Last Days in Poletown

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Poletown, a Polish community just east of downtown that was demolished in order to build the General Motors Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant. I recently found that several sets of photographs were taken of Poletown as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey, a federal program intended to document America's architectural heritage. These two pictures show the Chene Street Commercial District, a section of Chene between I-94 and East Grand Boulevard which was completely erased from the grid for the sake of the plant's construction.

Corner of Chene and Milwaukee. (Image from the Library of Congress)

Chene between Trombley and Piquette. (Image from the Library of Congress)

These photographs were taken in 1981, right at the height of the controversy over the city's decision to displace the neighborhood's residents. The neighborhood appears to be on its last legs. Cars can still be seen in the street and parked along the curbs, but the buildings look dilapidated and the pictures give off a generally desolate feeling. Residents had begun taking relocation payments from the city and moving out of the neighborhood by this time, but the photographs may suggest that Poletown had emerged from the last couple decades in fairly rough shape, anyways. Documentation included in the Historic American Buildings Survey report hints at this, claiming that "the 1950s generally were very hard on the area" due to the steady movement of jobs and residents to the suburbs. The report goes on to say that "to the people of the area, the event which triggered the economic and social decline of the [Chene] Street Commercial District was the construction of the Ford Expressway (Interstate 94)." The report, from the Historic American Buildings Survey, can be found here.

Apparently, the construction of I-94 had cut Poletown into a north and a south section, which had done irreversible damage to the neighborhood by displacing some residents and breaking links between the remaining ones. This very closely resembles the way Corktown was split into two sections by the construction of I-75. It seems that by the time the neighborhood was scheduled for demolition in the 1980s, it was already on the decline.

On March 30, 1981, Time Magazine ran an article called "The Last Days of Poletown," which stated that 90% of Poletown residents had accepted relocation. The author writes that while a small group of protestors fight against the city, "other residents contend that the plant is actually a godsend, for it gives them the chance to leave the aging community and still get a decent price for their homes. Says John Kelmendi, 27, an area resident: 'Ninety percent of the socalled silent majority here want to go'" (Time Magazine, March 30, 1981).

So, these pictures may depict a neighborhood that has reluctantly accepted its fate after years of decline.