Detroit Is No Dry Bones - The Eternal City of the Industrial Age

DETROIT IS NO DRY BONES THE ETERNAL CITY OF THE INDUSTRIAL AGE Camilo José Vergara, 2014

UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA

Detroit, once the heart of industrial USA, is now its greatest ruin, with at least 70,000 vacant buildings, less than 40 percent of its peak population, and the highest homicide rate among large American cities. Thirty-eight percent of local residents live below the poverty line. The city’s unemployment rate is more than two and half times the national average. With $18 billion in debt and underfunded obligations, Detroit is in the middle of the largest bankruptcy proceedings of any American city.

The crisis has not stopped Dan Gilbert, the Quicken Loans billionaire, from putting up signs in the city center that read “Opportunity Detroit.” Surprisingly, despite financial default, poverty, and massive population loss, thousands of young, enterprising, educated people are moving to Detroit. These Internet-savvy pioneers believe that their hard work and creativity will bring them prosperity and perhaps fame while reviving the city. Their growing activity in Detroit’s center re-creates lifestyles similar to those found in gentrified Brooklyn, complete with fine restaurants offering a large variety of cuisines and an entertainment center with theaters and an opera house — all this on newly safe, clean streets.

Detroit is being shaped by investors, artists, and entrepreneurs from as far away as China and Peru, but also by its overwhelming majority of poor residents living in desolate neighborhoods untouched by development. An evolving urban utopia of idealistic young people, following their dreams, co-exists with the grim reality of thousands of families having their water shut off for non-payment, losing their homes to foreclosures, and becoming victims of violent crimes.

Downtown Detroit, 1991, View from Sibley Street down Park Avenue

AMERICAN ACROPOLIS: THE END OF AN IDEA

“I propose that as a tonic for our imagination as a call for renewal, as a place within our national memory, a dozen city blocks of pre-Depression skyscrapers be stabilized and left standing as ruins: an American Acropolis. We could transform the nearly 100 troubled buildings into a grand national historic park of play and wonder.”

— Camilo José Vergara, The New York Times, Dec. 10, 1995

Until two decades ago, an area of three blocks surrounding Grand Circus Park, once the city’s business and retail center, contained the world’s largest concentration of abandoned skyscrapers. Built mostly before the Great Depression, these grand buildings were prosperous until the mid-1950s, when they fell out of fashion, deteriorated, and were left to the elements. The sheer number and size of these abandoned structures, rising within a near-lifeless environment, turned Detroit’s old downtown into a surreal place.

In the early 1990s these behemoths, once symbols of progress and ambition, became the dregs of history, enormous shadows lined up along deep canyons.

Their awesome presence convinced me that the area around Grand Circus Park should be preserved as an American Acropolis, a ruined skyscraper park.

Anchoring the unique ruined-skyscraper park I envisioned was the massive Hudson’s department store, occupying an entire city block, the second-largest such store in the nation, a massive, misshapen fortress that had grown through a series of asymmetrical additions. Hudson’s was imploded in 1998 as Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer proclaimed, “Let the Future Begin.”

Among the other ruined skyscrapers was the Book-Cadillac, a hotel that once rivaled New York’s Waldorf Astoria in elegance. It has been rebuilt as a business hotel, part of the Westin chain. The Statler-Hilton Hotel, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt stayed, was demolished in 2005 to make downtown attractive for the 2006 Super Bowl. Among the last remaining abandoned skyscrapers is the gritty Book Tower, its green roof favored by peregrine falcons for nesting and by cellphone companies for their antennas.

Urban explorers willing to visit the ruined skyscrapers could search the perimeter for an entrance, sometimes a plywood-covered hole in the wall. Climbing over piles of trash leading to dark rooms, they would have to find an unblocked set of stairs to climb to the roof. Ascending the stairs, they would be put on guard by the masses of debris, pigeons flying overhead, water dripping from the ceiling, and by the expectation of dangerous encounters. The many mattresses, sleeping bags, and the occasional appearance of homeless men revealed these vacant structures to be unofficial shelters.

Left with most of their contents intact, the vacant buildings were time capsules of the Motown of half a century ago, storehouses of people’s dental and medical histories, divorce papers, tax forms, and real-estate investments. Inside were beauty salons decorated with pictures of popular hair styles, and travel agencies with fading posters of warmer destinations. One could peek into a dozen dentists’ offices with their drills, dental chairs, and file cabinets still there, covered with plaster.

