Detroit City Is the Place to Be (6 page)

My parents met at a picnic at Uncle Dave’s. After they married, they settled a few blocks away from my grandparents in St. Clair Shores, although my father continued to work in Detroit. Every so often, after moving back, I’d drive by his old shop, a warehouse building on Davison, between McNichols (6 Mile) and Mound. It was a rougher part of town than I remembered: lots of warehouse buildings that had seen better days, a prison, strip clubs, Coney Islands. There used to be a fast food joint called Marcus Burgers, “Home of the Loose Burger,” which my brother and I rechristened “Home of the Loose Bowels” and which seemed to have either closed or moved. We both helped out at the shop during our summer breaks and on Saturdays during the school year. I hated working inside, though, so as soon as I became old enough to drive, I began making deliveries all over the city, including to Service Street, my future block.

The shop had a fenced-in parking lot topped with barbed wire. There was a crack house just down the block. A clicker opened a section of fence remotely, the fence wobbling noisily as a motorized conveyor pulled it back along a groove. Fortified against the hostile forces in the neighborhood with heavy metal doors requiring buzzing in, the shop felt decidedly unwelcoming and contributed, like many other unadorned buildings, to Detroit’s bleak and battered physiognomy. That whole stretch of Davison was not different from the many industrial zones criss-crossing the city like fattened arteries. You couldn’t call it blight exactly, since many of the facilities, at least at the time I was working for my dad, remained going concerns.

Since then, of course, many of the shops had closed.

*   *   *

I remembered Service Street as an unremarkable back alley. But once I started living there, pulling onto the redbrick cobblestone always felt like entering a secret world. Doors to several of the buildings had been painted vivid colors—one was bright orange, with various-sized and -colored polka dots receding into the background—and a pair of old kitchen sinks had been converted into window boxes. There were landscaped flower beds, wind chimes hanging from a post, a fire pit at the rear of a dirt parking lot.

My downstairs neighbor, Las, a personal chef, could often be heard shouting, “Shiva! Be still, girl!” Shiva was a pit bull given to loud barking. Las himself struck me as an incongruous pit bull owner: gentle-voiced, with a round baby face, except for the traces of gray stubble, and such a mellow demeanor you might take him for a transplant from Laguna Beach, though he’d been born and raised in the city.

When we first met, I told Las my story about making deliveries to Butcher & Packer as a kid. Having driven to the apartment straight from the airport, I was, perhaps, a bit overeager to impress him, the first black Detroiter I’d had the opportunity to tell about my book project, with my own Detroit bona fides. Las nodded and said, “Right on,” but didn’t seem terribly wowed. He said the Butcher & Packer guys would occasionally give them old pallets to burn in the fire pit. Then he asked where I lived in New York, and told me that he had worked, for several years, at a Soho interior design studio not far from my apartment. Having established street cred in our respective neighborhoods, we gazed out the window for a moment, and then Las asked if I had any other questions about the block.

Las was just one of an appealing mix of residents, among them a jazz drummer, a clothing designer, the founder of the Detroit chapter of the Black Panthers, several DJs and artists (including a creator of art neckties), and, during occasional visits from Amsterdam, John Sinclair, the poet and former manager of the MC5 famously busted in 1969 for possession of two joints and sentenced to ten years in prison.
6
It also turned out that Detroit techno, a seminal early genre of electronic dance music, had basically been invented on Service Street. This had been back in the eighties, by the so-called Belleville Three—high school classmates Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson, who had all had recording studios on the block. In no small measure, the long-standing European romanticization of Detroit can be traced back to the borderline-deranged partisanship of the Continental techno enthusiast. I would still occasionally see May, whose record label office remained on Service Street, driving down the alley in his blue convertible BMW, when he wasn’t DJing at some club in Tokyo or Rotterdam, which is how he still spent most weekends. If he wanted to play in Detroit, Derrick told me, he would have to throw his own party.

