RSS Feed MenuDetroit 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. In 1960 it remained a thriving city, showing early signs of future trouble yes, but still strong, rich, and proud. By 1970, Detroit was a byword for urban dystopia. A small symbol of the change. In 1962, the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company commissioned a new headquarters building. Rather than build tall, they built opulently, hiring the then avant-garde Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki, and installing elaborate new technologies: elegant new lighting systems and an elevator management program that ensured that there was always an open car waiting on the ground floor. The building acted as a prototype for Moriyama’s most famous achievement, the World Trade Center. The restaurant at the top, Detroit’s answer to Windows on the World, closed in 1974. It has never been replaced. The gas company moved out. Today, almost every floor of the building stands vacant.
Detroit Then and Now by Cheri Gay compiles a series of photographs to illustrate the change. The book in one way is a disappointment: it’s written in a tone of forced boosterism that requires the author to deny the reality of the collapse she’s chronicling. 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.
This mode of argument will convince nobody. But sustaining it does require the author to avert her glance from those sections of the city where the theme of evolution cannot possibly be sustained: the acres of abandoned houses, the vacant lots where commercial enterprises once stood.
But here is one thing that I do learn from the book: Detroit has never been protective of its past. In the prosperous early 1960s, it used federal urban renewal funds to pull down its grand Romanesque 19th century city hall. (Detroit wants to use today’s TARP money to repeat its vandalism, this time on the old train station.)
Detroit sacrificed a handsome row of pre-Civil War mansions built by then-leading citizens to allow the Detroit News to erect a bland new office and printing block. It has erased almost all traces of its pre-automobile past from the downtown, and only lack of demolition funds preserved its oldest surviving downtown neighborhood, now faintly recovering as a yuppie-gay historical enclave.
Not all the urban renewal schemes failed. I was dazzled by a Mies van der Rohe townhome project, a human-scale garden streetscape in the middle of the city, so lovely that you could almost forgive the grim adjoining Mies van der Rohe high-rise apartment projects.
More often, however, urban renewal was to Detroit what the RAF was to Dresden. One heart-rending contrast: the General Motors plant in Hamtramck, where acres of solid working-class housing were bulldozed – not to make way for the factory itself, which required relatively little space – but so that the factory could be surrounded by parking lots, grass and a wide moat of highway from the rest of the city. It makes a heart-rending contrast to the abandoned 1920s Packard factory I visited, where cottages had been built literally across the lane from the factory wall: literally 40 feet away.
What killed Detroit?
The collapse of the automobile industry seems the obvious answer. But is it a sufficient answer? The departure of meatpacking did not kill Chicago. Pittsburgh has staggered forward from the demise of steelmaking. New York has lost one industry after another: shipping, garment-manufacture, printing, and how many more?
Two other factors have to be considered.
The first is the especially and maybe uniquely poisonous quality of Detroit’s race relations. Like Chicago, Detroit attracted hundreds of thousands of black migrants between 1915 and 1960, mostly very unskilled, hoping to gain well-paying employment in factories and warehouses.
Their arrival jeopardized the ambitions of the white working class to raise its wages through unionization. Henry Ford eagerly hired black workers in order to defeat the unions, and in the violent labor clashes of the 1930s, whites and blacks often confronted each other as strikers and strikebreakers.
After the war, the United Autoworkers union tried to integrate blacks into the industrial workforce. But by then automation had begun, and industry’s demand for unskilled labor would first cease to grow, then diminish, then disappear. For many migrants, the promised land soon proved a mirage. Or maybe worse than a mirage. 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.
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 fresh grievances.
The second factor in Detroit’s decline is the city’s defiant rejection of education and the arts. Pittsburgh has Carnegie-Mellon. Cleveland has Case Western Reserve University. Chicago has the University of Chicago, Northwestern, and a campus of the University of Illinois. Detroit has… Wayne State.
