How Dead is Detroit?

For most Americans, this is an abstract issue; for me, it’s existential. My interim life there --1930-50 was at the apex of its climb.( I moved from Battle Creek at age three, then left for graduate school as a just married at 23, never to live there again.) I remember the race riots of 1943 and 1967 as threatening turning points downward.

When I buried my mother there in Mt. Olivet cemetery in 1982, I still recall the hostile atmosphere on the Gratiot Avenue bus back downtown for the Greyhound to return to Philadelphia. The sullen black teens who verbally harassed me then could never respond to the fact that I started Black American Lit university courses, or that I grew up cutting high school to see “colored” orchestras at the Paradise Theatre in downtown Woodward Avenue. Or that I integrated the University of Detroit Senior Prom at the lily white Eastwood Gardens for the first time in 1949-- by double dating with a “colored” couple. (The collective grumbling at me at the urinal there attested to how far even a Catholic university had yet to mature on racial issues.)

Every time I see a photo of the abandoned once grand Michigan Central depot, my heart skips a beat.(I used take the train there three times a year to go to Holy Rosary Academy in Bay City. And now the newly installed mayor (his predecessor is in jail on perjury charges) argues that Detroit must shrink even more physically. It was almost 2 million when I left in 1950, and now it’s 900,000 and still declining. All my relatives have fled to the suburbs.

That is why Toby Barlow lightens my spirits! Rarely has any advertising executive done that. “One night,” he began, ”a little over a year ago, crossing Woodward Avenue, I crashed my bicycle. As I flew head over heels across Detroit’s main boulevard, I thought, well, in any other town, I’d be hitting a car right about now. But this being the Motor City, the street was deserted, completely motor-free.” (“Bike Among the Ruins,” New York Times July 5, 2009).

He argues that in most American cities bikers have to fight for their rights on the streets. Detroit bids fare to “become a new bicycle utopia.” He contends that “with well less than half its peak population, and free of anything resembling a hill, the city and its miles and miles of streets lie open and empty, beckoning. And lately, whether it’s because of the economy or the price of gas or just because it’s a nice thing to do, there a lot more bikers out riding.” Talk about making lemonade out of your unasked for lemons!

This new bike culture also has an expanding economic side. He has noted that his friends Kelli and Karen started two years ago what they dubbed the Wheelhouse, down on the Detroit River waterfront only three hundred yards from GM’s HQ! “One might think,” Toby muses,” that starting a business in the D makes as much sense as stepping on a nail, but Kelli and Karen’s shop is thriving; their profits in May were double what they were a year ago.” As yet, neither K has taken a salary from their shop. And Kelli keeps his job as a bartender and Karen still works for a community organization. But that’s not all there is in the newly emerging biker culture.

Along the Cass Corridor, another bike shop has opened: The Hub has a storeroom full of old bikes that they’ll refurbish for you. Their Back Alley Bikes program trains young people in bike repair and customer service, Technically The Hub is a nonprofit, even though it’s doing well financially. "Biking in the D,” Toby declares, "is the transportation equivalent of the Slow Food Movement, offering a perspective completely lost to those zooming in on the Lodge Freeway and I-75, those great superhighways that, once upon a time in the name of progress, were sliced deep into the heart of the city, only to bleed it dry.”

And with a wit sharpened by his years with J. Walter Thompson, he reminded Detroiters of the future that in 1896 when Charles B. King steered Detroit’s first automobile along its cobbled streets, Henry Ford was observed assessing the new machine’s progress—aboard a bicycle! Toby proposes bike hikes to still luminous neighborhoods like Indian Village, or the newly refurbished Frank Lloyd Wright out on 8 Mile Road (How did I miss that one!)

And for the new Slow Food Movement types, he reports of fresh food community gardens just carved out of newly abandoned neighborhoods! Hop on your bike and check them out. And explore abandoned houses going for $100.

Toby or not Toby, perhaps that’s the last best hope for a dying Detroit.