My favorite new neighbors were Steve and Dorota Coy, young artists who had met and married in Hawaii and then, in what might be an unprecedented move in the history of human migration, decided to relocate to Detroit. The first night we hung out, Steve told me, “This is the last frontier in this country. What else is left? There’s Hawaii. There’s Alaska. And there’s Detroit.” It made a strange kind of sense, although we were both very drunk. Dorota (born in Poland) and Steve tagged abandoned buildings with stencils promoting their nonexistent corporation, the Hygienic Dress League. Often, they depicted themselves in their artwork, wearing gas masks and carrying machine guns or mysterious briefcases. In real life, they never went anywhere without their tiny dog, Bob, often carted around by Steve in a shoulder bag. They were subletting an entire floor of an old furniture warehouse, about three thousand square feet of raw studio space, for $250 a month.

Another neighbor, Holice Wood, a stocky guy with a ponytail, had a variety of moneymaking gigs, or “hustles,” as he liked to say. Detroit was the sort of a place where even the people who held down a real job also had a hustle going, Holice told me, adding pointedly, “And now most people have
lost
their real jobs.” Holice’s own hustles included, but were not limited to, promoting blues concerts, starting his own T-shirt company, and plotting the opening of a marijuana dispensary. Despite the ponytail, Holice evinced none of the mellow grooviness such a hairstyle choice generally implied. He spoke with a loud, sandpapery voice and had a habit of fixing you, right in the middle of conversation, with a highly scrutinizing, cold-blooded stare, giving the impression that he might at any moment begin shouting for no reason or else challenge you to a fist fight. He lived in a windowless cinderblock bunker on the very corner of the alley, adjacent to a garage that I’d always taken for a chop shop (since the mechanics seemed to work only in the middle of the night) but that apparently was being rented by a muscle-car enthusiast with a regular day job. I never had a conversation with Holice that did not, at some point, involve his taking a massive, lung-puckering toke of a joint, which gave even a veteran smoker like Holice a croaking voice for a few moments afterward. That, too, did nothing to reduce his intensity.

Many of Holice’s stories involved fights or near fights. One night, he said, he’d spotted a guy breaking into a pickup truck in the parking lot. Without thinking, Holice had grabbed the only weapon at hand, which happened to be a broom handle, and dashed over to the truck, where he discovered the would-be thief was a six-foot-two crackhead. Holice himself had been “high as a three-peckered goat” (his phrasing). He swung and missed. The thief lunged with a sharpened screwdriver and also missed. Holice jabbed him in the face with the end of the weaponized broom handle. The thief howled and ran off.

The first time we met, Holice told me, “When I moved here five years ago, I couldn’t walk my dog without carrying my gun with me.” Leaning forward, he warned, “This is not a block where you can be timid!” I tried to remain nonchalant, as if crazy-seeming strangers invaded my personal space so often I’d become inured to anything less than a sucker punch. At first, I thought he might have meant timid journalistically—like, I shouldn’t be shy about approaching people for interviews. He went on, “If you hear any noise or commotion, you need to come down and see what’s going on and help out, because that’s the only way we keep this street the way it is.” He took a step even closer. “This is where we
live
,” he pronounced carefully. “If you see someone pissing on that wall over there or trying to break into a car, you need to
chase them down
.”

I nodded. Of course I would chase thieves. It was Detroit.

Detroit burning, 1805.
[Painting, Robert Thom]

2

THE TOWN OF DETROIT EXISTS NO LONGER

N
OT ALL OF THE
news coming out of Detroit was horrible. Some workers at Detroit Edison’s Conners Creek power plant reported a number of downed trees displaying curious chewing marks, possibly bites. The report landed on the desk of a safety specialist whose duties included “wildlife coordination” on the plant’s vast grounds. He expressed skepticism of the bite claims but agreed to set up a motion-detecting camera.

The ensuing photographic evidence prompted breathless headlines: “The Beavers Are Back!” It seemed to be true: though hunted to near extinction during the rabid European fur trade that occasioned the founding of the city, the beaver, not spotted in the area for at least seventy-five years, had returned, against all odds, to the Detroit River. Or at the very least this one particular beaver, looking, in the grainy black-and-white surveillance photograph, like an appropriately rough fellow, standing pear-shaped on his hind legs, his chin and stubby front paws raised in the direction of a hanging branch, burglar’s eyes aglow; even his tail, flat on the ground behind him but lying at an awkward angle, seemed fake, as if the rogue sawyer were actually an obese rat with a crude prosthesis trying to outsmart pest control. I’m just saying that if cities had the power to conjure animal familiars, Detroit would have conjured this beaver.

