All Along Down That Road

The City of Detroit in the nineteen-seventies was a god-awful mess, well along that downward spiral that would, thirty some years later, result in its largest employers, the business Detroit was about, making cars, almost disappear. Both General Motors and Chrysler would accept billions of dollars in federal assistance, after both declared bankruptcy, while Ford, minimally better off, barely avoided those ignominies. Back in the seventies, further up the spiral, the symptoms of that proceeding decline were as much visual as economic. Much of the city looked like Berlin at the end of World War II. Entire blocks consisted of nothing more than boarded up buildings and weed-wracked empty lots. In large swatches of the urban landscape nothing moved and few chose to even show their faces. Over its entire extent, space seemed to have stretched, liked the expansion of the universe; the population had already declined dramatically. Much of the populace had fled from the city. The rest redistributed themselves into pocket galaxies of anti-entropic stasis amid ever expanding voids. Those that left did not flee for other climes, however, simply for the outer limits, the surrounding geography, the suburbs. Employment in the auto industry may have already peaked but it was still stratospheric. It wasn’t lack of jobs that precipitated the exodus so much as other factors. Primarily, it was going on in every major city, it was what was happening everywhere. The entire country, ever since World War II, had begun migrating outward from city centers and that pattern was only intensifying. As more and more people found they could afford the offerings of the “Big Three,” they used their purchases to transport themselves to the current interpretation of the American Dream, a home of their own on their own plot of land, removed from the crowds, dirt and noise of the city. It was simply more pronounced in Detroit. But it wasn’t simply innocent wanderlust, a naïve yearning for more space and bluer skies that caused Detroit’s visual leprosy, not entirely and probably not even substantially. There were also racial factors involved that undoubtedly contributed mightily, again like elsewhere, again here more so than elsewhere. Housing integration was now federal law, and the Detroit populace hated it. Venal real estate agencies fanned the flames by “turning” neighborhoods. They would, through fair means and foul, install a black family on the block and then reap commission after commission as most of the rest of the neighborhood would then, almost immediately, sell in a panic. Entire areas changed ethnicity almost overnight. Greektown became a sea of black, sniffing the lingering aroma of baklava and spanakopitta in dull amazement. Hamtramck became besieged, a walled town of Polish stubbornness surrounded by those they had always excluded but who were now in much closer proximity. The city rushed to tear itself apart into hate-edged, boulevard bounded shards. It was like shooting wolves from helicopters for the real estate industry. After decades of artificially restrained housing demand, blacks practically swarmed to grab their piece of the American dream much like the “Sooners” had in 19th century Oklahoma. Rules were broken; ethics be damned; the rush was on. The other major factor was forced school busing. Not only were the existing residents powerless to decide who lived beside them but they had to put up with them sitting beside their children in over-crowded classrooms, as well, frequently after those selfsame children had to endure a migration of miles and sometimes hours to try to spread a too-thin layer of whiteness upon an ever increasing majority of darker hues. It was imposition of draconian measures upon an already trod-upon constituency by social engineering bureaucrats largely exempt from its consequences themselves and the victims of their dictums damn well were not going to put up with it. Not with alternatives so close at hand. There was really only one place for the scared and self-evicted to go, outward. Many of the escaping ethnicities had predilections to flee, anyway, as they, or their recent ancestors had made much the same fateful decision to get the hell out of Europe a mere handful of years earlier. Giving up and leaving may well have been in their DNA, certainly their familial memory. Detroit’s fate had undoubtedly been sealed years earlier, by the riots of 1967, a boiling over of resentment and frustration that, like any good cock-up, did far more harm to its participants than to any object of their outrage. That was when the inner city first acquired its likeness to World War II Europe. What wasn’t already boarded up was smashed up. Smoke and fire rose over multiple square miles of the encroaching urban desert while the stench of uncollected garbage gagged its survivors like penance. The jacked-up urban cacophony was repeatedly stuttered by persistent gunfire insincerely reported as sporadic, that simply completed the wartime metaphor. It took four days, the National Guard, and the arrest of more than seven-hundred people to quell the chaos and anarchy that ruled much of the city. The longer term effects were far more dire. Few if any ever came around to the instigators’ point of view, regardless of the fact of hundreds of years of persecution and suppression as glaring justification. That would have taken compassion and empathy and no one, on either side, was interested at that point in exhibiting compassion for anyone else’s perspective. Instead, those that could simply looked for an exit. They existed all around. It was different outside. It was open and green and available, for a price. It was a goddamn land rush; a run for the hills, stake-a-claim-on-any-piece-of-land-that-looked-even-vaguely-habitable fleeing of failed urban inevitability. Subdivisions and apartments and condominiums sprang up faster than the weeds that had so recently covered the very ground they expropriated. Craven greed conjoined with Yankee ingenuity and blind ambition to form a swath of verdant, bucolic suburbia, seemingly overnight, that stretched in a rainbow-like arc from Dearborn clear around to Lake St. Clair, in less time, seemingly, that it took to build a single public housing project in the dank, darkening remains of the still-festering inner city. The suburbs, towns like Royal Oak, Birmingham and Fraser grew so fast that even the insatiable greed of its grasping governments could not slow down its expansion for any longer than it took to accommodate a bribe-offering handshake. The surging suburbs were where the future lay, where dreams could be realized and all that was required was a smidgen of ambition and a dram of competence to turn hastily drawn, airy blueprints into tangible rewards. That most of the suburbanites were sundry shades of white and the remnants below ever darkening hues of brown and black was inevitable. That it seemed as though those outside were hemming in those within was an accident of geography. There was nothing but water and Canada to the south and east and no one, not even the most radical separatist below Eight Mile Road felt any desire to flee in that direction. That was the basic paradox of the situation. Everyone, of all ethnicities and races was American. What they all fought for was the same thing, the exact same thing, their piece of the American Dream. It only seemed paradoxical that one group striving for it meant denying opportunities for its attainment by another. It wasn’t impossible, only as unlikely as the Palestinians and Jews acquiescing to accommodation. And for historical injustices far more irreconcilable. This all too pervasive American diaspora constitutes the paramount transition of the times but it is not what we shall be focusing on. All the preceding mishmash is intended for is to merely establish the setting, the milieu of the piece, the abi