No, the ruins. Detroit is a big field of ruins.
They’ll say, “Look at the renovated Fox Theater”, “the city is going up”. It’s true that Detroit is washing its face for hosting the 2006 Super Bowl. But, having decay, poverty, unemployment, segregation and high crime all over the city, what is restoring a couple of buildings downtown? Isn’t it but a vain attempt to look good?
Dead join the flight to suburbs / Families moving remains from Detroit
Thus read the headline of a Detroit Free Press article in 2000. Is this “exaggerating” problems in the press, or the harsh reality of a city that loses even the dead?
Cleaning facades and demolishing ruins may trick tourists and officials, but certainly will not restore the urban prairie into city living, reverse poverty and create an environment fit for settling in and calling it home.
Does Detroit have a solution, at all? Should we cure this city, or keep it as a "Ruins Park" where America and the world could learn what not to do?
Although, will America and the world ever learn from the atrocious past?
***
From Alter Road where the Pointes end and the city of Detroit starts its sprawling death to downtown through Jefferson Avenue we follow a never-ending series of boarded-up storefronts and houses, ruined factories, empty lots and monstrous housing projects.
Never entering a city was this gloomy and soul-affecting.
Ironically and coincidentally, as I was sketching these lines riding a train to New Jersey we stopped at Newark Broad Street, right across the three high-rise apartment buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe, the Colonnade Park Apartments and the Pavilion Apartments (both 1960). Ironic for Detroit was for Mies, as Newark, a presently little-known field of experimentation in moderate-income housing. The Lafayette Park was an attempt, said to be successful, to re-attract people into city living, combining tall apartment buildings with low-rise structures Crown Hall-style designed for shopping. Both the Detroit and Newark Mies van der Rohe projects sit in cities affected by the worst riots of contemporary America, white flight and segregation. Both complexes look like blighted housing projects, big inhabitable glass-and-steel boxes seriously dated and in need of reparations. My problem with Mies and my problem with America folded together.
***
From downtown Detroit, where the People Mover moves no people, you can see Windsor, Canada, a place said to be healthy and enjoyable, with almost non-existent crime and poverty and where no building is burned down or ruined.
Just across the river.
But in Detroit, and up north along Woodward Avenue, there are many worlds into one: the cultural campus with the Public Library, Wayne State University and the Detroit Institute of Arts is racially mixed and alive. Just a street across north, the urban prairie and a succession of decayed buildings and empty lots strike again, in an industrial area once inhabited by important factories that gave America the automobile and today in serious disrepair or recent charred ruins.
***
Coda
The opening in Detroit of the famous Eminem semi-autobiographical movie “8 Mile”, in which tough 8 Mile Road is portrayed as what it actually is, the unsurpassable racial and social divide between all-black Detroit and all-white suburbs, marked yet another time for the real-life staging of the race issue in America. The Christian Science Monitor run then an article called “Along Detroit's Eight Mile Road, a stark racial split” in which the racial wounds of Detroit bled endlessly yet again, exposed. A city of almost a million, Detroit has one single cinema for new releases, and it is in 8 Mile Road. Being Eminem popular among whites and blacks alike, whites from the suburbs would not cross the line to see the movie in Detroit, even if the theater is the closest to them in this strange urban area of side-by-side separated cities. Dane Chinni reported for the Monitor:
Michael Rhodes, who is black, says he isn't surprised. "That's the way it is here," he says, as he exits the cinema. "We stay on our side and they usually stay on theirs."
The problem of racial segregation is not unique to Detroit. Indeed, 40 years after the death of Jim Crow, blacks and whites often live separate lives in separate communities all over the United States.
But the problem is especially ingrained in the Detroit area. It is, according to the 2000 Census, the most segregated metropolitan region in the country.
It is not easy to cross Eight Mile, as it is not easy task to leave the American ghetto, that most unfair creation of the land of supposed, never-reached freedom. If you do get out, you may be an achiever, but also a traitor. Living in (some many) suburbs of Metro Detroit will not be easier for an African-American, or maybe for any given Detroiter or out-of-suburbia individual.
Detroit. The Balkans and Israel-Palestine plus the Deep South altogether, the most schizophrenic, paranoid living (war) zone in America.
An ex-Eight Miler now living in a big house in the suburbs was quoted in the 2002 “Monitor” report as saying, "This is the most racially charged area I have ever seen". "People don't talk about it, but it hangs over everything".
Detroit, America.
