Posted on 08/05/2009 10:07:51 AM PDT by canuck_conservative
Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the 1920s — the booming home of a glamorous new industry, a place where huge fortunes were conjured in years, sometimes months. But while the creators of the computer industry have as yet bequeathed very little to the built environment, the automobile industry piled up around it an astounding American city, in astoundingly little time.
The Detroit of 1910 was a thriving Midwestern milling and shipping entrepot, a bigger Minneapolis. The Detroit of 1930 had rebuilt itself as a grand metropolis of skyscrapers, mansions, movie palaces and frame cottages spreading northward beyond the line of sight, exceeding Philadelphia and St. Louis, rivaling Chicago and New York. I had a chance to tour central Detroit recently, my first visit to the downtown core in many, many years.
Some of the old visual magnificence remains, has even been improved. The Guardian tower displays again the blazing colors of its vaulted atrium, long covered up by dry wall. The marble adorning the Fisher building still glows. The Renaissance Center, once as walled and moated against the city as a medieval castle, has lowered its defenses, especially on the side facing the Detroit River. But for the most part, all is decay. Whole towers stand empty, waiting to join the long line of grand structures that have either been abandoned to pillage and ruin, like Detroit’s once magnificent neoclassical skyscraper of a train station, or else pulled down entirely, like the downtown Dayton Hudson department store, once the largest enclosed shopping space in the United States.
Detroit’s fall was as steep and rapid as its rise....
(Excerpt) Read more at network.nationalpost.com ...
Would appreciate some feedback from those more familiar with the city.
Stopped reading at this line:
“Detroit was vibrant then, and it remains vibrant now, she wishes to argue… like Sarah Palin’s career, it’s just advancing in a different direction”.
Frum can’t resist skewering Palin in every thing he writes.
WTG, Frum. You just had to slip in that dig, didn't you? What a maroon.
One thing for sure is that Detroit becomiing a black majority city had nothing to do with its decline or present status.
Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Chicago are vibrant, booming cities?
This clown is missing the obvious.
Detroit was killed by unions, libtards, and Rats.
Just the same as everywhere else.
If the answer isn’t unions, this is cr@p.
Growing up in the city in the 60’s and 70’s, the worst thing to happen to that once-great example of the American Spirit was Coleman Young. He was a Marxist/Collectivist and stacked his administration was cronies and criminals.
One could see the rather rapid disintegration of the city after that point.
Perhaps businessman Dave Bing can resuscitate it somewhat,
but the core group of crooks are still there.
Personally, I’m not going to hold my breath.
Detroit: The Triumph of Progressive Public Policy
http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=10743
Excerpt:
Imagine a city where all the major economic planks of the statist or “progressive” platform have been enacted:
* A “living wage” ordinance, far above the federal minimum wage, for all public employees and private contractors.
* A school system that spends significantly more per pupil than the national average.
* A powerful school employee union that militantly defends the exceptional pay, benefits and job security it has won for its members.
* A powerful government employee union that does the same for its members.
* A tax system that aggressively redistributes income from businesses and the wealthy to the poor and to government bureaucracies.
Oh yeah, I figured the unions were too obvious.
That has happened in virtually all major urban areas; the result is that they suffer.
Detroit is now an outhouse.
Once great city, now some one wants to take vacant land and turn it back into farmland.
I almost cry when I see my Dad, when I drive were I use to deliver newspapers.
One block is empty and full of weeds. Also my Dad has rarcoons in his backyard!!!
I’m a life-long Detroiter, and I’ve lived long enough to witness the death throes from the Great Society years through today. I venture into Detroit often in the early morning hours, camera in hand, to record the amazing devastation - and to remind myself and anybody who will listen exactly where the collectivist mindset leads.
One critical piece of this puzzle has been left out of the story - the city’s tax policies. Detroit levied its own income tax, which was the straw that pushed many of the city’s workers out. This was often attributed to “white flight”, but it was a separate issue - an entirely economic one.
After the worker’s exodus, the city decided to levy a commuter tax to make up the deficit. That’s when the businesses started pulling out wholesale.
That tax is still in effect. You actually pay a premium for the privilege of living in Detroit, putting up with non-existent city services, a city hall with a “greater than thou” attitude, rampant crime and entire regions where the police no longer patrol. Is it any surprise that you cannot find a supermarket in the city?
Detroit has been killed by politicians - politicians who arrogantly refuse to recognize the results of their own actions and decisions.