The office of Jessie Willie, the elderly caretaker at the David Broderick Tower, was decorated with objects that former tenants had left behind, including an idyllic picture of Portofino.

From the roofs of the skyscrapers one could see a great city spreading far to the north with the wide radial avenues meeting the horizon, the slow Detroit River to the south, and the Ambassador Bridge to Canada to the west. I often tagged along with Peter Zeiler, a planner who worked for the Downtown Development Authority and had access to the vacant buildings. Peter carried a machete to cut down trees growing on the roofs, believing that vegetation would discourage investors. I, on the other hand, hoped for nature to take over, creating many secret gardens. Green moss would spread, frogs would populate the pools of accumulated water, and the graceful alder trees and cell-phone antennas would become a thick forest. Surely, owls, terns, and geese would follow. On summer nights, the skies would fill with bats and swallows.

On the ground, nine vintage trams imported from Portugal and Switzerland, part of a national bicentennial project in 1976, contributed to the ghost-town atmosphere.

Until 2003, the tinkling of the trams’ bells filled the air as they moved from their station on Washington Boulevard toward the Renaissance Center and back. The vehicles were colorful, mostly empty, and charming; they bore the names of exotic cities such as Lisbon, Montreux and Vevey. Adding to the atmosphere was the screeching People Mover, a clean, well-lit monorail that circled the ruins. The little train still travels. It is mostly empty at night, throwing light at the dark hulks as it glides by. The sides of the cars carry advertisements, such as the one in 2009 with the Pepsi symbol followed by the word OPTIMISMMMMMMMMMMMM in giant letters against a pink background.

Late in the last century, downtown Detroit became a sports and gambling center with new stadiums and casinos. Suburban families discovered that the city could be a fun place to watch games, throw tailgate parties, attend conventions, and enjoy the theater. Although Detroit’s population is 83 percent African-American, on game days the downtown population is predominantly white.

It was once common to hear members of the African-American elite complain that whites had drained capital out of the city, leaving behind derelict buildings and expecting the city administration to maintain them. They asked, “If people in the suburbs liked these buildings so much, why didn’t they take them with them?”

Sandra Hines, a community activist, called Hudson’s a “significant and magical

Jesse Willie standing on the roof of the David Broderick Tower, Grand Circus Park at Woodward Avenue, 1995. At the time, Jessie was the skyscraper’s only caretaker.

store,” adding that blacks, though, “unless they were very light skinned, could not aspire to become a doorman or elevator operator; it wasn’t for us.” Arthur Johnson, a Wayne State University vice president, told me that he felt no love for the robust buildings of Detroit that had excluded him in his youth.

Nowadays, Detroit’s downtown blight has greatly diminished. People’s Outfitters, a once-celebrated, then abandoned Albert Kahn building, has been replaced by a multilevel parking garage. The site of the Statler-Hilton is a vacant lot, and Hudson’s footprint is a field of concrete above an underground parking garage. The Metropolitan, United Artists, Book, and Wurlitzer buildings and many other empty storefronts still, however, remind us of the abandonment that was once the norm. Several survivors have been rehabilitated and made into apartment buildings by members of a new generation who appreciated their craftsmanship and design. The Compuware Building, now also the headquarters of Quicken Loans, together with the Ernst &Young Building, represent something different — modern, glitzy high-rises.

Allowing the old downtown to safely fall into further ruin would have been expensive. Unlike ancient ruins that were built brick upon brick or stone upon stone and can last for thousands of years, modern ruins used steel armatures that can rust, and water infiltration corrodes the clips that hold the cladding. When water gets in between the cladding and frame and freezes, the resulting expansion loosens the coverings and they fall. To stabilize the buildings so they could continue to safely decay, without fragments falling on passersby, would have required frequent inspections and maintenance.

