Detroit in Memory and Imagination
September 24, 2016
Michigan Central Station. When built in 1913, the tallest rail station in the world. Passengers would get to and from the station by streetcar until 1938. Still heavily used during WWII, traffic dropped off as the highways system expanded in the 1950s. Amtrak service ceased in 1988. Photo source: http://pixelperfect-photo.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/DetroitTrainStationFlat8x10.jpg (acc. May 17, 2010).
I associate Detroit and death, so I approached the city with some trepidations. (Carl likes it when Glenn reveals things about his personal life, the past. Long ago, I was researching my dissertation at the Reuther Library in downtown Detroit, in the immediate aftermath of Christina’s death. There were a few weeks there when I was still in shock, but wanting to work—what else was I going to do?—and I just remember Detroit being utterly cold, desolate, miserable. Kind of like it is now. And then there were these codas, when it seems like I was always taking driving trips into Detroit with a woman, and we were taking photographs, and then we’d break up. OK, this happened twice. But you get the point.)[i]
I was driving up to Detroit from Cleveland. I took the slow roads that hug Lake Erie because I wanted to look at nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants are massive. But I also noticed, not so surreptitious, big trucks with “Border Patrol” parked on on ramps to the highway. Not near the Ambassador Bridge—further south from Detroit. To intimidate farmworkers?
But coming into Detroit, I was thinking about “ground zero” of the economic collapse, and wanting to see what it feels like on the ground. I drove from downtown out to the airport on Michigan Avenue, which is seven lanes, total—three lanes each way, and a turn lane. But now, no cars. One homeless person pushing a shopping cart. Two blocks with every building boarded up, or burned out. Then there is a deli that is a going concern, with a dozen cars and pickup trucks out front. The ARRA street repair guys, who I can’t seem to not think of as the “wrecks and the recks,” which I think is in Vonnegut’s Player Piano? The reclamation crews that repair the streets. (I hope the crews are LIUNA. They are, right??).[ii]
Anyway, they are repairing Michigan Avenue, all seven lanes of it. I’m thinking: does it make sense to repair the whole street? Shouldn’t it be repastoralized, turned into—well, not a dirt road, but maybe a four lane highway? Because there is no traffic, except the 12 pick-up trucks, at the deli, which are the guys from the ARRA crew who are repairing the road in the first place. As challenging as it is for urban planners to accommodate a rising population, it must be 100 times harder to downsize a city.
*
It is, of course, mile after mile of devastation. But only in the city of Detroit. Once you get into Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Inkster, Romulus—it looks like suburban working class/middle class everywhere else in the midwest. Plenty of unemployment, but the streets look like there is business being conducted. To me, a great irony about this is that the concentrated Arab population in the metro area is in Dearborn. So on Michigan Avenue, dozens of Lebanese, Middle Eastern, etc., restaurants, all doing a great business. Love those small shopkeepers from the Middle Eastern. So industrious. So American dream.
Also we have
- lots of bail bond stores;
- lots of temporary storage facilities;
- more billboards advertising jobs, moving out of state and “foreclosure help” than I have seen elsewhere;
- more strip clubs per capita than…? Well, more strip clubs than I’ve ever seen, except perhaps in Tampa.
Prestige of the past
And Ford Motor Company—the Glass House, Ford’s world headquarters, with twenty-four world flags arrayed in a semi-circle out front, with the water fountain—Ford, all corporate version of the United Nations. A bit run down (especially the mini-headquarters of the supplier firms that group around the Glass House—more cultural reclamation for the ARRAers to do—we need a civilian conservation corps of architects). But you get the feeling that Ford has staying power, if they can just get the stink of GM and the downsizing of Metro Detroit off them. Maybe it is just me, but the shadow of what Detroit was in 1950—the UAW, the booming economy, the prestige of having been the heart of the “arsenal of democracy,” that defeated fascism—hangs over every street, every boarded up building. Won’t this somehow weigh on the dynamism of everything that is there? (Hegel would say that world economic spirit was in Detroit in 1944 or 1950. It was the cutting edge of world history. But economic world spirit is gone, now, to Shanghai or Long Beach, the valves along the central artery of the twenty-first century supply chain.)
Scale and proportion
Do a longitudinal comparison of Lake Erie heavy industry cities.[iii] They’ve all lost about half their population in the post-WWII period. But with the exception of Buffalo, their metropolitan areas have grown considerably. Metropolitan Detroit, which stretches out to Ann Arbor and (arguably) up I-75 to Flint, has nearly 5 million residents—half of Michigan’s population. Their urban geographies are somewhat different—the blackest and roughest parts of them are all spread out differently.[iv] And I have to say that, as a Clevelander, I think one of the reasons Detroit always somewhat intimidated me is its vastness. Many more square miles than the other three.
