Poletown's "Desolation Angel"

The cover story of this week's issue of the Metro Times, "Desolation Angel" by Detroitblogger John, is about a small church on Chene called Peacemakers International which has become a refuge for the poor, drug-addicted, and destitute in one of Detroit's roughest areas. It's a really great article and I would recommend reading it, but one specific reason I wanted to mention it is that Peacemakers International is located in Poletown, a few blocks south of I-94. I've written about Poletown a couple times recently, specifically about how the neighborhood slowly declined over several decades as a result of the same things that affected many neighborhoods: freeway construction, a general movement of population out of the city, and urban renewal (a highly publicized and controversial example of it, in Poletown's case).

Here's how the article describes the area's recent history:

"Chene Street is a disaster. The rows of burned-out storefronts between the empty blocks are reminders of how bustling it once was. But after the riot, after the freeway and an auto plant split the neighborhood in half, after everyone packed up and moved away, almost everything just died off.

Pouring into the void left behind were outcasts and cast-asides — junkies and drunks, hookers and drug dealers, the mentally ill and the physically disabled. Like a few other areas of the city, it became a refuge of the underclass, a home for everyone with nowhere else to go, where they can wander freely without being chased away by store owners, or told to move along by the cops."

Peacemakers International, at the corner of Chene and Frederick. (Image from Google Maps)

Detroit Does Not Need a Walmart

Jim Griffioen, the author of Sweet Juniper, wrote an amazing article for the Urbanophile called Yes There Are Grocery Stores in Detroit in which he attempts to refute the widespread myth that Detroiters have no place to shop for food. We've all heard this idea repeated over and over in the national media - a reporter says, "There is not a single grocery store within the city limits of Detroit," accompanied by a series of images of boarded-up liquor stores. Griffioen argues that while there are no national chain supermarkets in Detroit, America must try to get past the idea that a city without a Wal-Mart or Kroger is somehow at a disadvantage.

There are plenty of independently owned grocery stores in Detroit. Of course, some of them are not so great, but others, like the Honey Bee Market on Bagley, are much better places to shop than a big box supermarket. And the Honey Bee is just one of many small grocery stores in Mexicantown. In fact, in a recent discussion on WDET, the produce purchaser for the Honey Bee suggested that if there's any food issue in Southwest Detroit, it's that there is too much competition among independent food stores. Some of these independent grocers offer a more diverse, high-quality selection than chain supermarkets, and their profits go right back into the community, as opposed to being sent back to Arkansas or wherever corporate headquarters might be. I'm going to guarantee that residents of Southwest Detroit (and many other areas) are not driving to the suburbs to do their grocery shopping, as some in the media have suggested. Unique, high-quality markets like Honey Bee are actually attracting shoppers from outside the city.

The main thesis of the article (at least what I took from it) seems to be summed up in this quote:

"Ultimately, that myth perseveres because the mainstream media and its audience is steeped in a suburban mentality where the only grocery stores that really seem to count are those large, big-box chain stores that are the only option in so many communities these days, largely because they have put locally-owned and independent stores like the ones you find in Detroit out of business."

Rush Hour on Second Avenue, July 1942

Photograph taken by Arthur S. Siegel, a member of a team of photographers who documented American life from 1935 to 1944 for various government agencies, including the U.S. Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information. This photograph, like others in the FSA-OWI collection, is held by the Library of Congress. According to a biography written by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photograph, Arthur Siegel was born in Detroit and attended the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. He was a professor or photography at Wayne State and eventually at the Illinois Institute of Design in Chicago.

This photograph, taken from the Fisher Building facing south towards downtown, shows 5:30pm traffic on Second Avenue. The General Motors Building, now called Cadillac Place, can be seen on the left.

You should probably move to Midtown

As a follow-up to my previous post on the Live Midtown program, I wanted to mention an article in the Free Press last weekend which discusses the program. One Wayne State employee and student who was among the first people to apply for the incentives will be getting a total of $3,500 over two years towards the rent on his $400/month studio apartment. This is a pretty amazing deal for someone working for any of the three organizations involved in the program who is in a position to move.