A city that celebrated industrial culture spurned high culture. The Detroit Institute of Arts is very nice. But it does not begin to compare to Cleveland’s museum, let alone the Art Institute of Chicago. Detroit has a symphony orchestra, but its history has been troubled and unstoried in comparison to Philadelphia’s or Cleveland’s. On the plaza in front of the Detroit municipal building is a huge bronze replica of Joe Louis’ fist and arm, as if to say: “Here is a city ruled by brawn.” Brawn counts for very little in the modern world. The earnest redevelopers who hoped to renew Detroit by razing its history instead destroyed the raw materials out of which urban renaissance has come to so so many other American downtowns. A couple of days after I returned from Detroit, I telephoned a friend who had lived and worked in the city for many years. My friend, it’s relevant to mention, is the son of an Irish cop, ardently Catholic and defiantly conservative. Why did Chicago recover and Detroit fail, I asked. What doomed the city? He thought for a moment. “Not enough gays.”
Detroit confirms the lessons taught by Jane Jacobs and Russell Kirk. Preservation is as vital to urban health as renovation. Indeed, they are inseparable. The preservation of the old incubates the new.
It’s a lesson with application not only to Detroit’s past, but its future. The great factory complexes along the Detroit River have shuttered. America no longer manufactures here. Some will want to rip the factories down. Leave them be – leave them for now as monuments and memorials of the achievements of the past; leave them for the future, when somebody will want them. Want them for what? Who can say? Who in 1950 could ever have imagined London’s Docklands converted into condominums? Who would have guessed that New York’s emptied toolshops would provide some of the city’s most coveted office space? The 22nd century will put the artifacts of the 20th to equally unsurmisable uses, if only we permit it. Cities can molder for a century or more, and then reawaken to a new era that rediscovers something of value in the detritus of an earlier time. Brooklyn did. So did Miami Beach. Ditto Boston and Charleston – and even more spectacularly, Dublin and Prague. The promise of renaissance may yet come true, even for the ghost city of Detroit.
sinz54 // Aug 2, 2009 at 8:36 pm
David,
You’re right that race relations had a lot to do with white flight to the suburbs. But you left out the biggest cause of white flight: The political violence spawned by militant black separatists, and their indulgence by guilt-ridden white liberals.
In the 1960s, while Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. continued to emphasize peaceful civil disobedience, a new generation of black militants urged violence. Riots broke out in a number of cities. But nowhere was it worse than Detroit.
The Detroit race riot of 1967 may have been the worst riot of the 20th century up to that time. 40 were killed, 400 were injured, thousands of buildings were torched. Even the National Guard couldn’t cope–LBJ had to send in the regular U.S. Army.
Combined with forced school busing–another gimmick of white liberals–white folks said “Enough”–and fled to the suburbs, taking their businesses, their investments, and their wealth with them. At a rate of about 60,000 per year. By the 1970s, Detroit was majority black–mostly poor black. Later, Mayor Coleman Young would blame the 1967 riot specifically for the white flight that occurred from then on.
Those black militants didn’t believe in desegregration, but in black separatism. They got what they wanted. Detroit became a black city.
Tommy Boy // Aug 2, 2009 at 9:13 pm
The promise of renaissance can only come with state and city government getting out of the way. Small business is going to have to lead considering the unlikelihood of big business going anywhere near the city.
You are placing far too much on the availability of arts and education. The presence of business, shopping, and commerce is much more important than artwork or some school that won’t be a dramatic upgrade over Wayne State.
DailyInstigator // Aug 2, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Really? You’re saying this with a straight face? You think two of the major factors in the collapse of Detroit are bad race relations and the lack of cultural arts. That’s such an absurd suggestion it’s hard to even take it seriously. Race relations and cultural arts had absolutely nothing to do with Detroit’s downfall. The real answer is obvious. The unions got deals from the auto companies that were unsustainable. You cannot make profits when you’re paying people not work and giving employees insanely generous retirement plans. The unions killed Detroit.
Spartacus // Aug 2, 2009 at 11:04 pm
“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.”
Were the welfare programs in Detroit any more generous than those in Atlanta, Washington D.C. or any other major city? I think not. Was Detroit the only major city to suffer white flight? I think Atlanta, D.C., New York and other cities would disagree.
All major cities elected mayors who embraced “urban liberalism,” yet they’ve avoided Detroit’s fate.
Detroit is where it is today because it did not have a diverse economy. None of the other major cities in the U.S. were as dependent on a single industry as Detroit.
Race relations and cultural arts? Get serious.
KL7212 // Aug 2, 2009 at 11:39 pm
I strongly recommend the DetroitYES website and forums.
http://detroityes.com/0tourdetroit.htm#The_Fabulous_Ruins
The “Fabulous Ruins” tour is terrific.
