Detroit RIP

Another of those articles about the death of Detroit has appeared, this latest one in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone. This one focused mostly on the auto industry.

I do disagree with his opening assertion...that for those of us kids who grew up in Detroit circa 1980s, attending the auto show was mandatory. It most certainly was not!

But I was not struck so much by his description of the auto show, its decline, its lack of prestige, its detachment. We know all of this. But little things: the pathetic People Mover:

To get to the conference, I ride the People Mover, an elevated tram that runs through downtown Detroit in a three-mile one-way loop. The city used to have an extensive trolley system, but it was purchased by National City Lines, a front company formed by GM, Firestone, Standard Oil and other corporations with automobile interests, after which the trolley tracks were ripped up and replaced with buses. The People Mover began running in 1987 and seems, in its utter uselessness, as if it might have been built by another secret auto-industry cabal as a way of mocking the very idea of public transportation. The monorail cars are automated and driverless, like trams at the airport or an amusement park; occasionally, walking along a barren downtown block, you glance up and notice a pair of empty cars passing above your head at a haunted crawl.

And:

We drive into Highland Park, a tiny city almost completely surrounded by Detroit proper. Highland Park is best known as the site of Henry Ford's first assembly line and, more recently, as the setting of the Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino. Thousands of people moved to the area in the Teens and Twenties to build Model T's, but those working-class families are mostly gone now, and in recent years, entire residential blocks, once tightly packed with houses, have been razed by arsonists and demolition. We turn onto a side street and drive past a large, empty field covered in snow, with impossibly tall patches of yellow grass poking up like a wheat field. "I wish you were here in summer," John says. "It looks like a jungle in Bolivia. You'll see these vast grasslands with one home in four blocks. There are no city services. These people are alone on the frontier. Someone saw a coyote downtown last year."

We keep driving, turning near a lot where the Motown headquarters once stood. John says he snuck inside before it was demolished and discovered Marvin Gaye's old desk, with love notes to his wife still inside. We drive past GM's gargantuan Fisher Body plant, in the Milwaukee Junction neighborhood — a railroad junction where a number of car manufacturers sprung up in the early days of the industry. Built in 1919, the plant initially turned out Cadillac and Buick bodies, eventually shifting to fighter jets during World War II; in the Depression, the space was used as a homeless shelter and soup kitchen. Now, the factory, closed since 1984, sits empty, its six floors of broken windows — hundreds of them, entire blocks of them — giving the place an odd beauty, like a dried-out beehive. On a wall nearby, someone has spray-painted "Fiends Will Have Their Poison."

His conclusion is sad. It was the Detroit of my youth. The author grew up in St. Claire Shores...perhaps a St. Joan's kid? They were a little more high-brow than those of us who went to St. Jude, St. V, St. Peter's, straddling the lines of the city, barely. But it's all our Detroit, and what was ours never really existed. He seemed to mourn but not really, and he seemed to take a blunt tone: this is what it is. This is what is left. This is what remains. There's nothing left to mourn.

You want to believe everything will turn out OK. But the Big Three clearly had no concept of what they were up against until it was too late. And now, after years of having our trust abused with shoddy cars and patently deranged business models, we're being asked to take a huge leap of faith and believe in their ability to learn from their mistakes, to turn everything around. On an infinitely vaster scale, of course, the United States government is doing the same thing: begging the rest of the world to trust us, to continue to buy our Treasury bonds and fund our bailouts and stimulus packages because we're too big to fail. And we're hoping the world won't ask us the most pointed question Congress asked the carmakers: Why don't you try selling something people want to buy?

It's hard not to wonder fleetingly if Detroit, in the end, might reclaim its old title after all — not the Motor City but the City of Tomorrow. John says we should go. I squint out over the ledge one last time. The icy wind is almost harsh enough to make you cry, and Detroit, from up here, looks like it goes on forever.

Isn't acceptance the final stage of grief?