Free Detroit City Is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli Page A

booming! Conot notes that by the eighties Detroit, a city “whose egalitarian character had struck Alexis de Tocqueville in 1830,… now contained a significant number of the nation’s four thousand millionaires.” Detroit’s first skyscraper, the ten-story Hammond Building, was erected in 1889 with much hoopla (state holiday, bands, an aerialist pushing a wheelbarrow across a tightrope). And four years later, Ford, by this point chief engineer at the main branch of the Edison Company, fired up a crude homemade engine in the kitchen of his family’s new home. It was Christmas Eve. The room immediately filled with smoke and fumes, displeasing Ford’s wife, Clara, who had been pouring gas into the motor (which had no carburetor) by hand.
    And yet, for all that, the engine had worked. Henry Ford removed it from the kitchen sink, and his wife went back to preparing Christmas dinner.

 

    An urban garden in Upper Chene, tended by a storefront preacher. The roofless building was once a furniture warehouse. [Corine Vermeulen]

 
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    DIY CITY
    Or, Okra as Metaphor
    It has also been my good fortune to have lived long enough to witness the death blow dealt to the illusion that unceasing technological innovations and economic growth can guarantee happiness.… Instead of putting our organizational energies into begging Ford and General Motors to stay in Detroit, we need to go beyond traditional capitalism.… Instead of buying all our food from the store, we need to be planting community and school gardens and creating farmers markets.
    G RACE L EE B OGGS , The Next American Revolution
     
    Brothers and sisters, I wanna tell you something. I hear a lot of talk by a lot of honkies sitting on a lot of money telling me they’re high society. But I’ll let you know something. If you ask me, this is the high society.
    MC5, “M OTOR C ITY I S B URNING ” (live intro)
     
    S PEND ANY TIME IN DETROIT and you’ll quickly see that the city’s ongoing and multi-sectored collapse has made room for a kind of street-level anarchy. Red lights: optional. Buildings: porous. All manner of vice could easily be had. More positively, self-reliant Detroiters exploited, with admirable vigor, the twin strengths of their particular failed state: space and lawlessness. Artists, musicians, and other bohemian types tended to hog all the ink when it came to manifestations of the do-it-yourself spirit, but painting foreclosed homes “Tiggerific Orange” as a conceptual art prank or throwing a rave in an abandoned auto factory were not the only creative reclamations of negative space. Detroit had become a DIY city unlike any other, the kind of place where regular civilians took it upon themselves to tauten the civic slack.
    Des Cooper, a local journalist and demographer, moved to Detroit from the D.C. suburbs in the early eighties and she came to see the DIY nature of her adopted hometown as one of its “huge, huge strengths.” The amount of work people do for themselves simply to live in the city, she told me, was truly stunning when you stopped to think about it. “Because the problems are so huge and the people have so few resources, it doesn’t always look that way,” she went on. “There’s a perception that people here are kind of lazy and not really trying. But then you think of somebody who doesn’t have a car and has to take two buses to get to work and worry about child care—and then they come home and do neighborhood patrol and go to block club meetings. Nobody in West Bloomfield has to do neighborhood patrol!”
    She had a point: once you began to pay attention, the sorts of activities to which Cooper referred were apparent everywhere, and despite all evidence (historical, economic, you name it) to the contrary, the transformational potential of Detroit could start to appear boundless.
    In 2010 alone, the blog Rethink Detroit pointed out, the New York Times ran ten articles on Detroit’s DIY revitalization, spotlighting the