I love Detroit, but the city is beyond life support. There are sparks of life in there still, around the cultural center and in the very heart of downtown; the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and a hanful of other institutions that have managed to survive in spite of the horrific conditions. These are the exceptions, standing in stark contrast to the rest of what remains - a city that was once the industrial center of the world.
To any who do not feel the national political battle worth fighting, I invite you to visit my home town.
Palin is a joke. Wake up.
“Detroit was vibrant then, and it remains vibrant now, she wishes to argue… like Sarah Palin’s career, it’s just advancing in a different direction.”
From this left field gratuitous swipe at Sarah Palin, Frum spouts some predictable pap about race and arrives at the crux of the problem with:
“If the promised land did not yield the hoped-for industrial jobs, it offered something else: generous new welfare programs, the ashy false fruit of urban liberalism. The children of the parents who accepted the fruit grew into the criminals who drove first the middle class and then the working class out of the downtown and then altogether out of the city.”
Having hit the nail so squarely on the head, Frum goes on to the more important factor in the decline of Detroit. “Not enough gays.”
/facepalm
The NappyOne
Detroit is a fine example of liberal good intentions gone awry. If the Obama Administration gets all it wants, the whole country will look like Detroit.
As the white working class departed, Detroit became a black-majority city, governed by a deeply aggrieved and flagrantly corrupt political class. Political dysfunction spiraled the city into another cycle of dissolution and abandonment — and the abandonment in turn provided the politicians with..”
It sure took Frum long enough to explain Detoilet’s problem.
I guess to be ‘PC’ he had to hide the truth in a jumbled ramble of word salad.
your story is my story. I personally believe that Detroit is beyond hope.
Go to Google Images and search on something to the effect of “Detroit Michigan Central station.”
Frum managed to get in his inevitable gratuitous dig at Palin. Another Yaley who has fits at the notion that someone from a mere state school might presume to high government office. This is sickening.
Is that racist?/sarc.
Thanks for posting that link.
An interesting but truly sad look at a part of what our foolish politicians have taken from America.
He nailed the reason for its demise. The race riots in 1967, the subsequent take-over of the city by corrupt black officials, and widespread crime accelerated white flight and left Detroit in the hands of the criminal poor and the criminal politicians.
No it is because of corruption, not good intentions. I was there during Coleman Young, and again, during Kwame. If I could post a story that would not be deemed racist I would tell you.
It takes the drivers 15 hours or so to go from Livonia to the Dakotas, but they think they are entering another country.
Over the past couple years we have brought here 8-9 semi-loads of manufacturing equipment from Michigan. Our young machinists laugh derisively at the UAW labels on the older tools.
What manufacturing that remains in this country will be done in low tax open shop states like this one where people appreciate risk taking and wealth creation.
I have a different theory. More than any other city of the old industrial belt, Detroit was a massive "company town." Well, "companies" as in the auto companies. I wasn't there, but looking at the aftermath, one thing stands out--this city was abandoned by the powers who built it. I see no evidence that the auto companies showed any shred of civic responsibility to the city that hosted them during the good years.
The executive suites and their financiers appear to have sold out, folded up and left, or cocooned themselves in office enclaves, leaving their massive manufacturing plants to sit and rot untended, unmourned, and unreplaced.
The populace left had no capacity to salvage these cavernous hulks and do anything with them. How could a bunch of people with no management, planning or financial skills, no particular wealth and no capital, do anything but scratch around for a living in the shadow of the monster derelicts.
If you want to ask why this blight has persisted for so many years, and sunk so deep, then yes, look at the factors of demoralization, ignorance, race politics and corruption. But I think Detroit basically is a city whose commercial leaders just pulled the plug.
Good for you. Indeed - the unionization is a another very critical piece of the puzzle, and another piece that is on the table to be exported to the rest of the nation.
I’m a shop owner - or was. My little shop is just outside the city limits, and is in the process of being shut down. I’m trying to figure out how to store my beloved machine tools, because I refuse to give them away or scrap them after a life spent accumulating. We’ve not had enough work to maintain employees for a couple years, and have finally reached the point where the overhead is no longer being covered.
So why stay? Those elements that made us what we once were are still here - raw resources, land, transportation and most of the world’s fresh water. Politics can be changed. If we ever do recover from this disease that has swept our nation, Michigan will again be a viable place to run a business.
Until then, it’s grease and tarps for my iron.
If she runs for national office, I will support her 100%. I am tired of holding my nose to vote for the lesser of 2 evils.
If you would like to be added or dropped from the Michigan ping list, please freepmail me.
Guess I’ll have to see if the machine movers are looking for help, they seem to be they only ones working here in MI.