The program is expecting about 500 applicants in its first year, and it's already attracting at least some outside investment - the article mentions one Oakland County developer who just finished his first project in Detroit, Centurion Place on Ferry, and plans on continuing to build in the area. And on top of that, six of the eight units at Centurion Place have already sold.

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.

The Consequences of Progress: Corktown

I'm really interested in how urban planning decisions that are intended to improve neighborhoods can have terrible long-term consequences. Urban renewal was a concept based on the idea that city governments could take an active role in redeveloping land and revitalizing cities. It became popular in America in the middle of the twentieth century. Corktown, an originally Irish neighborhood located immediately southwest of downtown, was threatened by several development projects over the course of its life, but it has emerged in relatively good shape.

A few of these projects involved transportation. Ironically, the automobile both built Detroit and contributed to its demise as the freeway system cut the city into sections, many of which withered away as neighbors were separated from each other and from commercial districts. In the 1950s, the construction of the John C. Lodge freeway, which ran north from Jefferson, separated Corktown from downtown. Some of the eastern edge of the neighborhood was demolished for the construction.

In this c. 1950s photograph, the Lodge freeway (seen from left to right near the middle of the frame) can be seen running under Michigan Avenue towards the Detroit River. Beyond the concrete river is Corktown and the rest of Southwest Detroit. (Image from the Wayne State University Virtual Motor City Collection)

In the 1960s, the Fisher Freeway was built right through the middle of Corktown, just north of Michigan Avenue. The freeway intersected with the Lodge at the edge of the neighborhood and basically split it into two sections, north and south. North Corktown, as it is now called, did not fare as well as its southern neighbor, probably because it was cut off from Michigan Avenue, the main commercial anchor of the neighborhood. North Corktown is now an almost rural landscape, with many abandoned lots and some scattered homes. Driving north on Rosa Parks Blvd over the Fisher Freeway, the contrast between the southern portion of the neighborhood and the bizarre peacefulness of North Corktown is striking. The comparison to the rural country may be somewhat accurate, as some farms have emerged in between the grassy lots. A few Corktown establishments, like Nancy Whiskey, have been able to hold on over the years in the area north of the freeway.

Harrison Street in North Corktown. (Image from Google Maps)

The two freeway projects were not the first transportation-related plans to affect Corktown. In the early twentieth century, Michigan Avenue was widened to make room for increased automobile traffic. This required the demolition of the southern portion of the street to accommodate the extra lanes. Today, with the population of the neighborhood and city far below what they were at the time, Michigan Avenue seems desolate and incredibly spacious. I should note that the surplus of lanes would make plenty of room for a light rail line extending from the southern end of the Woodward line and traveling through Corktown and Mexicantown, but I won't count on it. Still, this could make positive use of a situation that originally caused the destruction of much of the neighborhood's major street.

Probably the most significant threat to Corktown came in the form of an urban renewal project. The city sought to demolish much of the neighborhood in order to re-zone the land for industry. Fortunately, resistance from the neighborhood was strong enough to prevent much of the potential damage from being done. The core strength of the neighborhood may also be one of the primary reasons that Corktown has been experiencing a small renaissance in the past few years. Armando Delicato and Julie Demery write that "today many of the buildings that were to save Corktown are abandoned while the remnant of the old neighborhood is resurging" (Detroit's Corktown, 40). Hopefully, the neighborhood can see a steady, organic renewal that forms it into something new and exciting but still connected to its beginnings.

Move to Midtown?

Wayne State University, the Detroit Medical Center, and the Henry Ford Health System are collaborating on a new program called Live Midtown which provides incentives for employees of these companies to buy or rent a home in Midtown. As the three largest employers in the neighborhood, these organizations are attempting to become actively involved in its redevelopment. Although the specific guidelines vary between each organization, the general idea is that new renters can receive a total of $3,500 towards their first two years of rent, and new homeowners will benefit from a forgivable loan of either $20,000 or $25,000. Employees who already live in Midtown can also receive assistance through the program - renters receive $1,000 for renewing their current lease, and homeowners can get up to $5,000 to be used towards exterior renovations.