Detroit was a city with a vibrant cultural life, undone, as Spartacus states, by its (over)reliance on one industry.
steelyblades // Aug 3, 2009 at 12:12 am
Thanks for this article, David. I really enjoyed it.
dragonlady // Aug 3, 2009 at 2:13 am
One word sums this up: UNIONS.
barker13 // Aug 3, 2009 at 7:11 am
“The book in one way is a disappointment: it’s written in a tone of forced boosterism that requires the author to deny the reality of the collapse she’s chronicling. 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.”
So here’s the question:
Does Frum suffer from a serious psychological malady or does he simply believe that without the shot he’d get less comments?
Well, all it did in my case is stop me from completing my read of the column. And the sad thing… I was enjoying it.
BILL
ottovbvs // Aug 3, 2009 at 9:20 am
dragonlady // Aug 3, 2009 at 2:13 am
“One word sums this up: UNIONS.’
……….Yes that would accord with your one dimensional view of the world………the reason’s for Detroit’s decline which dates from the sixties and has basically been taking place through every auto boom (and there have been several booms) and bust since then are a lot more complicated than “unions” but being conservative we can rely on you to go for the simplistic diagnosis
sinz54 // Aug 3, 2009 at 9:30 am
dragonlady sez: “One word sums this up: UNIONS.”
I’m old enough to remember the “white flight” from Detroit. Prior to the mid 1960s, Detroit had a vibrant white population, which ran most of the businesses and contributed most of the tax revenue.
The 1967 race riots were the last straw for Detroit’s white population. With their businesses torched and trashed, their families receiving death threats from lunatic black separatists, they just picked up and left, taking all their business acumen and wealth to the suburbs. In a rout. 60,000 per year, every year, starting right after the race riots ended.
These black separatists were totally insane. They said it was OK for black people to murder white people. They demanded that part of America be carved out and given to blacks as a separate nation.
There was nothing that Mayor Coleman Young could do to persuade Detroit’s white population to live in that kind of environment.
balconesfault // Aug 3, 2009 at 9:54 am
I think David’s position has a lot of merit here. In the new paper/digital economy, there’s a lot of trend towards companies moving jobs into inner cities, with a corresponding boom in downtown living spaces, restaurants, stores, etc – eventually even conventions and destination tourism. But it takes there being some sort of attractant to the downtown … and it seems that Detroit has cultivated none of that attraction. And the major university thing has serious merit to it – university communities serve as a hub to draw research investment, and to anchor a young workforce, which is a big factor for high tech companies looking for resources.
Then again, maybe there’s a karma at work here. The fruits of Detroit destroyed many urban cores over the last century, indiretly by making suburbia possible, and directly by such actions as the deliberate destruction of urban rail systems to eliminate competition for the car. It is a city that grew without a sense of the importance of the city, and many of the actions you describe just reflect that myopia.
Cforchange // Aug 3, 2009 at 11:03 am
David’s position does have merit. Pittsburgh would be Detroit if it didn’t have the academics which fueled the enormous hospital systems. This in turn fed the cultural district. Then the new ball parks and beautful riverfront development and a new convention center that will be hosting the G20 in a few weeks…. It all adds up to an appealing package that hopefully will attract the investor to revisit the city to put the middle class back to work.
There are pockets of Pittsburgh that are undeniably some of the most beautiful places in the US. It is standing monument to the mightly steel industry. Even the affordable housing stock for the middle class is extremely nice – brick & slate for most. I think no matter what perception one has of the union world, somehow in it’s day the steel industy and it’s way was quite good to everyone. Enough so that the well built foundations including the philantropic that were able to carry the city through some very dark times.
My comments should not be construed to infer that the mill life was not hard. While the job of laboring in the mill was difficult, it was plentiful. It also set an standard of quality that transcended into the building of residential housing, parks and public places, bridges – even retaining walls. WPA projects remain astounding. Not that this isn’t the case elsewhere – but most of Pittsburgh was developed in this era or before and it flawlessly endures just waiting to be fully used once again.
sricher // Aug 3, 2009 at 1:14 pm
This is why I’ve never understood the hostility so many cities have shown toward the universities they play host too…
When I was New Orleans, I felt like most of the town hated Tulane because it represented everything that the city wasn’t–rich, educated, and fairly well-managed. Some for when I went to University of Chicago, and I would imagine similar stories could be told of schools like Yale, or as David cites in his piece, Carnegie Mellon and Case Western.
