From Motown to Ghost town: How the once mighty Detroit is heading down a long, slow road to ruin

By Peter Hitchens In Detroit
Updated: 17:01 EDT, 9 July 2011

This was once the capital city of capitalism, the great roaring furnace at the very centre of America’s rise to world power and greatness. Stalin wanted to copy it on the banks of the Volga, but found he couldn’t replicate its spirit – or its cars.

Aldous Huxley’s great prophetic novel Brave New World was written on the assumption that the ideas of its founder, Henry Ford, especially that ‘history is bunk’, would one day take over the planet. He may yet turn out to be right.

Certainly, Ford’s desire for a world of vast mass-production factories in which the workers were paid enough to keep the economy going by buying their own products seems to be coming true. But nowadays it is mainly coming true in China and South Korea, and failing in Detroit itself.

Peter Hitchens stands in Belle Isle Park with the skyline of Detroit, Michigan, behind him

America’s fabled rise to world power and wealth may only have been an overture to China’s seizure of world dominance. 

The revolutionary artist Diego Rivera made a pilgrimage to Detroit to paint – in a gigantic, overpowering fresco – the very spirit of frenzied, unstoppable economic ferocity, ruthless, cold and majestic. Detroit’s original heart was crammed with some of the most exuberant and powerful buildings of the American mid-century: colossal, ornate theatres and cinemas, mighty hotels and department stores, all emphasising energy, movement, optimism and power.

In the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt christened the city the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ as it turned from making Cadillacs and Fords to producing 35 per cent of America’s war production: tanks, Jeeps and B-24 bombers by the tens of thousands. The wartime expansion drew in 200,000 immigrants, many of them blacks from the South. 

In the Sixties it produced its own art form, the thrilling, emotional music of Motown (now relocated to Los Angeles).

Its uneasy peace between business and unions, soothed by generous benefits and pensions, gave its name in 1950 to the so-called Treaty of Detroit, a national pact between capital and labour that lasted 30 years until Ronald Reagan broke it, and which many American workers look back on with nostalgia.

And it was one of the cities of the ‘Promised Land’, the new future sought by countless black Americans who left the bigoted, segregated American South in the hope of a new life, drawn by the high wages of the new factories, and found that the officially liberal American North was just as bigoted and segregated, just less frank about it than they were back in Dixieland.

Crumbling despair: Once a home for the rich, a Detroit house teeters on the brink of collapse

It is a melodramatic place. How could it not be? It sits on the frontier of the United States, captured by us British in the war of 1812 and heavily fortified thereafter in case we came back (we never did, and certainly nobody would want it now). It is by common agreement the last eastern city before America opens out into the big skies of the Midwest. It was the last station on the ‘underground railroad’ by which fugitive slaves made their way to Canada and freedom before the Civil War.

Now, true to its past, Detroit is not just fading away gracefully, but noisily sick and dying, expiring as spectacularly as it once lived. Fifty years ago it was the fifth-largest city in the United States, with 1.85 million people. Now it is eleventh, with just over 700,000 people. It is likely to fall further behind as it shrinks, and as more Americans head for the Sun Belt and the flourishing South West, away from this blighted, dingy Rust Belt.

Each year at Halloween more of it is burned down in a mixture of wild destruction and insurance fraud. You can walk right through its majestic downtown in the middle of the morning and meet nobody at all. There is no danger of being mugged, as a mugger in this part of town might have to wait hours for a client.

Most of the great buildings are ghosts: hotels that haven’t seen a guest in years, department stores where the last customer left decades ago, abandoned dentists’ surgeries where the elaborate Forties chairs moulder in echoing solitude. Where there was optimism, there is now nothing but melancholy.

Sometimes the majestic hulks are brought down in giant explosions.

Sometimes they are brutally recycled, so that you can find the sad traces of a beautiful theatre’s ornate ceiling stranded madly in a multi-storey car park. But mostly they have just been left forlorn, the windows of their high floors sparkling misleadingly in the sun, but the grand doorways at street-level smeared with dust and firmly locked.

A little way out you can see the colossal wreck of the old Packard factory, a monument to the passing nature of commercial success. Once, Packard was as well-known and renowned as its rival, Cadillac. Now it is almost forgotten. 

As is so common in America, with its endless space, the corpse of this enormous building has not been demolished. Why bother? Instead it has been left to decay, a dangerous wasteland of sagging roofs and jagged edges, frightening in its emptiness and silence. It is strangely moving to imagine that in my lifetime this place was a source of pride and (false) security to thousands of men. 