I was one of the few who loved the derelict skyscrapers, a sentiment characterized as that of an outsider and an aesthete. Local critics saw no beauty in ruins, equating them with death. Preserving the core of the old downtown as an acropolis was reducing Detroit to a hopeless reminder of the great city that it once was, critics said, even though my proposal for a ruins park occupied far less than 1 percent of the city’s surface. Wayne State University planner Gary Sands wrote, in an April 13, 1997 opinion piece in the Detroit News: “The very concept that this city should have produced a ‘magnificent ruin’ that others would come to marvel at is considered to be an embarrassment to city residents. After all, Detroit prides itself on producing things that are useful and stylish, not things that are abandoned and decaying.”

It took more than a decade for the beauty of Detroit’s ruins to be widely acknowledged, first in Europe and later, begrudgingly, as “ruin porn” in the United States.

But by then the possibility of a ruins park had been reduced by demolition and rebuilding, and in the process the city lost much of its mystery and strangeness.

GETTING TO KNOW DETROIT

Every year, starting a quarter-century ago, I have spent at least a week in Detroit.

Upon my return to New York, I spend at least two weeks captioning and organizing

Tireman Street at Hazlett Street (Spot-Lite Market), 2014

the images, researching issues that come up from studying the images and conducting telephone interviews.

During my visits to the city, I stayed downtown on Bagley Avenue at The Michigan Building, one of the city’s landmarks. In 1896, Henry Ford built his first automobile, the “quadricycle,” in a small garage at the site. The former Michigan Theatre, built inside it in 1926, was turned into an equally famous parking garage in the late 1970s.

From Bagley Avenue I would travel as far as the city limits along such commercial thoroughfares as Fort Street, Michigan Avenue, Grand River Avenue, Woodward Avenue, Jefferson Avenue and Gratiot Avenue. To survey the city’s downtown, I either walked or used the People Mover.

My yearly visits, which continue, have included more than 500 miles of driving through streets and alleys, surveying the entire city at a cruising speed of 12 miles per hour. Driving along the main commercial and residential streets, I visit the city’s landmarks, parks, and cemeteries, taking numerous detours into residential streets and alleys. I explore interiors of abandoned buildings and photograph panoramas from their rooftops.

By returning to the same locations, photographing the same views, and interviewing the same people, I hope to let Detroit tell its own developing story. I am especially interested in the city’s most decayed corners, filled with buildings beyond rehabilitation, as reported by the Detroit Free Press’s 1989 “Survey of Vacant and Abandoned Property.” The key intersections include Livernois at Fenkell, Livernois at Fullerton, Joy Road at Grand River, Lillibridge at East Jefferson, Mack at Chalmers, Mack at McClellan, and Harper at Van Dyke. I want to discover what happens to the most desolate corners of urban America, what new activities and uses emerge, and get glimpses of the city’s future.

Since 2010, I have also been helped in my quest through an uninterrupted dialogue about the city with Tim Samuelson, cultural historian of Chicago. Tim and I often interview people together and compare impressions. When curious about a building, a sign, or anything that has caught my attention, I ask for his interpretation. When I cannot adequately express an idea, Tim can usually complete the thought.

GAME CHANGERS

The leaders of the revival of this largely African-American city are all Caucasians, including three billionaires; Rip Rapson, a philanthropist; and a handful of high-profile young entrepreneurs united in the altruistic belief that they can rebuild the city. They regard doing business In Detroit as an opportunity to become wealthier and more renowned in the service of good.

“Anything can be created in Detroit,” claims Dan Gilbert, the Quicken Loans tycoon.

Gilbert, a relative latecomer, presides over the transformation of downtown where his company owns 9 million square feet of property, and he continues to expand. At his headquarters stands a model of the center city in which the 60 buildings he owns have orange tops that light up. In 2014, Brent Ryan of MIT explained that Gilbert’s plan “amounts to one of the most ambitious privately financed urban reclamation projects in American history.”

Through his umbrella company, Rock Ventures, Gilbert has an armed security force working around the clock as well as 300 video cameras linked to a control center that monitors people’s every move. Aggressive panhandlers, muggers, and “outlaw” graffiti artists have disappeared. But the sense of “anything is possible” that once gave downtown its appeal has also gone. According to Gilbert, once the derelict structures are cleared, the city will have open land and, more important, “hope and optimism.” He has declared blight to be a cancer. Since 2013, his struggle against blight has extended to the entire 138.75 square miles of the city and to the 78,000 buildings in need of demolition.