Yet these schools are so beneficial to the surrounding city in so many ways…
DFL // Aug 3, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Very good essay by Mr. Frum. However, a community is only as good as its people. Much of the decline of Detroit can be laid at the feet of a dysfunctional populace. Material decline goes hand in hand with moral decline.
dragonlady // Aug 3, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Sinz, I’m not dismissing the impact of white flight on Detroit as one of the major causes of the downfall of the city. I have family and friends who grew up in Detroit and Flint. There was (and still is) a fairly sizeable number of blacks who worked in the auto industry in Detroit and its outlying areas. It’s why many blacks emigrated in the first place to Detroit: for jobs. So while unions did eventually help end discrimination against blacks and protested white worker strikes, their sense of entitlement of what big business owed them grew to outlandish proportions. With the poisonous race relations and slow strangulation of the Big 3 by the unions, jobs hemorrhaged. The decline of the auto sector has hit middle class blacks the hardest: http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2009-01-20-blacks-auto-industry-dealers_N.htm
It’s not only the auto unions–Detroit’s teacher unions still refuse to allow charter schools to compete with the inner city schools. Even the liberals recognize this:
http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,526339,00.html
JohnMcC // Aug 3, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Detroit somehow managed to survive a horrible race riot in 1943 that left 34 dead and required federal troops to restore order. Something other than the ‘67 riots did the city in. A dependence on individualism and a lack of civil sensibility? Nah….not in America!
Washington Planner » Required Reading 8/4/09 // Aug 4, 2009 at 10:54 am
[...] How to kill a city like Detroit, by David Frum. [...]
sinz54 // Aug 4, 2009 at 1:08 pm
johnmcc: The big difference between the race riot of 1934 and the race riot of 1967 was that in the race riot of 1934, the white folks gave as good as they got. There were black mobs beating up white folks, but there were also white mobs beating up black folks, and white mobs warring with black mobs. Plus, the cops sided with the white folks, and brutally suppressed the black mobs but not so much the white mobs.
Whereas in 1967, white folks felt entirely like victims; THEY had been peaceful, BUT black rioters attacked innocent white folks without cause, and were openly advocating the murder of white folks just for being white.
DFL // Aug 4, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Detroit might be a good place to construct nuclear power plants. There are plenty of shuttered factories and abandoned neighborhoods to make the space.
sinz54 // Aug 4, 2009 at 1:15 pm
dragonlady sez: “So while unions did eventually help end discrimination…, their sense of entitlement of what big business owed them grew to outlandish proportions.”
But the auto makers’ negotiators didn’t fight the unions’ demands, because the auto companies were sure that they would always make big profits and strong growth, and could afford to be generous with their workers. And for 25 years, that was true. So true, that liberal economists like Galbraith claimed that the auto companies were now immune to competition and needed to be restrained by wage and price controls.
Then came the invasion of Japanese automobiles in the 1970s. And the rest is history.
The Detroit auto makers have NEVER shown any foresight on anything that would require them to change. The fact that they failed to see a day when they could no longer afford to pay the workers’ pension and health benefits, is just a part of that.
KL7212 // Aug 4, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Good point, Sinz54.
In the year of my birth, 1972, GM alone controlled more than 50% of the domestic auto market in the United States. The Big 3 didn’t fight the unions because they didn’t have to–the pie was big enough that everybody got a nice, healthy slice.
But UAW wasn’t entirely (or even mostly) responsible for the lack of effective quality control procedures which were a staple of Japanese automakers like Honda and Toyota from their inception.
The unions didn’t continue to push unreliable, gas guzzling clunkers long after oil prices spiked in the early 70’s and the American public came to prefer smaller, more fuel efficient cars. They didn’t continue to design and build vehicles based on outdated platforms with outmoded technology.
Conservatives, who should be mindful of history, should also remember that industrial unions weren’t born in a vacuum. They were formed because American business leaders, in typically shortsighted fashion, weren’t willing to throw a few extra pennies to the workers who labored in dirty and often dangerous conditions to provide them their enormous wealth.