Brave efforts are made to keep life going in the middle of the city. A few excellent restaurants do surprisingly good business in the evenings, much of it from prosperous black families. A grand hotel has been reopened. There are some dispiriting casinos, those invariable signs of economic desperation. But real life, the sort that makes for crowded pavements, exhilarating noise, bright lights and business, has departed to the far fringes of the suburbs. You can find it, for instance, out in Dearborn, where America’s biggest Arab Muslim community is forming, in unspoken defiance of the post-September 11 belief that their way of life is incompatible with America’s.

But they seldom cross the border into Detroit, perhaps having a heightened sense of approaching danger. And it is a border. As you pass the city limits a blanket of gloom, neglect and cheapness descends. The buildings are shabbier, the paint is faded. The businesses, where they exist, are thrift shops and pawn shops or wretched groceries where the goods are old and tired. Finding somewhere to have breakfast, normally easy in any American city, involves a long hunt. ‘God bless Detroit’, says one billboard, just beside another offering the alternative solution: liquor.

The ruins of the Packard Plant stand in Detroit, Michigan. The plant first opened in 1903 and was abandoned in 1958

Nobody actually wants Detroit to perish. Many clever people have spent billions of dollars trying to revive it. General Motors, no longer the power it once was, now occupies the aggressive new Renaissance Center which stares across the river to Canada. A monorail, that favourite toy of town planners who want to look ultra-modern, circles the riverfront zone, largely empty and going from nowhere to nowhere. 

Glowering over the main entrance to the city stands a tall and frowning structure, dark and dispiriting even in bright sunshine. This is the abandoned Michigan Central Railroad Station, rearing up like an enormous tombstone. It is impossible to see it without feeling a strange fear for the future. Is this how all the great cities of the mighty West will one day look?

Through here, in the lost boom years, came businessmen hastening to sign contracts, politicians looking for finance from business, unions or both, government contractors gearing up for war, Southern blacks and their families seeking a new life. Now it is a ruin, ringed by razor-wire, its windows broken, its superb arrivals hall a shadowy, chilly tomb, its many silent platforms invaded by weeds. The few remaining trains do not even come here any more. The neighbourhood is not safe after dark.

The main road that leads from here into the heart of Detroit is so worn that the asphalt has peeled away to reveal the Edwardian cobbles beneath. No doubt something can be rescued. But much has gone already. I have yet to get to the worst.

This is to be found near where Van Dyke Avenue intersects with Mack Avenue. Where prosperous, neat suburban homes once stood, pheasants flap and knee-high grass obscures the foundations of vanished homes.

Occasionally a half-ruined or half-burned house still stands to remind you that this used to be a cityscape. Pathetic, besieged knots of surviving homes remind you of what was once here. Sometimes amazing efforts have been made to keep them smart. More often, they haven’t.

Many bear menacing notices warning visitors to stay away. On the door of one, easy to imagine as a neat home with an iron-pillared porch where the head of the family must once have sat on summer evenings, are the words ‘Enter at ya own risk’ accompanied by a crude drawing of an angry face.

I ventured into a nearby ruin, smashed, charred and half-filled with garbage. You have no idea who or what might be lurking in these houses. I lacked the courage to go in any deeper than the front room, in case I plunged through a rotten floor or met somebody unpleasant. The towers of downtown, only a couple of miles away, are visible from the front porch.

Soulless city: The shattered grandeur of Detroit¿s United Artists cinema

But they, too, are mostly empty, and are not reassuring.

There are real perils. My photographer colleague, Brian Kersey, and I were investigating a particularly desolate street when two large and purposeful dogs, one a pit-bull, came pelting towards us. I have not run so fast since I was at school.

Not far away, the danger might well have been human. Much of Detroit is horribly dangerous for its own residents, who in many cases only stay because they have nowhere else to go. Property crime is double the American average, violent crime triple. The isolated, peeling homes, the flooded roads, the clunky, rusted old cars and the neglected front yards amid trees and groin-high grassland make you think you are in rural Alabama, not in one of the greatest industrial cities that ever existed.

Amazingly, only a short walk away, the remnants of a rich man’s quarter, the so-called Indian Village, still survive. Here the owners of spacious early 20th Century mansions keep up appearances by tending the empty houses next to them, making them look occupied, mowing the lawns and sweeping the leaves, in the hope that nobody will burn them down and spread the blight.