Craig Fahle discussed the program on his radio show yesterday morning, and he framed the conversation around the question, "What would it take for you to move to Midtown?" These financial incentives are obviously very significant, and there has apparently already been a positive response to the incentives. Of course, a move to Midtown will not interest every employee of these three organizations. Many with children are concerned about the quality of area schools, for example. Many of the commonly referenced concerns, such as school and crime, will only improve as more people move into places like Midtown and become invested in the neighborhood. Just by visiting, it's clear that the neighborhood is seeing a resurgence, and these financial incentives might be enough to give one final push to someone who has been considering a move to Detroit. More information on area boundaries and program guidelines are available at livemidtown.org

Detroit Lives

A while ago, I had heard that Johnny Knoxville was making a short film about Detroit with Palladium Boots as part of the company's series on urban exploration. I just got around to watching it a few days ago, and I ended up really enjoying it. The film, called "Detroit Lives," follows Knoxville as he attempts to look beyond the tired imagery of Detroit's epic collapse, and while he does spend some time exploring the city's ruins, he makes an effort to look beneath the surface. He highlights several of the creative projects emerging from the city, and he visits some of the classics, like the Heidelberg Project. The film portrays Detroit as a unique environment that is offering people the freedom and space to realize their vision and make a real impact on their surroundings. And of course, like any city with cheap rent, it's attracting some hipsters, as well.

The movie is about thirty minutes long and you can watch it in three parts on the Palladium Boots website.

Evidence of Poletown

Last winter, I spent some time at the Detroit Historical Society helping to catalog photographs taken by former students at the College for Creative Studies. One day, I was going through some miscellaneous photographs of residential neighborhoods, and I began looking up the addresses of some of the homes. One photographer had taken a series of shots of some small single family homes on St. Aubin, and I didn't recognize the cross streets he listed under the photographs, so I was doing some Google Maps investigation. I couldn't seem to locate the intersections where these photos were supposedly taken. Google Maps told me they didn't exist, and I searched up and down St. Aubin a few times. I was starting to wonder if the photographer had made a mistake and completely mislabeled the photos. After searching the map several times, I realized that the huge space directly adjacent to the area in which I thought these homes would be located was the General Motors Hamtramck Cadillac Assembly Plant.

I didn't know too much about the Assembly Plant, besides that it was constructed on the site of a large immigrant community called Poletown. Poletown was one of the few communities still thriving in Detroit by the 1980s, but the city of Detroit seized it through eminent domain, claiming that the potential for job creation brought in by a new GM plant would outweigh the benefits of keeping the community intact.

The pictures I was looking at were taken in 1981, and they showed rows of homes which were in various states of disrepair but still appeared to be in decent shape. Many of them were located on a stretch of St. Aubin which was right on the edge of the Assembly Plant and, as far as I can tell, no longer exists. I had heard some vague rendition of the story of Poletown, but seeing pictures of entire city blocks which stood in 1981 but have completely disappeared made the whole thing seem more like reality and not just a piece of Detroit political history.

Of course, it's tough to know what conditions were like in Poletown in the 1980s without actually having lived there. Even by interviewing former residents of the neighborhood, I'm sure we would get conflicting opinions about the neighborhood's reaction to the deal. For example, David Schultz writes in Property, Power, and American Democracy that the Poletown Neighborhood Council (the organization created to oppose the demolition) was actually fairly unpopular among Detroit's Polish community, which saw the potential economic benefits of the plant's construction for nearby Hamtramck and was offered significant payments for relocating (pg. 101). On the other hand, it's important to remember that this was a community, and there was at least some segment of it that vigorously opposed the deal. Jeanie Wylie's book, Poletown: Community Betrayed, represents the viewpoint that it is an injustice any time a community is sacrificed for the benefit of some external power, and it is widely acknowledged that this expansion of eminent domain gave governments and corporations an unprecedented amount of control over private property. These complicated issues are always important to remember, especially as the city attempts to deal with its current land use issues by attempting to incentivize residents to move out of what it considers to be unsustainable neighborhoods through the Detroit Works project.