Little Caesars Pizza founder and owner Mike Ilitch and his wife, Marian, control the Detroit Tigers, The Detroit Red Wings, and the MotorCity Casino Hotel. The two are planning to build a $650-million Red Wings stadium and entertainment/residential district north of downtown in a desolate area of the Cass Corridor. The elegant ruins of former hotels and apartment buildings along Temple Street will be demolished.

Away from the business center, standing in isolation, is the former Michigan Central Station. It is America’s most famous ruin, owned by Matty Moroun, who also owns the Ambassador Bridge to Canada. The station’s monumental lobby was inspired by the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. In 2014, the old depot will be fitted with a new elevator and a few new windows; a new, huge American flag flies where an earlier one previously stood; and rose bushes were planted in front. But it still lacks a mission.

Corktown, a former Irish neighborhood regarded as a safe area, is well- known as a meeting place for hipsters and the college crowd. They patronize Slows Bar BQ (begun by Phil Cooley), St. Cece’s Pub, and Astro Coffee. Bakeries, coffee shops, refurbished buildings, murals, music and startups, as well as the people who make them possible, are often celebrated for making a difference. Yet the segregated character of the city becomes evident to visitors looking at the online images of the mostly white patrons posted by these trendy spots.

In forums discussing Detroit, Kresge Foundation President Rip Rapson is one of the most visible presences. Rapson proudly told the Chronicle of Philanthropy in 2013 that philanthropic ventures designed to revive a city “have never been attempted at the scale it’s being attempted in Detroit. Without being grandiose about it, there’s nothing even close.”

Former Michigan Central Railroad Station, 2013

Phil Cooley is a media favorite. A former fashion model, he is now a successful Detroit restaurant owner and businessman sometimes referred to as “the prince of the city.” Cooley has become living proof that taking risks investing in the city can get you respect, celebrity, and prosperity.

Locally famous, but not among those struggling to bring new life to the city, is Joumana Kayrouz, a personal-injury attorney ready to come to the defense of desperate people. On billboards and buses throughout Detroit, huge portraits of the formidable Kayrouz, arms crossed, are placed next to the question, “Injured?” In some of the advertisements she asks, “Auto Accident? Truck Accident? Motorcycle Accident?” In others, she offers people a chance to get some money, promising “settlement for your pain and suffering.”

Urban gardeners are a different breed. While the artists, entrepreneurs, and business people wind up behind the stockades in safe places, gardeners need to go where devastation has been total, where white people don’t normally go, and where open land is available. Theirs is an idealistic mission; they work in what is left of neighborhoods with local residents to grow food and to fraternize. People working in gardens are a mix of minorities who live in the community and whites who volunteer their time. Unlike billionaires, young entrepreneurs, and personal-injury attorneys, urban gardeners do not become celebrities.

Through neglect and disinvestment, Detroit became a city of unique environments that are “blighted,” “edgy,” “picturesque,” and “free.” What would give identity and character to a Detroit that makes few cars and lacks grandiose ruins and desolate landscapes? A new city of sidewalk cafés, bars, casinos, sport stadiums, and local celebrities in a fortified downtown, and large urban farms in the ghetto would not capture the world’s imagination.

YOU GOT TO HAVE FAITH: VOICES OF THE PEOPLE

Detroit has a strong sense of racial identity because of its predominantly AfricanAmerican neighborhoods, and because of the unique urbanism that developed after many decades of segregation. Throughout black Detroit, one encounters arresting expressions of cultural values as well as extraordinary ruins of factories, health facilities, churches, and houses.

Edwin, an usher at Rhema International Church on Mack Avenue, told me: “Anything that is deteriorating would be considered the ghetto. Any place where the white man has moved out, they consider the ghetto. … People with no hope for jobs, better schools, and services often have faith that Jesus will help and that they will be saved.”

On Sundays, preaching and singing are part of the sound of Detroit. Mega-churches are being built, and storefront churches are often the last standing buildings on a block.

Mural, Goethe Building, McClellan at Goethe Street, 2014

Among the voices of the people of Detroit are pervasive folk images and signs, such as hot soul food on a plate depicted on restaurant walls, paintings of classic automobiles flying among the clouds on car washes, symbols of Christianity on storefront churches, and scenes from black history on the walls of party stores and drug-treatment centers. Then there are memorials to the dead, on walls and in small displays attached to fences and lampposts near the places they died. Christ is almost always depicted as black. The Renaissance Center, home to the city’s tallest building, the Detroit Marriott, is the most frequent image on neighborhood walls. And pictures of President Barack Obama remain popular even though the quality of life in most of the city has deteriorated during his tenure. Placing trust in a stronger leader, a graffiti sign on East Forest Avenue reads: “Obama for America, God for Detroit.”

