How Detroit, the Motor City, Turned Into a Ghost Town

Guardian News and Media Limited ^ | Sunday 1 November | Paul Harris

[P.O.E.]

Who burned those buildings down?

/rhetorical question.

When there is no respect for property rights (tangible and intangible) civilization breaks down.

[GOPJ]

Detroit is run by Democrats - with dem ideas - with “wealth distribution” and “give aways” and it failed. Detroit is what the United States will look like if we become a dem country.

[frankenMonkey]

Just went to Google Maps, and they have street photography for all of Detroit!

[Frantzie]

Kind of hard when a corrupt govt and judicial system has a gun to management’s head.

[shove_it]

I've followed your posts back and forth on this heartbreaking thread. Detroit was a terrific place to grow up in the 40s and 50s - BobLo and Vernor's Ginger Ale at the dock, Belle Isle, Put In Bay, Great Lakes cruises on the North and South American ships, tobogganing at Rouge Park, taking girls to the River to watch the submarine races, walking to my neighborhood George Ford Elementary School, safety patrol, 12 cent all day movies at The Atlas.....

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the 50th reunion of my 1957 Mackenzie High School class.

Thanks Son House for all the great links and Goat Granny, thanks for the memories.

[Son House]

BobLo and Vernor’s Ginger Ale at the dock, Belle Isle, Put In Bay, Great Lakes cruises on the North and South American ships,...taking girls to the River to watch the submarine races

^
One of those clips for the Detroit Olympic bid mentioned the longest fresh water beach in the world, and I couldn’t help but think of the coast of Somalia and the comparison of such a beautiful place going to waste

[goat granny]

***We collected welfare while dad was on Valium and bed rest.***

I had to laugh at this remark, I don't have back problems but I love Valium shhhh don't tell anybody...

A lot of people really have the wrong opinion of Valium, it got a bad rap years back when some people got their panties in wad over prescribing it...but it is in every crash cart in hospitals...given for any bad muscular problems as it is a skeletal muscle relaxer. Also given stat for epileptic seizures...

The city of Detroit printed their own money called Script and that's what my father was paid in, then mom had to find a store that would take city script and then the store turned it in to the city for dollars...I was born before WW2

During the depression ERA, many citys did that......

Also the milk man came around 3 times a week with a horse drawn milk cart as did the ice man..Milk and ice (for ice boxes) was home delivered...A fresh produce truck would make the rounds once a week every summer...No super markets in those days and a Kroger store had stuff stacked clear to the ceiling and you had this long handled reachy thingy to get things on the top. It was not a super market, just a grocery store and rather small. The one by our house was not much bigger than a 7-11 store of today...

Detroti at that( the 40s') time was a city of around 1 million.

[VRWC For Truth]

Democrats ... just say no.

[goat granny]

Your reply was a hoot, I was going to mention watching submarine races from Belle Isle but figured no one would know what I meant...

I did go to the 35th reunion party for the Pershing 1957 class. That was the only one I went to...What I found interesting was I could recognize most of the women, but hardly any of the men...

Bo-lo moonlight cruises were the best...Vernor's is the only company I think still in business. Once in a while you can find Sanders bumpy cake... Oh and Edgewater Park for the roller coaster ride.. Glad someone else is interested in (those good old days). When childhood was childhood and your mother would tell you go just be home when the street lights went on... :O)

[Cacique]

New York is next, and that’s just the way the socialists like things to be. Zimbabwe is the model they want to emulate....

[Clemenza]

Michael Jones is a quack. Catholics of middle class background were leaving for the suburbs starting in the 1940s. This depressed property values in the white Catholic neighborhoods, as said nabes had no further waves of immigration to replenish them. There was no WASP conspiracy, and the “Catholic voters” merely transported their enclaves to suburbia, where they settled among other Catholics.

[Clemenza]

You forget that those "Catholic ethnics" were loyal democratic voters themselves. They didn't exactly become Republicans when they moved out to suburbia either, unless they became white collar employees.

Don't believe the "destruction of Catholic neighborhoods" conspiracy BS put forward by quack pseudointellectuals. As an assimilated white American of Polish and Italian ancestry, the reasons my family left the ethnic GHETTOS had more to do with upward mobility rather than some conspiracy to drive them out. The upwardly mobile had been leaving since the end of WWII, which in turn drove down the property values in the ethnic enclaves, which could NO LONGER sustain themselves without further immigration from Europe.

[Clemenza]

Actually, 90% of Manhattan has been gentrified, or is in the process of being gentrified (even Harlem and Washington Heights). Most of NW Brooklyn has also been gentrified, with places like Bushwick, a scary ghetto 10 years ago, increasingly becoming "hip" enclaves of young white people.

Newark, my dad's hometown, still sucks.

[Son House]

Thanks for that update, haven’t got to look at it too closely yet, but from what I saw it looked brighter

[MinorityRepublican]

bttt