Wish I could put the /s on this post.
So????
Yours is the best take on this thread. Bravo.
unions
liberals
taxes
Well, it’s a small step in the right direction but yesterday Detroit picked the 18 candidates who will vie for the City Council in the Fall. Gone will be a lot of the deadwood from the current corrupt Council, such as Monica Conyers and Martha Reeves and a couple of others not seeking re-election. The Council will have a lot of new, young blood that is promising at least in the fact that they appear to be people of honor. The new mayor, Dave Bing, is a man of class as well with a business background.
Also, maybe most importantly, in November the voters will vote on whether to elect council members on a district basis, rather than city-wide as it stands now. This should go a long way towards making a single representative accountable for all areas of the city, and not just the downtown. There are glimmers of hope that the city of Detroit has reached rock bottom after the affairs of Kwame Kilpatrick and Monica Conyers and can begin to rise again on a modest scale.
Troll much ?
“Frum can’t resist skewering Palin in every thing he writes.”
Yes - that very nonsequitur makes me look more closely at his analysis - and it comes up wanting.
Sures, the race problem wrongly dealt with caused big trouble, and, yes, the unwillingness to preserve the relics of the past has contributed enormously to Detroit’s undesirability today.
But he doesn’t really put his finger on what caused Detroit to miss the rejuvenation boat. Why is it not a viable city? Boston Is. Chicago is. New Orleans i - - - now, here’s something that could throw light on our question!
How viable a city is New Orleans now? Did the hurricane do to New Orleans what the collapse of the American auto industry did to Detroit? Namely, expose a major and catostrophic political shortcoming?
If you're talking about David Frum, I read the article and found no specific reference at all to the '67 riots, which was the major turning point.
A little history lesson for Mr. Frum: By 1910, Henry Ford had already been cranking out Model T's for a couple of years. He had built his first automobile in his home in Detroit c. 1896.
Notice that Frum mentions Northwestern in connection with Chicago's educational institutions, though its main campus, of course, is in suburban Evanston. He could have mentioned the University of Michigan in the same vein relative to Detroit, but failed to do so. He also neglected to mention the U. of Detroit.
One of my uncles had an incredible machine shop set up in his three car garage. He built engines for use in his self built hydrofoil race boats.
There was nothing that couldn't be manufactured in Detroit. I visited Ford's Rouge plant when I was a kid in the 50s and still remember with pride the sight of raw commodities entering via ship and leaving as finished autos.
The once arsenal of democracy is proof that civilization is fragile. It should be a lesson for the rest of the country as to the end point of decades of awful government.
Detroit is a fine example of liberal good intentions gone awry. If the Obama Administration gets all it wants, the whole country will look like Detroit.
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I agree with you except for one point! I am convinced Detroit is a fine example of liberal BAD intentions come to fruition. The idea that these people really want to create utopia but are misguided and don’t understand what will result from their misguided actions is incorrect. They worship power and the ultimate power is the power to destroy, therein lies their religion, the slavering devotion to death and destruction.
If they truly believed that their way was the way to heaven on Earth they would proudly claim the label of liberal as so many proudly claim the label of conservative or libertarian, instead they deny what they are and lie about their deeds and demand instant passage of legislation that they don’t even pretend to read and understand. Tell me now, are these the actions of people with good intentions?
It has been at least 45 years since I read “Atlas Shrugged” from cover to cover but I still recall that Ayn Rand warned against mistaking evil intentions for honest error.
Are you serious? Black majority city means blacks inevitably governing the city, which means black leftists in power, which means nothing but corruption, crime, and decay. Can you name me a mayor of Detroit in the last 35 years who can be credited with stemming the downward slide? (The jury is still out on Dave Bing, the newly elected mayor and former basketball star.)
I agree with you.
Carl Stokes was the first black mayor of a major US city and he started my hometown of Cleveland Ohio on the road to ruin.
When Krazy Kucinich then took her to bankruptcy, I bailed out for good.
Are you serious? Black majority city means blacks inevitably governing the city, which means black leftists in power, which means nothing but corruption, crime, and decay. Can you name me a mayor of Detroit in the last 35 years who can be credited with stemming the downward slide? (The jury is still out on Dave Bing, the newly elected mayor and former basketball star.)
Is there a black majority city in the States that is not a ghetto and crime ridden hellhole?
Hartford, New Haven, Lawrence, Springfield, Camden, Philadelphia, Baltimore are just a few of the Black Majority cities that have failed under Black leadership.
Wonderful to hear that your kind of work is being done here in the states.
I was being sarcastic (-:
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