***

One of these photographs had a caption which read, "On St. Aubin between Henrie and Palmer," and it showed a row of six or seven houses. I located this block on Google Street View, and found that only one of the houses in this row remains, surrounded by trees but still appearing to be in good condition. The house is only a few blocks from the GM Plant and from I-94, which had done its own damage by splitting the community in half like so many Detroit freeways had done in other neighborhoods. Even though this block sits just outside the area demolished for the plant's construction, surely most of its inhabitants simply gave up and moved on to other places. I wonder if this house is occupied by some Polish family that was too stubborn to leave the neighborhood, like the few residents of Centralia, PA who refused to leave after a mine fire made the town uninhabitable. Maybe they choose to continue living in the house, painting the walls, and trimming the bushes as a symbol of this former immigrant community.

(photos from Google Maps)

***

Still, Poletown refuses to die. A few months ago, an article on detroitblog drew attention to St. Albertus Catholic Church, which is no longer an officially recognized church but is hanging on by a thread as a small group of people work to preserve it. A priest from Hamtramck occasionally bikes into the neighborhood to give masses to a handful of people. And the Ivanhoe Cafe, or "Polish Yacht Club" (not an actual yacht club, for the record), still serves fish and Polish food on a desolate section of Joseph Campau Street which was cut off from Hamtramck by the construction of the Assembly Plant. These people and others like them are evidence of the community's symbolic connection to this one random piece of land, and stories like this are repeated throughout Detroit's many forgotten neighborhoods.

Positive news for several neighborhoods

An article in this morning's Free Press titled Detroit's profile grows as investors, young professionals return to city discusses the steadily increasing interest and development in neighborhoods like Woodbridge and Midtown. The article includes the story of two friends who left their jobs in New York and Washington, D.C., to move to Midtown after vacationing in Detroit on a whim and finding that the city was more than the decaying, feral wasteland portrayed in the media. The founder of a real estate firm called City Living Detroit says that the housing market in these neighborhoods is doing very well in spite of the generally stagnant American real estate market. At least seven major housing developments and renovations are being planned to meet the demand.

And Corktown seems to be headed in the same direction. An article on Model D a few weeks ago talked about several restaurants planned to open in 2011 along Michigan Avenue and in the space where Bailie Corcaigh used to sit at the corner of Trumbull and Bagley. Sadly (for me), Mudgie's is moving downtown, where it will probably be much harder to find parking.

Some thoughts on Detroit's abandonment

One thing to keep in mind when thinking about Detroit is that not every dilapidated structure was abandoned as a direct result of the 1967 riot or "white flight." The Michigan Theater, for example, went out of favor when tastes changed and people no longer preferred to see movies in grand palaces with orchestra accompaniment. It went into disrepair only after changing hands several times and being trashed during its time as a rock venue. The difference with other cities, I think, is that these sorts of buildings would have always been valuable real estate and would have quickly been repurposed. In Detroit, we instead have this slowly decaying portrayal of the early twentieth century sitting in front of us.

A city will always change - even the landmarks we are trying to preserve were built at the expense of previous structures. Michigan Central Station was built on top of a former residential section of Corktown, and I would bet that every resident of that neighborhood opposed the destruction of their home, no matter how much money was offered to them. "Matthew Scanlon, the real estate dealer who acquired the land for the railroad, had to call on one old woman forty times to get her to sell," Dan Austin wrote on Buildings Of Detroit. Today's Detroit, however, is frozen in time. On the bright side, this leaves the city with a lot of unique architecture that cannot be seen in other places. In another city, the Michigan Theater may have been radically altered or torn down by some investor to take advantage of its prime location near the center of Downtown. On the other hand, the fact that Detroit is stuck in time makes us feel strange and confused because at some inevitable point in the future, every city, town, and street in the world will look like this.

Introduction

The goal of this blog will be to discuss Detroit from the perspective of someone who is not an expert but who has some background in historical research and an interest in where the city has been and where it's going. I do not claim to be an endless source of flawless Detroit knowledge, but I do know some things and am always in the process of learning. At the very least, I hope to refute the idea that Detroit is a "dead city" by bringing attention to its complex past and the endless number of people who are working to ensure that its current slump is simply a low-point in the city's life cycle. Even though I am not all that familiar with William Faulkner, I will quote him anyways: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Detroit's past is not dead - it will continue to teach us about how we have gotten to this exact point in our history and how we should be trying to shape the future.