by Drew Philp
I told myself it wasn’t the one because it was on a fairly main street, near a bus stop. If lots of people could see progress, it would be incentive to steal the tools that made that progress, and opportunity for the city or police or government in general to poke around. The goal was to be anonymous. Will suggested I could plant pine trees in front of it to obscure the view from the road, but this posed its own problems. You still wanted your neighbors, and only your neighbors, to be able to watch over it. They were unlikely to steal or call the cops, less so for someone passing through. Really, though, it just gave me a bad feeling. I figured I could do better. Next.
It was during that time I decided I was going to do this the old-fashioned way, without grants or loans or the foundation money beginning to pour into the city. I would work for everything that went into the house, because not everyone has access to loans or foundational grants. I could have called the house “art” and people would have thrown money at me. It would have been comparatively easy, and I likely would have been able to get more done. But I wanted to prove one man could take a house and make it into a home without someone subsidizing it, like the baseball stadium downtown. If it needed to be done that way, what was the point? What could you prove?
It seemed wrong, too, to come into a place, especially one so poor, and suck up all the money. There were people who had been around much longer who could use a roof that didn’t leak or plumbing that didn’t either. I didn’t want any part of that. It would separate me from my neighbors.
In the northern part of the city there is a six-foot-high concrete wall that runs along 8 Mile Road. It was built to keep black people out of the suburbs. 8 Mile is the historic dividing line between black and white—also the dividing line between suburbs and the city—the same road made famous by Eminem in his titular film. The wall was built in 1940 by a white neighborhood developer, supported by the federal and city governments.
When the soldiers returned from World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt, along with Congress, instituted the GI bill that we generally think of as a law paying for the college education of soldiers. But the bill also built infrastructure and widely expanded federal home-loan programs. Coupled with other federal and state initiatives and subsidies, it spurred a house-building boom, the suburban living of the ’50s, and ensured the United States would be a nation of homeowners. This all happened in the lifetime of your grandparents, and maybe even your parents or you.
Those home loans were not available to blacks in Detroit. The same soldiers who fought under the American flag across the world against fascism, Japanese imperialism, and Nazi racism did not qualify for U.S. federal home loans because of the color of their skin.
In fact, blacks were only allowed to live in a few crowded neighborhoods in Detroit, houses and apartments that were widely considered substandard. A typical black dwelling cost three times what a comparable place in a white neighborhood would—for half of the amenities. Many didn’t have running water, and rat bites on babies were a common problem.
That concrete wall was built by a real estate developer attempting to turn virgin land into a subdivision with federal money. Not only were the loans not available to blacks, but they were also not available for development in black neighborhoods; they weren’t available for white neighborhoods either if they contained even one black person; and finally, they were also not available for all-white neighborhoods bordering black neighborhoods.
This process is called “redlining” because of the color used on maps to denote areas where loans would not be made in any case. Its explicit use has now been made illegal, but the practice continues in many ways.
The neighborhood south of 8 Mile was a black neighborhood, one in which the professional-class residents were allowed to purchase land and were building homes without the help of federal loans. The suburban developer was initially turned down for funding because of the proximity to the black neighborhood. His solution was to build the wall, appeasing the civic government managing the federal loans. It ensured blacks would not even be able to see into the neighborhood he built.
The wall is still there today.
This is the “once great city” the newspapers pine for.
I figured free money might put me proverbially on the other side of that wall. Anyone who controlled that money, really controlled it anyway, lived on the other side. It wasn’t just a demarcation of area and governance but of wealth and consequently of character. White folks in Detroit had gotten enough free money in the past through subsidies and uneven dealings, so I felt I could leave that for someone else. I wanted, as much as possible, a clean break from the past.
Neither was I going to make the banks and bankers any more money by paying their usury on a mortgage. One piece at a time would cut out the middleman and his gleaning of profit for nothing, for being wealthy already. I was going to do this the old-fashioned way, through sweat and labor. Work it was and work I was going to do.
Will and I rode past a monstrous white Queen Anne with a wraparound porch. We didn’t go in, but I took note.
* * *
Six-foot-tall piles of kitsch. Hundreds of plastic Santa Claus decorations. Ceramic ducks, elephants, geese. Strings of lights. A lawn mower that looked like it didn’t work. Andy Kemp wasn’t kidding about the demo on his brother’s place. I stood in the yard.
Plastic houseplants. Piles of plaster, concrete, lumber. Flower vases filled with nails. Upsetting paper dolls crumbling in the rain. Indeterminate jugs. A coffeemaker.
There was a drizzle and I tried the door. Locked. I sat on the topless bookshelves that doubled as a bench and smoked. I needed to get a good start here before I had to leave Will’s at the end of the summer. I was grateful to the Kemps for letting me stay for free in exchange for a bit of upkeep and looking after the place. Any money I made could go into my own future home, and I was about to learn how desperately I was going to need it.
I noticed a two-foot-tall aluminum sculpture of a knight holding a sword hanging on one of the brand-new posts holding up the porch roof. I touched its foot and the whole thing crashed to the ground, making a hellish noise. I stood and returned him to his perch, watching sentinel over what was to be my new home.
