Detroit City Is the Place to Be Read Online Free PDF

chemicals and we might be breathing toxic fumes. On the way home, I took a circuitous route and saw a plume of smoke on the horizon. I thought, “How the hell did I completely turn myself around?” But I hadn’t. I was driving in the right direction and just looking at another fire.
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    If you’re from Detroit, you’re either from the east side or the west side, by which you would mean a “side” of Woodward Avenue, which splits the city down the middle. The east side neighborhoods, closest to the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair, were the first to be colonized and thus are older and generally less well-off than the landlocked, more tightly gridded western blocks. The proximity to water gives the east side a coastal lackadaisy, though the severe depopulation of many of the neighborhoods might also contribute to the ambience, the endless, grassy fields surrounding an occasional lonely homestead making for a decidedly countrified air. People from the west side say they never go to the east because it’s too violent and dangerous (but people from the east side say the same thing about the west).
    The east has the mayoral mansion, and the artist Tyree Guyton’s internationally beloved Heidelberg Project, an entire residential block transformed into a sculptural installation, and Belle Isle, the city’s bucolic island park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1883. The houses here tend toward the older, wood-frame bungalow. For a short few weeks during the summer, the streets closest to Lake St. Clair are overrun with millions of Hexagenia limbata , twig-bodied, long-winged insects known locally as “fish flies.” Fish flies spawn and hatch miles from the shore, eventually shedding an outer layer of shell, which they employ as flotation devices for the landward journey—though, unfortunately, their two-day lifespan provides only enough shore time for the couples to mate before the males unceremoniously die and the females fly back out to the lake, deposit their fertilized eggs, and likewise expire. Despite the brevity of their time in the city, fish flies en masse mimic the effects of a top-drawer biblical plague. At the peak of fish fly season, the bugs fur every illuminated surface close to the water (lamppost, party store 3 entrance, front porch, parking lot), forming a thick carpet on lakeside streets that makes a crunching sound as cars roll by. It is possible that the absence of fish flies has made west siders softer.
    Many of the major streets on the east side are named for French settlers: Dequindre, Gratiot, Cadieux. Other roads share names with one-term Republican presidents (Hoover, Hayes) and outmoded styles of beard (Van Dyke). There are also roads called Mound, Mack, Morang, Chalmers, Conant, and Caniff.
    Street names on the west side, on the other hand, evoke the romantic idea of the American West, conjuring images of unspoiled nature, wide open plains, and frontier optimism: Greenfield, Southfield, Wyoming, Evergreen, Telegraph, Joy. Berry Gordy founded Motown Records on the west side, not far from where Aretha Franklin grew up and first sang at her father’s church, New Bethel. The art deco sign at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, which claims to be the oldest continuously operating jazz club in the world, still glows nightly on Livernois. For black Detroiters, the west side traditionally stood for upward mobility. On the far western edge of 7 Mile, another church, the $35 million Greater Grace Temple, sits on nineteen acres of lush parkland. Greater Grace’s holdings include a golf course, a senior housing complex, low-income rental units, and a travel agency. The pastor, Charles Ellis III, has become known for his highly theatrical “illustrated sermons”—for example, during the auto bailout hearings, his blessing, on the chancel, of three sport-utility vehicles (one loaned from each of the Big Three automakers).
    My own Eastern Market neighborhood abutted the downtown center, where