Creativity does not abandon declining neighborhoods. It can be seen in the work of the anonymous sign painters and those who turn ordinary buildings into storefront churches. But these do not raise real-estate values or make Detroit more like the rest of urban America. They are generally excluded from the city’s narrative.

The purpose of many handmade graphics is to sell products and services locally.

The patrons are ministers, owners of convenience stores, car washes, and “coney island” fast-food restaurants, as well as those who manage educational institutions and need striking images to indicate that they are still operating.

Examples of folk murals include a large Afrocentric mural of Detroit in its heyday on the walls of East Side Check Cashing on East McNichols Road. At top center appears a gigantic portrait of former Mayor Coleman Young, smiling benevolently over the city. Barely visible at left, Henry Ford is shown driving a Model T. On East Warren Avenue I came across a memorial to Marty, the work of Steven, a local muralist and T-shirt designer who signs his work “Scribbles.” Steven tells me that he has been painting since childhood, and that he “works for the public,” meaning for the local residents. He aspires to be more, but like other amateur artists in his situation, he does not know about such resources as foundation grants or how to show his work in galleries.

At Little Learners Academy, a daycare center on Livernois, a row of statues of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves stand by the fence. Their skin is painted brown, which makes them form part of an Afrocentric narrative. When I asked one of the teachers if the painting of the statues had racial connotations, she said no. She added that children at the Academy, all of them black, know the names of the dwarves, who “remind them of chocolate.” At Burns Day Care on West McNichols Road, Snow White was also painted brown, but the dwarves were left white. In a similar vein were decks of cards featuring black royalty, made by The Blacks Factor Inc. in Detroit.

A burned apartment building from 1924 at the intersection of McClellan and Goethe was decorated with religious images designed by Kat, who lives across the street.

Barry, the postman, explained: “The neighborhood is being blessed. The area is so bad that they could use a blessing. Not so much an eyesore anymore, the Goethe Building is about faith; you got to have faith.” Detroit’s successful businesses are mostly in safe and reassuring areas. It is unlikely that the “blessed” Goethe Building would ever host a trendy bakery with outdoor seating, because the locals could not afford the prices and visitors would feel uncomfortable and unsafe.

Why is it important to know about the precarious restoration of a humble house at 3497 Mack Ave.? Once the roof burned, it didn’t make much sense to fix it, yet it got partially fixed anyway. The tree in the front yard was half burned, yet half alive.

Juanita Davis, a neighbor who called it “that Moose Tree,” told me that someone offered to buy it. The Moose Tree still makes the property stand out, even though it recently fell over and died. The remaining buildings on the block belong to an extended family, one of whose members wants to buy the house and start working on it again.

At night, 24-hour fast-food places called “coney islands,” owned mostly by Greek and Albanian families, resemble the painting Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. With the customers visible behind the glass, these eateries seem like oases of life, unlike the silhouetted bunker-like buildings with their small barred windows, metal doors, and concertina wire running along the roof.

Detroit abounds with a kind of fantasy architecture that is nevertheless practical, clean, well-lit, safe, comfortable, and usually in good repair. Brightly colored Dryvit cladding, a pliable and inexpensive material with a sculptural quality, allows builders to create arches, cantilever roofs, and to shape building contours into ornamental forms. New and refurbished fast-food franchises, gentlemen’s clubs, churches, and convenience stores dressed up in foam with a shell surface are covered with strange, exaggerated shapes that stand out. Outside, large planes of color and flashing screens designed to catch the eye attract drivers to the businesses they house.

I was able to photograph some businesses in their last gasp, just before they were abandoned. At 4 in the morning in 2013 I saw a golden light falling on the sugar and salt shakers set up on the counter of Ellynns Soul Food on Livernois Avenue. A year later, the light was extinguished and the building boarded up. In 2012, the Metropole Barbershop, a piece of Americana, was a bright spot along East Bethune Street.

