Posted on 07/19/2011 7:30:20 AM PDT by flowerplough
What does “ruin porn” tell us about the motor city, ourselves, other American cities?
... Its impressive collection of pre-Depression skyscrapers have been memorably lionized as a “American Acropolis” by Camilo José Vergara, the pioneering photographer of American ghetto landscapes. Buildings that have escaped the wrecking ball have also, for the most part, escaped gentrification, since most of Detroit’s economic elite remain sequestered in the suburbs, with little of the desire for urbanity that one finds among the leisure classes of Chicago, New York, London, or (even) Philadelphia. Nor has the city ever been able to do on any significant scale what Pittsburgh has accomplished with its defunct Homestead steel mill, now a shopping mall, or what New York has done with upscale condos in old warehouses—leverage the hollow shells of a productive economy into the shell games of the credit economy.
...
Coleman Young, Detroit’s charismatic and still-controversial mayor during the years of the city’s most precipitous decline in the nineteen seventies and eighties, put it well in his fascinating 1994 autobiography, Hard Stuff: “Detroit today,” he wrote, “is your town tomorrow.” From the 1967 riots, when Detroit became the flashpoint of the country’s political and racial crisis, to the deindustrialization and crime of the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties, the city has been a bellwether of each major urban crisis since World War II. Today, Detroit, to use an overused but appropriate metaphor given the city’s scarred appearance, is “ground zero” of the collapse of the finance and real estate economy in America. Detroit has been hit as hard as any city by the foreclosure crisis and by unemployment, and so it embodies the looming jobless future, or more precisely, our worst fears about that future.
(Excerpt) Read more at guernicamag.com ...
“Detroit may be a parasite but its an indifferent parasite. Ann Arbor on the other hand is an angry, self righteous and demanding parasite that has as much to do with Detroit’s downfall as Detroit does.”
Sheer poetry.
Ideas for fixing Detroit come out of Ann Arbor all the time. They all include trainloads of money to Detroit after a stop in Ann Arbor.
Ching! They lie EXACTLY in the mid sixties. That’s why Atlanta, where slashing tires and stealing copper are the biggest pastimes, is the looming Detroit of the future. ‘King-land’, ‘hip-hop-central’, or whatever; Atlanta is determined to self-destruct. We’re just hopeful the current power base will relocate to Detroit.
United Artists Theater, built in 1928
Woodward Ave. Church, built in 1911
East side public library
Dentist cabinet, Broderick tower
Farwell building
coinkydink, surely
“Detroit today,” he wrote, “is your town tomorrow.”
They don’t want to come to Detroit. Michigan took the hardest right turn of all states in the last election.
While Detroit mayor Dave Bing is a democrat, he was a real step up out of the gutter. A self made millionaire who has fired plenty of unionized city employees. He’s also welcomed Rick Snyder’s emergency financial manager law and will welcome an emergency manager if the schools don’t clean up their act.
Interestingly enough, William Ayers was a student in Ann Arbor during the Detroit riots which was the beginning of the fall.
Well, I don't think Young can put anything "well" or "charismatic." If there was one person you could blame for the destruction of Detroit as a major metropolis, that person's name would be spelled "C-o-l-e-m-a-n Y-o-u-n-g." I had a lot of friends flee that place because of his racist policies.
One of the killing problems for Detroit and similar cities is that the income of the white citizens was large enough for them to afford to move out of the city. It seems that once white people have enough money to leave the farm they will, and when they have enough money to leave the urban slums they will.
Go Blue, man! But spare Ypsi....
Gotta love Ann Arbor. That’s a town desperately clinging to radical liberalism at any cost.
In a story about college students being raped, Annarbor.com removes comments about arming victims as a solution.
Nice.
His manipulation style makes them look like part of a video game. A level designer would do well to go there and map out such places.
Don’t forget that middle class blacks moved out also...leaving no tax base and lots of tax eaters...
A large population of muslims in Detroit is a far cry from a takeover. Detroit is a speck on the Michigan map.
They already have Dearborn.
And everybody knows Dearborn stretches from Lake Michigan to lake Erie.
Wow. Great pics. Thanks.
The library photo is sad.
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