Detroit in the News

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Michigan Central Station - built 1913, closed 1988

Mayor Dave Bing, elected last year in the wake of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's contretemps last year, has proposed a novel way of trying to stave off the death of Detroit. Like a surgeon removing gangrenous flesh, Bing plans to encourage people still living in desolate neighborhoods to relocate to ones that stand a chance of survival.

Immediately I'm saddened by the plan but I'm also realistic enough to recognize its logic and potential. According to the city's survey of itself 1 out of 3 lots is abandoned or empty. The population's fallen from a 1950 high of 1.8 million to just over 900 thousand today. At the same time the total Detroit metro region has risen from 3.7 million to 5.4 million.

The disaster that is Detroit rests at many peoples' feet; the white people who fled, the auto industry that failed to make cars that could compete with Japan's, the unions that bled the auto companies, and the people left behind who elected incompetents and crooks in desperate hope of staving off their city's destruction. I'd add the federal government but what was it supposed to do - force people to remain in a burning and collapsing city or just pour billions down a municipal rathole?

So sadly, I commend Mayor Bing for coming up with a novel way to try and save his home city. Cities across the country have been losing people for years to the suburbs and beyond. There's nothing that could have prevented the reduction of Detroit in the face of that and the changing global economy. But still, Detroit's slow death hasn't been a natural one but an abetted one.

The Most Wondrous and Depressing Web Site

DetroitYES is a forum for exploring the ruins and history of Detroit as well as discussing its potential futures. In 1950 the population of the city had swelled to 1,849,568. Today it's fallen to 916,952. The history of racial conflict and economic decline in Detroit is way too complex to go into here at this time and I don't know enough about it.

I first got a sense of the city's decline and parlous state after I read "Devil's Night" by Zev Chafets back in 1992 or thereabouts (which I got in the temporary discount book store that was in the old Richmond Avenue Rockbottom back around that time). Detroit was a city that held no place in my brain except as some sort of place with car factories. Little did I know that that was increasingly a thing of the past and that the city founded in 1701 by Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac was a rotting corpse with little chance of revivication.




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The Urban Prairie of St. Cyril's - Seemingly countless blocks of working class homes have been swept away by time and tide and the wrecker's ball.

Since then I've learned a little more about Detroit and its fall, particularly following the riot of 1967. Economic collapse, racial animosity, political corruption and just plain meanness took a city that once numbered almost 2 million down to under 1 million and its populations continues to fall.

I once thought cities aren't disposable. How could things ever happen that would lead to the abandonment of vast swaths of expensive or desirable real estate? Recently I've been reminded of the great lost cities of antiquity like Ur and Sumer. Time passes them by, populations shift and the flow of history is diverted to flow in other directions. That's what's happened to Detroit and other American cities like Baltimore and Newark. It's just happened in our own short lifetimes, not over the ages like in the Fertile Crescent.


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Just tooling around on GoogleMaps I found this liquor store housed in the husk of what was probably a bank in the midst of nowhere.


Also check out: Forgotten Detroit