The property consisted of two lots, and in the back was a dripping garage. It was rumored that the porch I sat on had cost Betty and Sweaty their home: they paid for its construction then couldn’t afford the taxes. So they left for Florida—and left behind all these trinkets and a ten-grand water bill. The state of the place wasn’t uncommon for Detroit. Houses in the neighborhood didn’t last long without someone living in them. They would succumb to fire, get stripped of their valuable metals at night, fall to the relentless rollback of nature. Less likely is that someone would begin squatting one and turn it into a crack house, but stranger things had happened and it was a real concern.
I wandered into the backyard and stared into the pond, a shallow hole about as big as a cafeteria dining table. It was bordered by rocks and plants that had been dug up from around the neighborhood, and odd bricks and chunks of concrete that could be found anywhere. At one time there had been a pump, but it wasn’t running now and the water was stagnant and beginning to go to algae. A mottled carp surfaced and ate a water bug. Looking closer, I found the pond was filled with these fish, white, gold and orange and black-spotted, and variations between the two.
I looked at the house. There were holes in the roof and water would drip inside when it rained. One of the first projects would be to string a tarp across and patch the holes as best we could—
I heard a mutinous racket and walked back out front. Andy and Kinga pushed a giant box with a broken wheel down the road in the rain, laughing at their folly and achingly in love a dozen years after marriage. One corner would scrape on the ground and careen in a circle like a race car losing a tire, and they would laugh and when they got back on track it would happen all over again. The drizzle had become harder, and Kinga wore a yellow rain slicker
three sizes too big. She kept sweeping the hood back out of her eyes while pushing and laughing and shouting at Andy to get the box back on track. They looked like puppies in a mud puddle, a big mess of joy.
It was a scene I never would have imagined coming out of Detroit.
“What’s this?” I asked when they wheeled the ornate box into the yard.
“Obviously we can’t work without music, man. What are we, animals?” said Andy.
We lifted it up the porch steps. The stereo was old, a piece of furniture really, and had been found in an abandoned house. Nearly the size of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, it had provided the working music for at least a half dozen project homes around Detroit so far. It would move again with me to my own place, when I found one.
Andy and Kinga were both soaking wet and gorgeous. Kinga removed the hood from the yellow slicker and Andy shook himself dry like a dog. Their smooth muscles and homemade tattoos, come by honestly, were devoid of any pretense or irony.
“Hey, Drew.” Kinga waved.
“Have you been inside here yet? You ready for this?” Andy said.
He opened the door. The house, stripped down to the studs and bare like a cabin, consisted of three rooms in the front, a bathroom, kitchen, and living space. There was a chimney in the center, crumbling. The rear of the house contained more rooms but would be shut off from the rest and were filled with junk and construction materials. The upstairs was one large room. During the winter as I lived there I could have sworn I heard strange and unexplainable noises coming from the second floor, but when I went up to check I found nothing. Andy told me later that the son of a previous tenant had committed suicide up there. He was found hanging from the rafters.
“So what do you think? You think you can make it here over the winter?”
I looked around. I had slightly exaggerated to the Kemps my experience with tools. I didn’t doubt for a minute I could do it, but when I looked at all the work, it seemed like an absurd amount. I was eager to get my hands dirty—when something was done it would be done, either the lights would turn on or not. Water would come out of the faucet or not. Things would look square and plumb or they wouldn’t. Still, what would my parents say? Would I ever be able to bring a girl here?
“Of course. I’m excited.”
“Let’s plug this bad boy in and see what we got.”
The radio turned on to Bob Seger, Michigan’s blue-collar poet laureate.
“You and Kinga can finish putting in the switches and outlets and I’m going to run to the hardware store for lumber. Does anyone need anything?”
“I don’t think so.”
I had replaced switches before but never installed them new. Kinga gave me a crash course and we set to work. She had brought a plastic kitchen timer, one of those with the large dial in the center, and set it for an hour.
“What’s that for?”
“It’s so I remember to pick up my kids from school. Sometimes I get working and I get so into it I forget about anything else. I started doing it when Andy and I did our house.”
“When was that?”
She told me the story as we stripped wires and threaded them through the small plastic outlets we take for granted.
They met one summer when Andy was a camp counselor and Kinga a camper on holiday from Hungary. She had grown up in the Eastern Bloc just after the fall of communism and her father was a brilliant mathematician, his career stunted by fascism. She had lived in a typical Communist apartment block, gray, concrete, and with few creature comforts. After the fall of the Wall she discovered punk music and fell in love with it. She still had tapes from Eastern Bloc hard-core and punk bands in the pre-Wall era that she lent generously.
She bonded with Andy over music at camp, and when Kinga went home they wrote to each other across the ocean. “We fell in love through letters,” she said.
The next summer Andy went to Hungary to visit her. They had wedding rings tattooed on their fingers soon after. Andy found a job as an English teacher at Catherine Ferguson Academy, the same school for pregnant and parenting mothers where he would meet Farmer Paul. Paul would eventually convince the two, plus their two daughters, to move to Forestdale. At the time the place was still a crack house.
