Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier

240 Pages·2016·5.111 MB·English

by  Rebecca J. Kinney

BEAUTIFUL
WASTELAND
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B E A U T I F U L
WA S T E L A N D
The Rise of Detroit as America’s
Postindustrial Frontier
Rebecca J. Kinney
University of Minnesota Press
MinneaPolis • london
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Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid-f ree paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-o pportunity educator and employer.
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kinney, Rebecca J.
Title: Beautiful wasteland : the rise of Detroit as America’s postindustrial frontier / Rebecca J. Kinney.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016003047 | ISBN 978-0-8166-9756-4 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-8166-9757-1 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Detroit (Mich.)—Public opinion. | Public opinion—United States. | Popular culture—United States. |
Frontier and pioneer life—United States. | Racism in popular culture—United States. | Detroit (Mich.)—Social conditions. |
Detroit (Mich.)—Economic conditions. | Detroit (Mich.)—Race relations. | City and town life—Michigan—Detroit. |
Urban renewal—Michigan—Detroit.
Classification: LCC F574.D44 K56 2016 | DDC 977.4/34—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003047
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Contents
introdUction Building a Beautiful Wasteland vii
1 It’s Turned into a Race Thing
White Innocence and the Old Neighborhood 1
2 Picturing Ruin and Possibility
The Rise of the Postindustrial Frontier 38
3 Fanning the Embers
Branding Detroit as a Phoenix Rising 65
4 Flickers of the American Dream
Filming Possibility in Decline 91
5 Feeding Detroit’s Rise
Provisions for Urban Pioneers 121
conclUsion The Strait: A Tale of Two Cities 147
Acknowledgments 155
Notes 161
Index 197
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INTRODUCTION
Building a Beautiful
Wasteland
Detroit right now is a great American story. No city has had more
influence on the country’s economic and social evolution. Detroit was
the birthplace of both the industrial age and the nation’s middle class,
and the city’s rise and fall—and struggle to rise again—are a window
into the challenges facing all of modern America. From urban planning
to the crisis of manufacturing, from the lingering role of race and class
in our society to the struggle for better health care and education, it’s
all happening at its most extreme in the Motor City.
—John Huey, Time Inc. editor in chief, October 2009
In the summer of 2009, the editors of Time Inc. purchased a house in
Detroit. John Huey, editor in chief, announced the purchase, as well as a
yearlong series of articles called “Assignment Detroit,” in an editorial let-
ter to readers included in the print and online versions of Time magazine’s
October 5, 2009, “special issue” on Detroit. Huey frames the move as
a chance to understand the city, telling readers, “As a story, Detroit has
been misunderstood, underreported, stereotyped, avoided and exploited
for decades.”1 Huey then explains that Time Inc., its editors and staff
members, would become “stakeholders” in Detroit, with their plan over
the next year to “flood the D-z one with journalists, photographers, vid-
eographers and bloggers” from its network of news outlets, including not
just Time but Fortune, CNN Money, Money, and Sports Illustrated. The
purchase of the home would enable journalists from across the news
organization to live and report from Detroit in the home that they affec-
tionately named the “D- Shack.”
The nickname is revealing. Huey’s letter describes a house with three
stories, five bedrooms, and three and a half baths, in addition to both a
vii
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viii Introduction
basement and a yard; the accompanying photograph pictures a charming
blue brick home with new windows, flower boxes, landscaped trees and
bushes, and the hint of a backyard trellis. The house, in other words, is
nowhere near a “shack.” It seems to offer a pointed contrast with the ubiq-
uitous images of Detroit’s blighted and decaying homes. However, by
naming the home a “shack” and emphasizing the fact that the purchase
price of $99,000 was “about $80,000 above the average price of a house
in the city limits,” Time joined the long list of news outlets creating and
fueling the narrative of Detroit as a devalued place, even as they tried to
sell the story of Detroit on the upswing.2 Semantics aside, however, during
