I just drove out to Detroit from the east coast with my daughter, who started working for General Motors this week after graduating from Harvard Business School. (I try not to brag too much but I hope you’ll permit me that one mention.) I grew up in the Midwest and have been to Detroit many times over the years, mostly to visit the car companies or the Auto Show.I like the town – always have. I like their sports teams, I like that there is a Coney Island hot dog joint on practically every block, I like that you can go under a tunnel into Canada and see the Windsor Ballet, a staple of Detroit media T&E for decades. I love Motown. I love how it’s a Spartie town – not a Michigan town.
But I saw it with new eyes this trip. You think about things differently when you are dropping your kid off to live in a new place. It was neither worse nor better than I remembered it, but I saw things I never saw, or never really noticed before, and they are things I think every American would benefit from seeing.
I am moved to write about this but I was only there for 24 hours (although little of that time was spent sleeping.) And I don’t have any illusions that I can offer a Brooksian insight that finds the nexus of the cultural, historical, economic and political stuff of the place and make you say “Wow!”
What I did see was how easy it is for the collapse of one industry to bring down an entire community in barely half a human lifetime; a community that was, as recently as 1970, the fifth largest in the U.S. I saw what faded prosperity looks like in the residential neighborhoods just off Woodward Avenue that are filled with spectacular mansions, alternating with boarded-up hulks.
There was so much prosperity in Detroit at one time, and like in Rome or Egypt, the signs of it are still there in the old churches, mostly abandoned and succumbing to gravity, or in other old buildings that were once grand and important, but are now forced to suffer the indignity of housing bail bondsmen, dollar stores, and under-funded municipal agencies.
Everyone should see Detroit because we take our prosperity for granted, or we assume if things don’t go so well there will be a gradual, gentile decline that we won’t even notice in our day-to-day lives. But that isn’t what happened to Detroit, and you need to see it to understand.
In the end though, it wasn’t as bleak as you might imagine. Rebirth fights through the cracks in the cement of decay everywhere you look. Many old buildings have been saved and retain their grandeur. Bold new projects dot the city. The Detroit suburbs are still as nice as any in the country, and regular people can afford to live in them.
Detroit will survive – smaller, but smarter and scrappier than before. The hubris that came with being the Kings of the automotive world is long gone, replaced with the certainty that nothing will be given to them. They will have to make it happen, and I believe they will. You should see it; both for the warning and for the hope it offers.
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8 comments:
A city that has survived a similar fate is Pittsburgh. I first went there in the early 70's and there was an orange glow in the sky at night from the steel mills. I opened an office in the mid 1980's there as the steel mills were closing. The city went through some tough times but the metro area is bigger than it was in the hay day of American steel.
Very moved by your Brooksian insights, d'b. You won't recall but I lived there for 2 years, early 70s, the start of the demise of the industry. Dennis ran the dealer org for BBDO so we were pretty involved. Wonder how you could get this in front of 'the people who matter'.
@ Ken -- good point. the 'burgh is thieving these days and few could have imagined it even 15 years ago.
@ Nancy -- now that you've read it so have the people who matter.
I love the view on Charlotte's facebook post. That's a view you can build a city on. Detroit has a lot of other cities depending on its recovery i.e. Warren, Youngstown. Without a vibrant automobile industry, Detroit and the other cities that depend on it will have a very difficult time surviving.
There is deff hope. As Ken points out, Pittsburgh came back. Even Youngstown is showing signs of hope. We need a lot more new jobs every where first though.
Detroits is an example of why not to bail out an industry. We should have never bailed out Chrysler in the 70's. That bailout was the beginning of rewarding failure. The message then,as it should be now,should have been to make a better product or sink, the same policy as we go to work with everyday.
Thank you detroit for; the wall of sound, Ronnie, Martha,the MC5,CKLW, & lessons in rioting. I wish you well.
Come to the north coast. We burnt our water years ago.
d'b Are you getting ready to get us going again?
Not 'til September. I need reliable wi-fi and some connection to real life. Being off the grid out here in the woods makes it hard to get mad enough to write.
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