Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with three hundred empty acres,” Park said.

  “Put a compass on Homestead, swing it ten miles, and you’ll have a million people,” Lewis informed him. “It’s twelve minutes from downtown Pittsburgh and eight minutes from Carnegie Mellon.”

  Lewis drew up a plan for a shopping center inside one of the old mill buildings. That turned out to be impractical, because the building could not be air-conditioned, but the idea of a shopping center remained. It took another step when West Homestead convinced Allegheny County and the state of Pennsylvania to scour the old mill site of its toxins. The Homestead Works was the first brownfield in Pennsylvania to be completely remediated. Lewis suggested Park film a flight over his empty, unpolluted three hundred acres of riverfront and take it to a meeting of a national conference of convention center businesses. Developers loved it. In 1999, only thirteen years after the works closed, greater Pittsburgh’s largest outdoor mall opened in Homestead. The Waterfront, as it was called, had a Bed, Bath & Beyond, a Men’s Wearhouse, a Macy’s, a Dave & Buster’s, a Mitchell’s Fish Market, and an AMC Loews Theater. It had a Chick-fil-A, a Barnes & Noble, and a Courtyard by Marriott Hotel starting at $169 a night. To remind shoppers that they were buying four-hundred-thread-count sheets on the site of a steel mill, and to remind sub-minimum-wage baristas that they’d taken the place of union crane operators, Lewis persuaded the mall’s developer to leave standing a dozen blast-furnace smokestacks. The flat-topped obelisks stand in a file along the access road, looking like abstract sculptures of branchless, crownless trees. The only other structures left over from the Homestead Works are a gantry overhanging the river, and the Pump House. The red brick station where the Pinkertons made their landing in 1892 is now rented out for private parties. In a grand irony of labor history, the International Workers of the World celebrated its centennial there, in 2005.

  The first successful repurposing of a steel mill, the Waterfront drew 1.5 million visitors a year to a town everyone had avoided in its industrial heyday. To Pittsburghers over thirty, Homestead meant steel. To children and teenagers, Homestead meant shopping. The mall’s sales tax receipts rescued the borough from insolvency but did little to change everyday life in Homestead, which had become poorer, blacker, and more run-down since the Works closed. The Waterfront’s attraction ended at the waterfront. Few shoppers crossed the railroad tracks and drove up onto Eighth Avenue. The Avenue, as Homesteaders call Eighth, had nothing to offer but a diner, a candy store, a lingerie shop, and a dark, surly bar where the drinkers stared at every newcomer, even when Penn State football games were on the TV. Chiodo’s, the after-work tavern by the mill gate, closed down, unable to stay alive even on the patronage of day-tripping Rust Belt romantics seeking an authentic proletarian drinking experience.

  “There’s two trains of thought on the mall in Homestead,” Mayor Betty said. “I love the Waterfront. Personally, everyone in Homestead is so glad they’ve got the Waterfront. At the same time, people drive through the town and there are empty houses and it’s unkempt.”

  To Stout, the mall didn’t change Homestead one bit. “Homestead’s one way on this side of the tracks and another way on the other side of the tracks. One’s still an impoverished, run-down steel-mill town and the other side is a glitter mall.”

  Realizing his work had not ended with the mall, Lewis began buying historic storefronts on Eighth Avenue. For $1, plus back taxes, he purchased a burned-out building, refurbished it, and rented it to a hair-dresser and a T-shirt shop. Then he bought the building across the street. One side became a gourmet kitchen boutique, owned by his wife. The other became the Tin Front Café, a vegan restaurant where Lewis’s stepson was the chef. Homestead began attracting hipster shops that could no longer afford Lawrenceville, the hip neighborhood across the river and up the heights in Pittsburgh. A thrift store specializing in retro fashions opened on Eighth Avenue. A mod furniture emporium followed next door. Homestead—the Homestead above the railroad tracks, not the Homestead of the shopping mall—was written up in a Pittsburgh lifestyle magazine.

  There were other benefactors with roots in Homestead. Charlie Batch, the star quarterback from Steel Valley High, went on to play second string for the Steelers. Batch spent his NFL money to transform an old bakery into $1,500-a-month riverfront apartments, with a basement gym. William V. Campbell had left Homestead for California, where he became chairman of Intuit, the tax and business software company. Campbell sent his Silicon Valley money back to the Mon Valley, building a football field for the high school and a gym for the middle school.

  “Billy always said when he made money, he’d come back, and boy did he come back,” Mayor Betty said.

  Stout had once dismissed the Save Homesteaders as “carpetbaggers.” He considered the Waterfront “the kiss of death” for bringing industry back to Homestead. But even he was impressed with Lewis’s work.

  “I think it’s real good,” Stout said. “I think he’s probably the lone person in the area that’s trying to revitalize the Avenue. He’s got all my respect. He put his money where his mouth is.”

