The City Where the Sirens Never Sleep

I grew up in a smallish town near, Ann Arbor, Michigan. My little town was 45 miles from Detroit. My father grew up in Detroit, graduating from Cooley High School. His parents, my grandparents, lived between Seven and Eight Mile Road, just off the John Lodge freeway. As a child, I visited them often. At Christmas time, my mother took us to J.L. Hudson's Department store, where an entire floor was dedicated to a fantasy world, the walk through which ended wit a visit with Santa (that's Hudson's on the upper right, when the historic building was demolished in 1998). The Detroit I knew as a child is gone now, replaced by vacant lots, decaying buildings and a deeply dysfunctional local government that featured Coleman Young and recently-convicted Kwame Kilpatrick as mayors.

Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard has written a simply exceptional piece on the City. The link to the article at the Weekly Standard website is here. However, they may move it to archives so a link to where I found the article on my favorite "metablog," Politics for Pros, is here in case the Weekly Standard link goes down.

From the article:

"Precisely what caused all this mess is perhaps best left to historians. Locals' ideas for how it happened could keep one pinned to a barstool for weeks: auto companies failing or pushing out to the suburbs and beyond, white flight caused by the '67 riots and busing orders, the 20-year reign of Mayor Coleman Young who scared additional middle-class whites off with statements such as "The only way to handle discrimination is to reverse it," freeways destroying mass transit infrastructure, ineptitude, corruption, Japanese cars--take your pick.

"What's clear, though, is that Detroit has failed, that it's broken and cracked. It is dying. But it's not yet dead. Although it has lost over half its population since 1950, 900,000 people still live there. I went to Detroit to experience a cross-section of those who live between its cracks, who either choose or are stuck with living among the ruins."

The article got me thinking, so I dug further. Anyone interested in the decline of this once great city and the lessons that might be learned from might want to check out Detroitfunk.com, which includes links to some incredible sites, including Fabulous Ruins, a site that features photos of deserted auto plants and formerly great but now ruined architectural landmarks. For an interesting look at how Detroiters view their city, read some of the forums at Detroityes.com.

Lebash came to Detroit as a result of his friendship with Charlie LeDuff. LeDuff was a successful journalist with the New York Times, who went back to his hometown to report on the battles there. He produces videos that can be found on YouTube and the Detroit News Web Site. An example, featuring the heroes in the Detroit Fire Department who battle fires, often in vacant buildings, and who recently lost one of their own in one such fire, is below. Walter Harris, who is featured in the concluding seconds of the video, was killed when the roof of an abandoned house collapsed on him as he fought an arson fire.



As we throw billions of dollars at a failed US Auto Industry, with no assurance that the team of management and labor comprehend the reasons for the problems that face the industry, it would be well to consider the lesson of Detroit with an eye to averting future similar disasters.