But the vastness of Detroit means that the devastation of the built environment of the city hits home all the harder, psychologically. You drive for miles and miles, seeing predominantly boarded up buildings. Even the storefront churches that were established to bring solace to a dislocated population (in the 1970s?) are boarded up. Driving past the Michigan Central Station, I wrack my brain to recall a comparison—an industrial city as devastated as this. It is true that Niagara Falls, NY, has been leveled and cleared downtown. (I once spent a ridiculous week there with the Teamsters, in January. Baggage check guy at National Airport in Washington: “Heh heh. Going to Buffalo in January, eh? Have a nice trip.”) But compared to Detroit, it is nothing—a few city blocks, then a casino, then you are at the bridge to go over to Canada.
At least Dresden, which was bombed to hell in 1945, got rebuilt. Badly—today its downtown is one part restored nineteenth century Altbau, one part open fields of grass, and one part post-Stalinist architecture, which is to say massive concrete structures redolent of U.S. 1960s era elementary schools. In Detroit the devastated buildings seem to all be still standing. (Interestingly, the train station, see photo, has looked exactly like this for well over a decade. It is NOT part of the recent acceleration of decline).
*
But when I make it to the heart of downtown Detroit—this looks bustling. True, odd things like the utterly closed Detroit Free Press building, with signs all over it—“rent premium office space in the DFP building.” But NO ONE is renting any of the offices. (We could start an urban artists’ colony. “Bohemians need cheap rents,” says Adam Lutzker). All around it, though—casinos (which are new), several rebuilt hotels, great statues of Kosciuscko et al.
I park on the street, don’t put money in the meter. Plenty of free parking on the street, right downtown, middle of a working Wednesday morning. I walk to a random hotel to find a john. It happens to be the Westin. On the way out, the sign. “Westin: Book Cadillac Detroit.” Long ago, when I was 22, my first trip ever to Detroit, Christina and I stayed at the Book Cadillac. We were at some left-wing conference, some miniscule gathering of anti-war protesters probably. Both with awful headcolds, which is why we “splurged” on the Book Cadillac. It is still here, under new management, completely renovated. Making money? On Casino visitors, if at all. Sure nobody coming to talk to the folks at the editorial offices of the Detroit Free Press.
The infrastructure of downtown looks fine. Sections are positively booming. Greektown. The Joe Louis Arena. This is, after all, not just the Motor City, but also “Hockeytown.” Downtown is great. Just not enough people.
Certainly not what post-1945 central European cities looked like, where there was starvation. (Is there significant malnutrition in Detroit?) But all of Detroit still has an eerie post-war feel. Detroit’s war has been long-term, a war of attrition, rather than the war of immediate aerial assault that devastated Dresden. Detroit’s bloodletting—the population drain, spurred by industrial relocation—has been underway since the early 1950s, accelerated to be sure by the end of the long industrial boom and punctuated by the oil embargoes in 1973 and again at the end of the 1970s.
One can walk or drive these streets and imagine Detroit in its heyday. You can almost hear the bustling sounds of the past. Streetcars. Lots of auto and foot traffic, the industrial colossus dense with factories. Both the struggles of the Depression era, and the hum of full employment during the war. The corner bars on industrial streets, where the grassroots structure of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) unions was born. Housecalling, UAW style, over beers.
But the urban planners’ nightmare is figuring out how to downsize this urban scaffolding for the lives that Detroiters in the next 50 years will be attempting to live.
*
Me at UAW headquarters, the famed Solidarity House, out east on Jefferson Avenue. Taking pictures. To the security guard: “I just wanted to know why the flag was at half mast,” to the security guard.
He gives me a puzzled guardian look. He doesn’t get much foot traffic. This is an auto town, an auto union in the American midwest. You drive through the gate at the Solidarity House.[v]
“I’m with the IBEW in Washington.”
“I don’t know what that is,” he says warily.
“Oh—the electrical workers. We’re with you in the AFL-CIO.”
“Oh, ok,” he nods. “Well, we fly the flag at half mast out of respect,” he explains, “when an officer or a family member passes.”
Nice, I think. Focus on the future. He recounted this explanation in a way that suggested to me they are flying the flag at half mast most of the time, these days.
