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

the fortresslike glass towers of the Renaissance Center, built in the seventies as a riot-proof lure for business and currently serving as the world headquarters of General Motors, gleam impregnably from the edge of the Detroit River. On a nearby traffic median, a public sculpture dedicated to boxer and city native Joe Louis hangs from a swinglike contraption. The sculpture is a twenty-four-foot, eight-thousand-pound black fist, pointing directly at Canada.
    Outside of downtown Detroit, residential neighborhoods throughout the city have the feel of a place like Atlanta or Los Angeles—less urban density, more single-family homes with front lawns and garages. By the 1940s, according to historian Thomas Sugrue, just over 1 percent of the residential structures in Detroit were apartment buildings, while two-thirds of Detroiters lived in single-family homes. Workers had the means to spread out, and the room, and so they did. A series of parallel roads cross the city (and the surrounding suburbs) from east to west at one-mile intervals, although they are not labeled as such until 7 Mile. Beyond 8 Mile Road, the suburbs also cleave east and west. The east side includes the Waspy, old-money Grosse Pointe, though many of the neighboring communities are fading first-ring suburbs, blue-collar places like Warren, St. Clair Shores, Roseville, and Eastpointe, all largely working class and ethnic: Italian, Polish, Irish, German. Most of the wealthier suburbs are on the west side, in Oakland County, still one of the richest counties per capita in the nation, with cities like Birmingham and West Bloomfield. Farther west, there’s Dearborn, where the Ford family once farmed and where Henry, a pioneer not only in Taylorized mass production but in suburban homesteading, would move his corporate headquarters and primary residency, the Fairlane Estate. Closer to the river, the scenery shifts with disconcerting suddenness to an almost surreal Industrial Age tableau dominated by the Ford Rouge plant, smokestacks rising like the peaks of Mordor from its two thousand acres.
    Back when business was booming, railroad lines connected the city’s car factories, metalworks, chemical plants, and hundreds of tinier parts shops like the cells of a single, groaning organism, a “simply staggering” environment, in the words of historian Olivier Zunz, wherein “the density of factories was such that the city appeared to have a totally industrial landscape.” Today, there’s still a bleak light-industrial aesthetic to many of the commercial strips throughout the greater metropolitan area. A gray quietude hangs over many of the buildings, which, thanks to their windowless, painted-cinderblock functionality, offer few clues as to present-day habitation or disuse.
    The blacks working at the Rouge didn’t necessarily want to commute all the way from Detroit but they weren’t welcome in Dearborn, so they began settling in the regrettably named suburb of Inkster (which in fact commemorates an early Scottish settler, Robert Inkster). For over three decades, Dearborn was ruled by Mayor Orville Hubbard, a morbidly obese open segregationist who once skirted a court-ordered travel ban by boarding a train disguised as a clown and, less charmingly, said things in public like, “If whites don’t want to live with niggers, they sure as hell don’t have to. Dammit, this is a free country.”
    Hubbard is long dead, but Oakland County is still ruled by L. Brooks Patterson, the paunchy Republican county executive who, in the early 1970s, made a name for himself by taking up the cause of suburban opponents of busing. Policies fostering regionalism, enacted in cities like Indianapolis, have been elusive in metropolitan Detroit. Instead, via unchecked suburban growth, counties like Oakland and Macomb have physically recoiled from the city, over the years continuing to spread north and west. On Oakland County’s official website, Patterson himself has written, “I love