But in 2014, one brick wall collapsed, allowing rain to enter, and now, with its overgrown front yard, the barbershop is forgotten.

White Grove, a classic diner that served greasy hamburgers, soup, meatloaf, and pies, closed in 2014. Standing all by itself on an empty block of Second Avenue, it was a charming little island serving a clientele made up of local homeless people.

Behind the counter were Helen and Bob, two elderly white wait staff barely able to

Hollywood Coney Island, Gratiot Avenue at Harper Avenue, 2013

stand. Above the counter they had hung portraits of youthful suburban families and of Venerable Solanus Casey, a Detroit Capuchin friar and a candidate for beatification. For those who worked at White Grove, the diner was their whole life.

Among other forgotten businesses are factories that once meant jobs, prosperity, and stability, giving identity to places. As ruins, they attract crime. People might be able to control their own house, or their block, but they cannot control a formidable presence like the remains of Federal Mogul #1 on the east side. Enough time has passed so that locals no longer remember what was made there, and they shun it as an eyesore, but they keep an eye on the place. I gathered these comments from local residents of Fairview Street, a block west from the former plant: “I don’t know what that factory used to be because I am too young. I am only 25.” Also, “I see they’re getting ready to do something; they’re putting up new gates,” and “I’m new around here.” Upon seeing me photographing from the roof of a car, a driver stopped to tell me that the tall smokestacks were once part of an FBI incinerator.

Will the ruined churches be resurrected? Observing the intact outlines of the former Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church lit by the full moon, I imagined the pride of the congregation that erected the landmark a century ago.

Neon signs also attract my attention. Some are rusty, hanging precariously from their supports. The sign advertising Nat Margolies furniture store on Van Dyke Avenue has disappeared, and I wonder if it simply fell off, or whether the city sent someone to clip it down. As I photographed the extinguished sign for the long-gone Spot-Light Market on Tireman Avenue, a man told me that the neighborhood suffered from not having a food market.

As I photograph Detroit at night, I ask myself whether the man silhouetted in front of a Marathon gas station on Gratiot Avenue is panhandling or waiting for somebody to rob. On the horizon beyond abandoned buildings, a narrow sliver of pink announces the dawn, and I muse about how the sunrise along the street makes this menacing urban scene feel as if it’s out of this world.

I JUST WANT TO DREAM

Trained artists seek recognition in Detroit; they regard the city as an enormous canvas closely monitored by the media. Street artists, muralists, installation artists, and sculptors from as far away as Texas, California, New Zealand, and The Netherlands are leaving their mark. With a powerful online presence, they are a different breed from grass-roots artists like Scribbles. They appear in videos walking alone at night along railroad tracks, abandoned factories, and bridges. Some make dangerous climbs to paint billboards next to freeways. Their work can be seen along major avenues near downtown, on urban ruins, in galleries and museums, and, most often, online.

Remains of Tyree Guyton’s Party Animal House after 2014 Fire, 2014

Taggers dialogue with Detroit as they spray-paint throughout the city. I first encountered the tag “It Don’t Exist” as I drove along Michigan Avenue in 2008. I imagined it expressed incredulity at the city’s strangeness. The tag, ubiquitous throughout the southwest part of the city, was chosen “The Best New Tag” by the weekly Metro Times in 2007. Another tag consists of a reversed Detroit Red Wings symbol with female breasts replacing the wheel, a commentary on the practice of female fans baring their breasts during the games. The cut-out, stenciled yellow snake once shown crawling out of a hole on the wall of The Museum of Contemporary Art, and in other places throughout Detroit, stood for the city’s decay.

Tyree Guyton, a trained artist born on Heidelberg Street, is the creator of The Heidelberg Project, an open-air art environment. Almost three decades ago, he began covering the exterior of abandoned houses in his neighborhood with ordinary objects he collected throughout the city. Among them were children’s toys, streetname signs, clocks, kitchen chairs, sofas, stuffed animals, shoes, and car parts.

He also displayed these objects on derelict vehicles and shopping carts, and hung them on trees or arranged them in vacant lots. In Detroit, Guyton’s work stands alone in its ingenuity, scope, and resilience. His folk celebration of Motown has a joyful strain in the colorful objects selected and the manner in which he gives these things prominence and dignity. Using mannequins, dolls, shoes, flags, and the ubiquitous word “God,” Guyton’s work also speaks about absence, memory, and the indifferent higher powers that allow so much waste and suffering.