their year in Detroit, the company’s journalists produced a lot of content,
including “roughly 300 print or online stories, 48 video reports, and over
750 blog posts” across the print and online editions of Time Inc.’s brands.3
I begin here not merely to critique Time’s social experiment but because,
in recent years, John Huey’s impulse seems ubiquitous. He is just one of
a seemingly endless line of people, not just journalists but bloggers and
photographers, artists and tourists, big business and advertisers, drawn
to the complex contradictions of Detroit— its storied past and beautiful
buildings and its infamous decline and abandoned factories. Huey talks
about the pride of Detroiters but does so beneath a shadow he presents
of Detroit’s broken present, telling readers: “Not all that long ago Detroit
was one of the richest places in the country. . . . Today it struggles for its
life.” Huey pronounced that Time would report Detroit “differently,” yet
he offered an angle that has been used again and again: “We want Detroit
to recover and find its way into the future.” He announced that they
would “bring a sense of surprise, discovery, enlightenment, horror, joy,
inspiration and fun to the reality of Detroit.” And then, just in case read-
ers did not understand Time’s noble intentions, he added: “[The] reality
is that Detroit, like all other cities, is human.”4 These pronouncements,
however, smack of the same old stories that have been told about the city
for years: the past as epic, the present as bleak, and Detroit as broken.
Even as Time seeks to humanize Detroit, the irony of course is that over
the years the media has been responsible for circulating and disseminat-
ing this notion of Detroit as dehumanized.
I grew up in Royal Oak, an inner-r ing suburb that hugs Woodward
Avenue, Detroit’s main north–s outh thoroughfare.5 Royal Oak is close
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Introduction ix
enough to the city that a ten-minute car ride down Woodward could
carry you the six miles to Detroit’s northern boundary, or twenty minutes
on the freeway could take you the seventeen miles to the Renaissance
Center, which sits along Detroit’s southern boundary, the Detroit River.
To people familiar with southeastern Michigan, this geographic location
identifies me as a metro Detroiter.6 To everyone else, I am more simply a
Detroiter. And whenever I tell people where I am from, they proceed to
tell me what they know about the city: its spectacular decline, and that
they learned about it from an online gallery of photos by Time or the
Huffington Post, from a news story they read in the New York Times or
USA Today, or a segment on the Colbert Report.7 All this is to say that much
of what is known about Detroit comes from stories that are read, or seen,
or heard in passing. Such is the case for pretty much any aspect of life,
of course. Stories are the way we make sense of the world. But when it
comes to Detroit, the content of those stories, and the drama with which
they are pronounced, takes on a particular significance. I have heard pro-
nouncements of the city’s impending death for as long as I can remember,
predating the Internet and probably even my ability to read. Indeed, I first
heard these stories coming from people like my grandparents, my mom,
and others in my inner-r ing suburb, who were Detroiters but who left the
city proper in the 1950s and 1960s for the adjacent suburban periphery.
The way they told it, downtown Detroit was a magnificent city back in
the day—a ll glitz and glamour complete with Sunday best, including a hat
and gloves for a trip to Hudson’s department store. Then, when I moved
from Michigan to California in the early 2000s, people were often sur-
prised that first, I was a metro Detroiter— “There are Asians in Detroit?”
is a question I get again and again—a nd second, that I had made it out
alive: “You must be so happy to be out of that hellhole,” one particularly
memorable coworker exclaimed. However, after nearly a decade of this mix
of pity and surprise and lament, the conversation began to change. Start-
ing sometime in 2009 or so, friends, acquaintances, and strangers began
to change their tune. “I hear amazing things are happening in Detroit.”
Or, “Detroit sounds like such a haven for artists and creative work, I want
to go there someday.” Yes, I was aware that the city was changing. But for
me, the city has always been changing. It has always been both awful and
wonderful, bleak and thriving. So the shift in the cultural conversation
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