"People Live in the Cass Corridor" is a series of short stories inspired by Douglas Ekman's five years living in the Cass Corridor, a neighborhood which was considered ground zero for urban decay in Detroit. Ekman took a job in advertising at Chrysler in 1977, and he and his future wife moved into a rowhouse near Second and Willis, decades before the Corridor was given the more friendly designation, "Midtown." The stigma worked hard against the neighborhood and prevented most suburbanites from doing any more than pass it on the freeway, but Ekman found "a very close-knit community, not unlike any small town made up of people... good people who through no fault of their own attempted to live their lives in the eye of a storm."
These stories, loosely based on Ekman's five years in the Cass Corridor, both confirm and shatter the neighborhood's bad reputation, illustrating the complexity beneath the very one-sided story that is told about the decline of Detroit's (and America's) urban areas.
Another interesting aspect of this project is that the stories are not available in print - Ekman made studio recordings of himself reading each of them, and you can listen to the audio recordings for free at http://www.peopleliveinthecasscorridor.com/. Single stories or the entire album can also be purchased on the website.
No comments:
Post a Comment