In addition to Guyton’s work in his neighborhood, he painted polka dots on thousands of abandoned buildings throughout Detroit, thus becoming the unofficial certifier of ruins. Officials disliked his work because it drew attention to decay and taught viewers who had grown used to dereliction to take a fresh look at their surroundings. Bulldozers demolished his most important houses in 1991 and 1999. He lost additional houses to arson in 2013 and 2014. When his “Party Animal House” was torched in 2014, Guyton used the brick base left behind as a platform to display an art piece consisting of a dining-room set with stuffed animals sitting on the chairs. “I want to be part of the great comeback of the city of Detroit,” he said.

OPPORTUNITY DETROIT AND THE PERMANENT GHETTO

When I asked him to define the ghetto, Pastor Kennard Pettaway, of Wings As Eagles Church told me: “It just happens that I am in an area called the ghetto, a poor, impoverished area of torn-down houses, trash in the streets, people standing out on the corners in front of liquor stores, where prostitution is high because women prostitute themselves to buy drugs. If you see some Caucasians down here, it’s because they got hooked on drugs, and drugs are readily available here.”

The billionaires, the philanthropists, and the young entrepreneurs are not visibly contributing to improving life in the ghetto. Creativity and hard work in greater downtown is not fostering racial harmony; on the contrary, it seems to reinforce

View East along Temple Street from Cass Avenue, 2013

Highland Park State Bank, 16549 Woodward Avenue, 1993. 2002, 2009.

existing patterns of segregation and of pushing blacks to the background. Accounts of interesting and well- designed outdoor cafés, bakeries, and micro-breweries in the greater downtown can easily be matched by depressing news from the neighborhoods. Urban gardeners do provide nutrition and advice, but they cannot bring prosperity, security and jobs to the neighborhoods.

Amid the rawness of Detroit, billionaires and suburban hipsters have found a unique, safe place to achieve and increase their fame and fortune. The world media flock to the city to show capitalism working under the most difficult circumstances. But, unable to develop stories of their own on tight budgets and a short timetable, they construct shallow narratives from what is fed to them by public-relations people.

Press releases and suggestions to the media do not include developments in storefront churches or mention the crazy forms of coney islands lit up at night, or the porno industry boom, or threatening gas stations. And when a voice from the neighborhoods is needed, that voice will be most likely recommended by a city official or a foundation executive. An example of this is Phil Cooley’s “Welcome-to-Detroit, it’s-more-than-just-grit” tour that he gives to celebrities and VIPs, as described by Melena Ryzik of The New York Times in 2010.

There is a growing belief that Detroit will make a comeback, but as a different city.

Perhaps the conditions necessary to make a revival possible will depend much less on the southeast Michigan region as in the past. If the media continues to define Detroit as a fascinating place that survives amid adversity, attracts creativity, and is filled with neighborhoods where people can live interesting lives, the tales coming from the reclaimed city will be inspirational sagas about hard working, enterprising young people building their dreams. And ghetto stories will be about intractable places, sources of tales both horrific and heroic. The best and the worst forms of urbanity will co-exist in the city.

Does it have to be this way?

Camilo José Vergara is a photographer-ethnographer who uses time-lapse images to chronicle the transformation of urban landscapes across America. Trained as a sociologist, he reaches into the disciplines of architecture, photography, urban planning, history, and anthropology for tools to present the gradual erosion of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century architectural grandeur in urban neighborhoods, their subsequent neglect and abandonment, and scattered efforts at gentrification. Repeatedly photographing, sometimes over the course of decades, the same structures and neighborhoods, Vergara records both large-scale and subtle changes in the visual landscape of cities and inner cities in the United States. Over the years, he has amassed a rich archive of several thousand photographs that are a rare and important cache of American history. These images, monuments to the survival and reformation of American cities, are a unique visual study; they also inform the process of city planning by highlighting the constant remodeling of urban space. This essay was written to accompany the exhibition, “Detroit is No Dry Bones: The Eternal City of the Industrial Age,” on view at the Liberty Gallery of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, December 4, 2014 – January 11, 2015. www.camilojosevergara.com

taubmancollege.umich.edu