Paul had turned the dealers out with an ingenious solution. One day when they were gone he began stacking hay bales inside, filling the house and blocking entry. “From a crack house to a hay house,” he told me, grinning. Soon after, Andy and Kinga purchased it legally and turned it from an empty shell into the envy of the east side.
By the time we had finished with the wiring the sun was out. We helped Andy load the lumber into the house, and Kinga had to pick up her children from school, so Andy and I began to sister the second-floor rafters with strips of plywood. I asked Andy about the pond outside and told him about the one we had just made at Will’s.
In the forest behind his house we had found a dumped hot tub, and after some fiberglass patching from my grandfather, we sank it into the ground behind his garden. Will had piled rocks and concrete and rubble around the edges and created a little waterfall from a red beverage cooler. We installed the pump that he had found and I had repaired, and finally Will had bought water lilies and other plants, and filled the pond with a handful of tiny goldfish.
“Do you think he wants some of our fish, from the pond?” Andy asked.
“Yeah, sure, I think he’d like that.”
We stopped what we were doing and Andy found a five-gallon bucket that he filled with water. He straddled the edges of the pond, finding a foothold on the rocks, his long and tattooed legs ropy with muscle. He was attempting to catch the fish with his hands, stumbling into the pond more than once, wetting his enormous tennis shoes. He’d dart in and the fish would flick away with little thought, his probing fingers only a minor annoyance. Without losing hope he found a milk crate and was stabbing at them with it like a net and having some more luck.
“Aw, yeah! Let’s get this one with the spots.”
I stood aside, dumbstruck at the man’s energy and enthusiasm.
Back in he shot with the makeshift net, sliding the fish into the bucket.
“You said Will has some fish in there already? Don’t tell him you put these in there. Let’s see how long it takes for him to notice.”
* * *
“The fish in the pond got huge! Like overnight!” Will said three days later. “They grew, like, ten inches!”
I wanted to play along but couldn’t hold in my laughter. Living with Will was great. I had traded my construction job for one at a bar downtown—better money and less taxing on the body. If I wasn’t serving customers from the suburbs attending baseball games or the opera, I’d chat into the night with Will. We played instruments or read or I might sew a pair of pants that had ripped during the day. Will would work on a birdhouse or drink canned beer, or we’d just sit and talk.
The conversation would inevitably turn to Detroit, and how to live responsibly but successfully as a white kid coming in from somewhere else. Even though we were both punks at heart, we knew there was an imbalance, and it wouldn’t make a pleasant or noble life to take advantage of the neighbors and the situation and become some slumlord or be driven by economic profit. There was no point to dreaming of a better world if you couldn’t sleep with yourself at night.
At the same time, you had to be able to come home in the evenings with your head held high. You couldn’t spend your life getting kicked around. You needed to be able to look yourself in the mirror and see a man without getting trapped up in any of the petty ghetto bullshit. Aside from work in the drug trade, protecting your manhood was the number one reason people got shot.
To live in Detroit was to live not just in a city but in a concept. And it’s strange to live in a concept. We had to make up the rules as we went, because there weren’t yet a whole lot, not many we knew of anyway. Other American cities could only hint at the devastation and uniqueness of Detroit.
Is it rig
ht to live in an opulent house and have nice things amid so much poverty?
“Not if you buy it,” Will said. “But you can have anything you want if you make it yourself. If you built it with your own hands you don’t have to be ashamed of anything.”
Is the world getting better or worse?
“Hell no, the world’s garbage,” Will said. I disagreed. I thought at least we have history to build upon.
Is it okay to steal materials from an abandoned house to build your own?
Under certain circumstances. You had to watch the house for a reasonable amount of time to make sure no one owned or was squatting it, and the stuff you took could only be used to build your own place, keeping history alive in the neighborhood. Selling or melting it down made you a scavenger, the material carrion.
What do you do if someone tries to kick down your door?
Will had stashed blunt objects around the house, but didn’t own a gun.
And how do you get the electricity turned on in an abandoned house?
We lived simply.
We were separate from the world aside from the radio we only occasionally used. The house didn’t contain a television or computer and neither of us had smartphones. Will instinctually avoided mainstream culture and the warping of the truth that comes with it. Long live King Ludd. Most entertainment we made ourselves, and we listened to music without regard to what was popular. Will reintroduced me to country music and played the clawhammer banjo. I could pick a little bit on my guitar. We traded stories about hitchhiking and riding trains, Will telling me about his nights spent in a Mexican jail or driving into Lubbock as dawn was breaking.
I never, ever went to the suburbs. It felt to me like a place a crime had been committed long ago and going there made me feel complicit. A lot of the things I hated about modernity were present in the most tasteless way, as well, just driving around: endless traffic and big box stores selling the cheap wares of near-slavery, impersonal subdivisions, and a lack of community or feeling, years of racial animosity that not only didn’t I want a part of, I was actively attempting to work against it by building my place in Detroit.
