Detroit City Is the Place to Be Read Online Free PDF Page A

and the way, when night fell, long stretches of major city streets became pitch-black country roads, Detroit’s lighting department remaining too broke to replace so many extinguished street lamps. And on those same streets—right here, in the Motor City—the absence of any normal semblance of vehicular traffic.
    And then there were the ruins. When it comes to the sheer level of decay, Detroit is truly a singular place; among the city’s ninety thousand abandoned structures, there were residential homes, mansions, storefronts, motels, factories (miles and miles of unplanned obsolescence, like the 3,500,000-square-foot Packard plant, spread across thirty-five acres of land and closed since 1958), Ford Auditorium (the former home of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra), banks, warehouses, Coney Island hot dog restaurants, YWCAs and YMCAs, the Reason Why Cocktail Bar, hospitals, churches, synagogues, porn theaters, schools, public libraries, a Chinese restaurant called Kung Food, a pair of geodesic domes, a club called Another Level, a children’s zoo, a slaughterhouse, beauty parlors, my father’s old knife shop, a car wash called Wash My Car, supermarkets, gas stations, an amusement-park ferry terminal, a bar called Stream in the Desert, the thirty-eight-story Book Building (1926), the nineteen-story David Whitney Building (1915), every building on Chene between Ferry and Hendrie (except for the Ideal Liquor Store), every building on Fort between Dragoon and Cavalry, and the All Star Barber Shop (its roof burned off, leaving a charred flattop).
    Most of the blight in Detroit is just that, blight. Away from the skyscrapers and the unbelievably vast industrial structures, back down at eye level, the quotidian monotony of the blasted and empty storefronts quickly becomes numbing, even though the scale can be unmooring. Some buildings have been picked clean as skulls by thieves, others left gaping and ravaged in a way that made you feel as if you were violating someone’s privacy by peering inside, somehow committing an act of voyeuristic sin, like a Peeping Tom catching a glimpse up a skirt. Apparently, by sneaking into the Metropolitan Building with John Carlisle for my original Rolling Stone piece, I’d committed a grievous journalistic faux pas—at least in the eyes of certain Detroiters, who were, understandably, quite touchy about the way the ruins have become favorite tour stops of visiting reporters. But what newcomer could ignore them?
    Though most commuters in southeast Michigan never pass an opportunity to jump onto the freeway, even if they’re only traveling as far as the next exit, I like to keep to the surface streets when I’m driving in Detroit, partly just to take in the scenery. One afternoon on Rosa Parks Boulevard, I spotted an enormous cloud of black smoke in the distance. It was startling, because I had been driving up Rosa Parks a few minutes earlier (trying to find the corner where the 1967 riot had started) before looping back to a film shoot I’d noticed on a side street. There had been no giant smoke cloud that first time around. I continued in the direction of the fire, which turned out to have started at a warehouse near the highway. A crowd had gathered for the action. I overheard a security guard ask her friend, “You ever see this many people out here? This is more than on payday!” Another woman called in a panicked voice, “They out of water. The firefighters are out of water!” But they weren’t. A few moments later, jets streamed from one of the hoses.
    The fire raged with fairly spectacular amplitude and intensity. Looking up, I thought I could see the moon behind the billowing clouds of black smoke. Then the clouds drifted away and I felt the heat of the summer afternoon beating down on me again and I realized I’d been staring at the sun, which the smoke clouds had almost completely blotted out.
    I left shortly after that, worried by rumors circulating that the plant housed