For the first European interlopers, the primary attraction of eighteenth-century Detroit’s straight-up wilderness was undoubtedly the beaver trade. The city had been founded as a French trading post and garrison, strategically located at the narrowest point of the strait,
le détroit
, connecting Lakes Erie and Huron, providing easy access for fur trappers combing the Canadian hinterland for beaver fur and other goods to export back to the Old World as well as martial advantage for the soldiers meant to keep rival English would-be colonizers at bay. The first French settlers had arrived from Montreal in the summer of 1701, an exploration party of a hundred men in twenty-five canoes led by a forty-three-year-old hustler and rather inept military tactician named Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. The previous year, Cadillac had managed to convince the French government of the need for establishing a new outpost on the river, of which he would, naturally, assume command. In a letter to his patron, Count Pontchartrain, Cadillac insisted that establishing a fort at
le détroit
would not only make the French crown’s commercial interests “entirely safe” but “cause the certain ruin of the English colonies.”

Hats made from beaver fur were sturdy yet easily shaped and naturally waterproof (in the least pleasant sense of the adverb: beavers rub themselves with an oil secreted by glands near their anus) and had been all the rage in European society since the fifteenth century. According to the historian Nick Bunker, felted North American beaver fur hats made their Parisian debut in 1577. With the Continental beaver population depleted to essential extinction, the discovery of the beaver-rich rivers of the New World resulted in a hot new import, “sensuous, durable, but chic, visibly expensive but open to subtle reinvention,” writes Bunker, “… a Jacobean version of the tweed suits designed by Miss Chanel.” Both men and women wore the new style of hat, festooned with gold and silver and silk and available in a variety of shapes and shades. By the 1620s, the price of a single pelt had reached nearly forty shillings, enough (again, Bunker) “to rent nine acres of English farmland for a year.”

A furious North American beaver harvest predictably arose, pitting rugged French Canadian
coureurs de bois
against colonial English trappers from the Eastern Seaboard, with both nations also jockeying for superior trading status with the Indian population. When Cadillac first began pitching Fort Detroit to France, he borrowed the descriptions of an earlier explorer, Robert LaSalle. Of course,
le détroit
would have strategic importance when it came to the fur trade. But with the establishment of a Cadillac-headed fort and settlement, the crown would also be gaining command of a river (per LaSalle) “as richly set with islands as is a queen’s necklace with jewels,” the “beautifully verdant” shores serving to “complete the picture of a veritable paradise” where deer “roam in graceful herds” and even the bear were “by no means fierce and exceedingly good to eat,” and be sure not to overlook (Cadillac pulling out all the Gallic stops) the wild vines, “heavy with grapes,” which produced wine “that, considering its newness, was not at all bad.” Cadillac was proposing more than just a fur post; he envisioned the beginnings of a colony, a real beachhead in what was, by any other measure, untamed land.

When Cadillac came ashore, his party included a motley assortment of soldiers, traders, artisans, and
coureurs de bois
, along with two priests (a Jesuit and a Franciscan Recollect), three horses (two of which quickly died, though the third, Colon, was still alive and doing plow work in 1711, providing Cadillac with a lucrative monopoly), and eighteen swords (Cadillac loved fencing). The original settlement, Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit was one arpent (roughly one acre) square, with fifteen-foot-high oak picket walls sunk into three-foot trenches. Among the deal-sweetening incentives offered Detroit’s earliest pioneers were land grants, in the form of so-called ribbon farms, the first European homesteads in the area, which ran up from the riverbank like the keys of a xylophone, each individual plot long and narrow enough to give every settler a bit of water frontage.
1
A handful of streets in Detroit, running north from the river, mark the locations of some of these original farms, taking their names from the French landholders: Chene, Dequindre, Dubois, St. Aubin,
2
Beaubien, Riopelle, Beaufait, Orleans.