Why Detroit
I had a brief romance with a girl from Westchester, New York, in the summer of 2014. She was sweet, dark hair, quirky, and we had fun together. At the end of the summer, she was going to start graduate school in Indiana.
“What are you going to do after Indiana?” I asked her one night.
“I might move to Detroit.”
“Detroit?”
I had never heard Detroit used in that context, as a destination for someone my age to live. New York City, Boston, Washington D.C., San Francisco, that’s where people moved. Detroit, though? Detroit, to me, was synonymous with wasteland — danger, not a place to inhabit.
That memory stuck with me, though, especially as the area around me in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, changed even more — as I watched vacant buildings turn into organic creameries and high-priced coffee shops. I heard that the same activities were happening in Detroit. And sure enough, over the next year I began to hear more and more about the motor city becoming a hub for young people — an inexpensive destination for broke millenials and artists. I joked around with friends: what if we moved to Detroit, and re-started our lives there, found jobs, bought houses. I was joking, though, and my friends, too, had similar responses that I had had originally, like “you’re not being serious,” and “that sounds like the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
When I toured Europe this summer, I met a guy in Belgium, and we connected over a steak tartar dinner one night. He was a 33-year old from Oakland, California, long hair, traveling through Europe like myself. His voice was raspy —but it made him seem wise, as if he had life-changing experiences that manifested themselves in his haggard vocal chords.
He told me that he was planning on moving to Detroit as soon as he returned from Europe. He was going to buy a house and open a BBQ restaurant. With the changing landscape of Detroit, he figured his business was going to be successful. Once it was, he was going to open a second restaurant in Pittsburgh, where he was from.
He spoke about Detroit as if it was the Gold Rush. The city had hit rock bottom and was on its way up, and this was the time to invest. The streets were lined with gold. The American Dream Is Happening Right Now, and it’s Happening in Detroit. I bought into it.
When I returned home a week ago, I decided to investigate more into this Detroit cultural phenomenon. I’m writing this from a coffee shop you might find in Williamsburg, but I’m in Corktown, Detroit, a — yes, let’s just use the word — gentrifying part of Detroit, where millenials are supposedly flocking.
I think it’s still a long shot that I move here permanently — but while I’m here, I’m committed to uncovering the rich history of the city and why, all of the sudden, it’s primed for a comeback.
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Brief One Minute History of Detroit (as researched on Wikipedia)
Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States. In 1930, the population was 1.5 million, by 1960, it was close to 2 million. The automobile industry created a bustling city, and people came far and wide with the prospect of making decent wages without having any prior professional experience. (Side note: as of 2015, the population of Detroit is 688,000.)
It was easy for workers, especially immigrants, many with no education or practical experience in the workforce, to make a stable income. The assembly line became a staple of the automobile industry and jobs were plentiful. In 1914, Henry Ford implemented the $5 a day a wage, which doubled many employee’s salaries at the time.
However, by the 1950s, Detroit seemed poised for decline. Automobile industries began to relocate to destinations more conducive to automation; jobs were being cut left and right. There was intensifying competition abroad, where countries such as Germany became giant exporters of automobiles.
Although the decline started in the 1950s, 1967 is seen by some as the turning point in the course of Detroit. On July 23rd, 1967, police — white police — arrested 82 black citizens who were gathered in an unlicensed bar in Detroit. Instead of attempting to disperse the group of citizens, they attempted to arrest all of them. In minutes, there was an intense uproar, and the next five days saw Lyndon B. Johnson deploy troops to quell a riot which would come to shake Detroit.
When the dust settled, 43 people were dead, 1,189 people were injured, and 2000 buildings destroyed. 2000 buildings destroyed. The following years would see the city of Detroit decline into eventual bankruptcy while surrounding areas became more affluent as — to put it as straightforwardly as possible — white people with money fled the city (“white flight”).
The history of Detroit is completely Black and White — skin color aside. There’s no sugar coating the levels of prejudice and racial tensions which coat the decline of the city. In fact, the history of Detroit, could be seen as a backbone of the racial tensions which still exist, prominently, in American culture today.
More to come.