A journey eastwards along Mack Avenue is simply sad. The city is sinking back into the deep forests and grassy plains that were here before Europeans ever came to North America. What buildings are left are seldom used for their original purpose. A once-grand bank is a sweet shop. Sordid-looking bars sit alongside the chapels of obscure religious sects. There are whole schools with no children to attend them. Step out of the car at the petrol station and you are immediately accosted by pathetic wraith-like figures in grimy clothes, with the prematurely-aged faces of drug abusers. This is urban failure in all its shabby misery.

Maggie DeSantis, a community worker and one of the leading experts on Detroit’s decline, explains how it all went wrong. Her history is not the conventional one, of the city being ruined by a corrupt black mayor: the notorious Coleman Young. It is far, far more complicated than that.

Because Detroit was a city based on the motor car, it was different from the start. Henry Ford paid his workers enough to buy the cars they made. And they did. So houses were more spread out and built on more generous lots than in most cities. Detroit was designed for car owners, who wouldn’t dream of using public transport, which barely existed anyway.

Maggie explains: ‘Even if you had a crummy house, it was your crummy house: you owned your own home, and ran your own car. But the things that made Detroit strong, the sprawling streets and the dependence on cars, also made it weak.’

When trouble came, the city was too widespread, the people too far from each other, the lives too individual, the temptation to flee to the remote edge of town too strong. It was fine to live in such a place when you had a job and a car. But if you didn’t, you were trapped and alone, left with a debt-burdened property you couldn’t sell and couldn’t leave.

The first tremors of change came with the war, but they intensified in the Fifties when blacks began moving out of the ghetto in the old centre. This district was typical of America before Martin Luther King. Known as ‘The Black Bottom’ or more politely as ‘Paradise Valley’, it was a complete society, in which the son of a labourer could and did grow up next door to the son of a doctor or a lawyer, and go to the same school.

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But when Detroit became the first American city to surrender to the motorway, it had an excuse to break up this vibrant but squalid enclave. Black Americans began moving into the Detroit suburbs.

DeSantis has no doubt the planners meant to destroy the ghetto. Blacks who had come from Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, enticed by high wages and hoping for a life free of prejudice, found a cold welcome in the rest of the city.

Detroit in those days was notorious for its thriving Ku Klux Klan and its bigoted police force. The city had suffered race riots as far back as 1943, caused by the crude segregation of hastily built and rare public housing.

The battles were so serious that in the midst of a war, thousands of troops were needed to restore order, 34 people died and hundreds were injured.
So, when thousands of displaced black families relocated, estate agents sought to profit by scaring white residents out. Then they bought their houses cheaply, and sold them at a heavy profit to black incomers. This cynical process was called ‘block-busting’, a technique of panicking people in entire districts into leaving, with coded warnings of black invasion.
DeSantis recalls: ‘I remember them using scare tactics. I remember in my Fifties neighbourhood, posters saying, “Sell for cash and get out while you can.” ’

Meanwhile, the city planners were encouraging still more blight. Because this was the City of Cars, rather than maintain or extend public transport, they built a web of motorways which encouraged more sprawl and broke up settled neighbourhoods. Better-off whites began to move beyond the city limits into new suburbs with lower taxes and superior schools.

Then in 1967 the city’s name was besmirched so badly it has never recovered. A second terrible race riot left 43 dead and nearly 500 injured. Federal troops, deployed under an anti-insurrection law dating back to 1807, eventually imposed a sullen peace.

Already, inch by inch, and largely thanks to whites moving out, Detroit was becoming a black majority city. The 1967 disaster speeded up the process. In 1974 it elected its first black mayor, Coleman Young. He would later become notorious as the man who helped kill Detroit. His election, fairly or unfairly, was a signal for faster white flight. DeSantis says Young has been unfairly blamed, and that the disaster had already begun to happen. Both versions probably have some truth in them.

But it was the 1973 Middle East war, and the ensuing oil price rise, which finally tipped Detroit over the edge and down the slope into unstoppable decline. From that moment, its big fat petrol-slurping monster cars were obsolete. The US car industry lost the confidence even of patriotic Americans, and has never fully regained it.

Meanwhile, the housing crisis grew and grew. There was already a stupid, state-encouraged mortgage boom, with the government lending to people who could never pay off their loans: an early version of the sub-prime crisis. The first crack cocaine made its appearance, sweeping through the listless, gap-toothed, jobless suburbs.