I walked through the immediate neighborhood, playing out counterfactual “oh, we could move here and rebuild the UAW and walk to work.” Nice neighborhood, big houses, some built by actual architects, with stone. But there are no “for sale” signs. And not very many “for rent” signs. I drive slowly through the whole neighborhood. No signs anywhere. This is a problem: ALL of these houses should be for sale. There can’t be THAT many UAW international representatives living in the neighborhood, can there?
When markets fail
I hypothesize that when the housing market goes so deeply south, you can’t make money in real estate, and people just abandon their homes. When there are no buyers, the sellers just give up. There is no point in being a real estate agent in a town where there is no “value” in the housing stock—there are no commissions. Thus, no “for sale” signs. What exactly is the structure of the housing market?? If I wanted to buy a house in Detroit, in the neighborhood of the Solidarity House, how would I go about it?
*
My dad grew up in Lorain, a steel and shipbuilding town on Lake Erie, just west of Cleveland. Steel and shipbuilding have long passed apogee in Lorain. But he grew up there in the 1930s and 1940s, the years of contraction and then great war-led expansion. I remember driving with him to Chicago, once, after Christina died. Outside of Gary, but still miles away, he sniffed. “Coke ovens.”
“What?”
“You smell that?”
I couldn’t smell anything.
He sighed, remained silent. He grew up in the shadow of the steel mills. All of his uncles worked in steel, or at the shipyard. They walked to work, had a beer at that neighborhood bar on E Street. That smell was the smell of his childhood. His whole young life—the fights with his father, raising pigeons in the back yard, run-ins with the railroad police, the “hobos” who begged potatoes from his mother at the back door in the 1930s. It all came rushing back to him. The mood of the steel-auto-rubber midwest, the dynamic vibrancy of these Great Lakes cities, the upward trajectory of industrial democracy, for my father it could all be captured in a scent. If the plants were working, you could tell because of the acrid smell of the coke ovens. The bad times came when that smell disappeared.
*
It was cathartic—I saw parts of Detroit that made me think that rebirth is entirely possible. I took pictures and myself thought about the future, even as the past hung in the shadows. What kind of an army it had taken to pull off the organizing task of the sit-down strikes and finally cracking Ford’s bastion of anti-unionism. What it will take to build such an organizing army for the struggles of the 2030s or the 2040s. Will Detroit be important to us then?
Notes
[i] Carl is a labor organizer colleague of the author; Christina the author’s deceased spouse. This essay was originally a long email letter sent in May 2010 to Carl and other fellow labor-movement organizer friends of the author.
[ii] The ARRA was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the massive stimulus bill, worth roughly $800 billion, included major provisions for infrastructure investment. LIUNA is the Laborers International Union of North America, many of whose members work in basic construction.
[iii] Interestingly, while Detroit has long been bigger than Cleveland, Buffalo and Pittsburgh, the population trends for at least D, C and P are pretty similar. (The rough size ratio is Buffalo 1; Pittsburgh 2; Cleveland 3; Detroit 5).
[iv] It is pretty important to work at getting this right. Plenty of neighborhoods in Cleveland that are historically white, ethnic working class. While the population mix has changed through time—with more Arab and Latin American immigrants—the near west side of Cleveland remains heavily white ethnic working class and lumpen. Devastated.
[v] Labor organization headquarters, the “international offices,” are characterized by their front desk security staff. At the Teamsters (I exaggerate only slightly to make the point), security is three guys named Vinnie, from North Jersey, who are all 6’ and 280 pounds. They don’t need 2x4s or any other weapons to maintain security. “Um, whadda yah need?” At the SEIU headquarters, on DuPont Circle, the front desk is a couple of efficient women, who sign you in, check ID, and whisk you to your location pronto. At the IBEW, it is a single man, Albert, military trained, a jumbotron and an elaborate electrical passkey system. The whole building is secured by the electrical passkey system. You can’t go to the john in IBEW headquarters without a FOB. Albert is especially fond of the Financial Times weekend edition, which he typically peruses on Monday mornings before handing it off to me. But Detroit is an auto town. At UAW headquarters, you are at a drive-through front gate.
Glenn Perusek teaches on and conducts strategic research for non-profit organizations and labor unions. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, where he was a Merriam Fellow and won the Baker Prize, a research competition. Glenn is a member of Phil Beta Kappa, the academic honorary society; he was a journeyman member of the International Typographical Union. He is author of Shifting Terrain and other works in the history of social theory and political economy. Glenn is based in Cleveland and can be reached at gperusek@gmail.com.
