my grandmother married into, but the total population of Pinzolo and its two largest neighbors is something like two thousand people, which makes his protestations suspect. To sound less Italian, one of the first Binellis to arrive in Detroit dropped the “i” from his surname and thus became a “Binell.” (In a fairly sizable oversight, however, he neglected to change his first name, Mario.) My grandmother’s younger brothers, Caesar and Angelo, followed, along with my dad’s best friend, Fausto, and soon my father himself joined them. At first they operated out of the back of a van, eventually securing a brick warehouse building on Davison Street, on the east side of the city. They called their business Detroit Cutlery.

My mother, Anita, was born in Madonna di Campiglio, a mountain resort town overlooking Pinzolo. Her family emigrated to Detroit in 1947, when she was only two years old. Her parents had managed various hotels in Campiglio, but the war had a predictably deleterious effect on local tourism, necessitating the move. As it happened, her mother, Josephine, had been born in Manhattan, where my great-grandfather had also worked as a knife sharpener. They lived in a tenement building on First Avenue near 125th Street, now Spanish Harlem but at the time the largest of the city’s several Little Italys. Through a series of misfortunes, my grandmother found herself back in Val Rendena with a new stepmother but without her father, who stayed behind in New York to sharpen knives and send over money.

My grandmother Josephine began working in one of the hotels in Madonna di Campiglio, which was where she met my grandfather, Pio. Also the son of an Italian knife sharpener, he had grown up in Wiesbaden, the German spa town, fought for the Germans in the First World War, and studied in art school in Frankfurt, before making his way back to Italy. After marrying my grandmother, he considered moving the family to New York, where one of his best friends from the
Kunstgewerbeschule
, Ludwig Wolpert, a master silversmith who has been described as “one of the greatest Judaica artists of the twentieth century,” invited Pio to join him at the Jewish Museum as an art instructor. But New York proved an impossible sell to my grandmother, whose memories of tenement slums were not exceptionally happy ones, and so instead they moved to Detroit, where her own father and brother, drawn by the beachhead of other Italians from Val Rendena, had settled and opened a knife shop. Nonno Pio, close to fifty by the time he left Italy, tried finding work that interested him (cooking at the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, teaching art classes at a local high school, sculpting headstones for a cemetery), but nothing ever bore fruit, and so he borrowed some money and bought a knife route from one of the Binells. He called his business, which he ran out of a shed next to the family’s cramped, slant-floored wooden home, the Sharpen Shop. Uncle Dave (my grandmother’s younger brother) also had a knife shop, Dave’s Cutlery, which he ran out of his garage, across the street from my grandparents’ place. Meanwhile, my father’s uncle, Caesar, had broken away from Detroit Cutlery and formed a rival knife shop, Statewide Cutlery (which was eventually sold to another cousin and became John’s Cutlery, John sprucing up the company logo with the tagline “Never a Dull Moment”), and then there were the Ferraris, cousins on my mother’s side, who had the Ferrari Brothers Cutlery, and the good old Binells. Basically, we were related to everyone who sharpened knives in a professional capacity in Detroit.