And the local politicians and businessmen floundered. As DeSantis puts it: ‘We could not get a grip on the fact that we were no longer in the top ten cities of the USA.’ They still cannot. It may take a while yet before Detroit can admit that it is probably just doomed to decline.

The most dramatic development in recent years is the idea that farming might return in the new ‘prairies’ where the city has died. But even this has met with scorn and opposition. The city fathers do not really want to see combine harvesters and barns, let alone pigs and chickens, in the middle of their proud and historic cityscape.

And yet, out among the derelict houses, a modest but determined effort is being made to turn the new badlands to good use. In a bleak corner of the city echoing to the hooters of freight trains, I found Mike Score, of Hantz Farms, cleaning up the site of some derelict houses. ‘I’ve just shifted 400 tyres, plus 200 cubic yards of garbage and waste,’ he said, happily Detroit has plenty of garbage and debris. But it also has plenty of land. House sites can be bought from the city for $300 (£190), each, which adds up to $3,000 an acre, exactly the price of good farmland outside the city limits.

Mike is going to block off one end of the street to stop the fly-tipping of yet more old tyres on this modest plot. Then he explains what comes next: ‘The city thought a farm meant a big red barn, with pigs and chickens. And they also thought red barns, pigs and chickens would be negative, a sign of defeat and failure. So we drew them a picture of what we meant: orchards, hardwood plantations, gardens, hydroponic greenhouses.’

He says it’s time Detroit had a new trademark, instead of the Renaissance Center, which everyone knows has not led to a renaissance. Why not civilised, cultivated green space where wilderness now is? He says with unfeigned enthusiasm: ‘I want this to be one of the landmarks of this city.’

He can see I’m disappointed by his modest ambitions, which really amount to a little bit of market gardening, not much more agricultural than an English allotment. ‘No, no corn, no sheep, no cattle’, he admits.

But if the city decides to encourage the plan, 40 out of its total area of 139 square miles are estimated to be vacant lots. With the true level of unemployment touching 50 per cent, there are plenty of people who might be interested in returning to the land.

The founder of the farming business, John Hantz, was the one who had the idea. Mike Score recalls: ‘He was driving to work past yet another closed business, yet another burnt out house. He realised that the city wouldn’t do anything about it. And eventually, he concluded that if he didn’t do anything, nobody would.’

It’s impossible to say if this will come to anything. My own guess is that the most likely crop to flourish on these sad fields will be cannabis, grown to satisfy a rising demand for ‘medical marijuana’, the cover under which the supposedly draconian United States is quietly legalising this drug in many states – including here in Michigan.

Another even more radical scheme for resurrecting the dead centre has come from Geoffrey Fieger, a Detroit lawyer who made his name defending the late Dr Jack Kevorkian or ‘Doctor Death’, the notorious local pioneer of assisted suicide. Having represented death, Fieger has now turned his attention to resurrection. He recently declared: ‘I could turn it (Detroit) around in five minutes.

‘I’d shovel the snow and I’d clean the streets and parks. Then, I’d tell the police department to leave marijuana alone and don’t spend one dime trying to enforce marijuana laws. I also would not enforce prostitution laws and I’d make us the new Amsterdam.We would attract young people. You make Detroit a fun city. A place they want to live and they would flock here.’

Since Fieger was the Democratic Party’s candidate for Governor of Michigan in 1998, he cannot be easily dismissed as a fringe wacko figure.

But if Detroit, once the mighty arsenal of democracy, is going to descend into being a patchwork Babylon of girly bars, brothels, casinos, druggy coffee shops, allotments and hydroponic cannabis farms, it is more likely to do it gradually and accidentally than as the result of a deliberate decision.

I came here soon after an equally unsettling visit to another empty city, Kangbashi in Inner Mongolia. There, the people are yet to come. Here they are going, and one day they may all have gone, leaving a strange green hole and some melancholy ruins where a mighty civilisation used to be.
Sincere and thoughtful men and women are doing all they can to save it from this fate. But that only makes the scene sadder and more dispiriting.

They have been trying to rescue Detroit for years, and for years Detroit has continued to be sucked back into the ground from which it was born.

Just as in China you can hear the roar and thunder of growth and ambition and the shouts of greed and triumph, in Detroit you can hear the whispers and sighs of decay and decline. For more than two centuries, America balanced on top of a wave of growth and power like a triumphant surf rider. Now she wallows in decline and the rest of us wait to see what that will bring.