Travelogue: Detroit

If there is such thing as a physical manifestation of tragedy, it is Detroit. Epic rise, epic fall. At one time this city was the epitome of American greatness (yes, probably even more so than Chicago.) There are dozens and dozens of fantastic buildings of large scale and opulent ornament; the exuberant monuments of the faster-bigger-better culture of the continent’s industrialization in the days when they set out to prove that Europe had nothing on the New World. There are blocks and blocks of the American Dream writ tangible; solid, clean brick houses perfect for the nuclear family and built back when visiting Soviets could ask, “is that really workers housing? Real housing for ordinary workers?” There are long avenues that stretch on forever full of two-story petit-urban shops within an easy walk from the porches of the houses surrounding them, incubators for retail traffic and conversation between neighbors.

All of this is now destroyed. The buildings are derelict and abandoned to broken glass and graffiti, with whole block-fronts in the heart of commerce covered with rotted and blackened plywood. The quaint residential blocks are unpainted and broken down with iron bars and overgrown landscape. Dozens of blocks have as ornament a neighboring house that burned – and they leave the half-burned wreck there! – an open sore on the landscape. The once grand avenues hold parking lots, boarded shops, or stores with steel grilles and almost nothing on the shelves. Only the ever-present Ford dealers seem to be willing or able to keep their businesses together. This is the Detroit of today: an abandoned shell of a city that looks more like a post-apocalyptic movie set that anything Hollywood could produce.

And yet, a few minutes (and several heartbreaking tower blocks) away is the bucolic paradise of Grosse Pointe (pronounced Gross Point,) where the interbred children of the lords of the city huddle behind armed guards and iron fences (even the lakeshore is private – where are Daniel Burnham and Aaron Ward?) sipping sherry and raising funds for remembrances of the glory days while their city burns (not altogether figuratively) around them. In fact, that seems to be the one bizarre unifying factor of the city: security. Gates and fences and guards seem to surround anything new or important. It’s as if the most frightening mentality of the Third World has landed by the shores of Lake St. Clair. Anyone involved in the urban enterprise should be forced to visit this place as a sobering reminder of the stakes of foresight and cooperation.

The gut-wrenching part of the whole experience is the knowledge that it didn’t have to be this way. There are other great American streetcar cities, other industrial cities, even other cities in the Midwest that adapted and adjusted and came through the dark times of economic shift all right. Chicago is a vibrant powerhouse (again.) New York had its nightmare and is back stronger and safer than ever. Boston deflected and bounced back. Even “satanic mills” Pittsburgh transformed itself into a quaint mosaic of clean (ed) neighborhoods once again nestled among the green hills. What happened to Detroit? Bad leadership? Racial strife? (Don’t try that excuse on L.A.) Irrational attachment to that one industry that “will come back, no really they will” while the rest of the world turns POST-industrial? Detachment of the elites? I suspect it’s a witches’ brew of all of the above and more.

What we do know is that it was NOT planning or design. The basic fabric is almost ideal, and the automobile did nothing here that it didn’t do in Chicago or a dozen other healthy cities. Detroit’s problems run deeper than streets and buildings and transit. A lesson to us all to beware of hubris.

[enlarge the photo for the full tragic impact]