  A quarter century after the mill went down, Stout is one of the only links between Homestead’s steelmaking past and its boutique present. Ronnie Weisen, the union president, moved on with his life, finding a job as a jackhammer operator with the city of Pittsburgh, but he died of cancer in 2000. Mayor Betty—the other link—ate lunch with U.S. Steel pensioners at the Elks Club on the second Thursday of every month, until the Elks closed. A few Christmases ago, they held their last meeting. Her generation of Homesteaders still thinks of their town as the Steel Center of the World. But Mayor Betty also renamed the High Level Bridge after the Homestead Grays, who have a larger place in posterity than the strike or the works. (You can still buy a Grays jersey. You can’t buy a bar of steel made in Homestead.) To Stout, who still wasn’t living as well as when the works had sprinkled a black snow across Pittsburgh, Homestead was a microcosm of what America had become: a nation of shopkeepers who sold each other things, instead of making things.

  “Young people who were born after the manufacturing base was destroyed, I don’t think they have a clue about what this place was like,” he said. “All they know is there’s no jobs out there. They don’t know why. I mean, you have to have a college degree to get a job at McDonald’s today. You can’t grow an economy, grow a middle class, without making things, producing stuff. It’s just impossible. I haven’t seen it anywhere.”

  There’s an old adage that says, “We can’t all take in each other’s laundry.” It’s been proven in Homestead.

  8.

  New Jack Cities

  Before the Vietnam War began, Detroit’s single-year record for murders stood at 158, set in 1929, during Prohibition, when the Jewish-dominated Purple Gang was smuggling booze across the river from Canada. Detroit’s OGs, the Purple Gang murdered its way into control of the city’s underworld by massacring three rival bootleggers. The hired hit man later took part in Chicago’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Lords of gambling, prostitution, narcotics, and even the wire service that transmitted horse racing results, the Purple Gangsters were so fearsome that Al Capone bought Canadian whiskey from them, rather than trying to muscle in on their smuggling operation. The end of Prohibition was the end of the Purple Gang. It was also the end of gang warfare in Detroit—until heroin started coming home with the soldiers.

  During Vietnam, GIs returned with an addiction to the Asian poppy and infected the streets with their craving. Greg Erving turned seventeen that year, and like most of the young men who weren’t sent to ’Nam, he went to work in the shop. His job at Chrysler didn’t last long. Erving disappeared to Toronto to play drums in a jazz band and get away from a woman who was nagging him for child support. When he returned, three months later, Chrysler informed Erving he’d been fired for going AWOL. In need of a new trade, he became a drug dealer. Music and narcotics went together, so he knew some guys who could h
ook him up. At first, he just sold marijuana. After his brother was arrested for dealing heroin, Erving took over that operation. He was a successful dope dealer—all the money he needed, all the pussy he wanted—until he met a woman who asked, “Why don’t you try balling when you’re high?” He tried it. He liked it. After that, he was nothing but a junkie and drunk.

  “The riot didn’t destroy Detroit,” Erving says. “That’s bullshit. There was a riot in 1943. It didn’t do anything. The riot was the riot. Drugs destroyed Detroit. The auto plants left, and people needed to make a living, so they started to hustle. You had white people coming in from the suburbs to buy heroin. By 1974, it was off the chain.”

  With its bounty of military contracts, the Vietnam War had at first looked so promising for Detroit. But beginning in the mid-1960s, as heroin was introduced to the city, and more and more multistory factories went dark, Detroit’s murder score increased geometrically. In 1966, it inched ahead of the record body count from the days of Prohibition, with 175 killings. The next year—the year of the riot—it was 220. The year after that—when heroin began to take hold—303. By 1974, the year Erving described as “off the chain,” 714 people were murdered in Detroit. Motown was so terrifying that even Motown left town—Berry Gordy Jr. moved his record label to Los Angeles, leaving only that monument to civic obsolescence, a museum. The Motor City picked up a new, unwanted nickname: Murder City.

  Heroin’s answer to the Purple Gang was Young Boys Inc., or YBI, a crew founded by street thug Milton “Butch” Jones after he returned to Detroit from serving a four-year sentence for manslaughter. According to Jones’s self-published autobiography (which is probably as much of a fable as any memoir by Jack Kerouac or Ernest Hemingway), he began his street career at fifteen as an arsonist and contract killer. (“I could easily kill somebody and not lose a second of sleep,” he wrote. “That’s when you know you a real O.G.”) With its near-parody of ghetto argot and its author’s determination to present a gangsta image, the book would be risible if it weren’t about shooting people and employing children to sell drugs.

  True to his crew’s name, Jones was a pioneer in the use of child labor, since juveniles could not be prosecuted in adult courts. In the Jeffries Projects, Detroit’s tallest, grimmest slum, the cops were pulling $2,000 rolls out of sixth graders’ pockets. Selling packets stamped with the brand names Dyno, Murder One, CBS, and Check Mate (like many ex-cons, Jones had become a chess buff in prison), YBI was running up $400,000 a week in sales. The police estimated 5 percent of Detroit was hooked on heroin, and YBI was satisfying 90 percent of the demand.

  “It was just like any other business, such as Ford or General Motors,” Jones wrote. “I had an assembly line, I was rollin’ so strong at that particular time that I had three hookup crews that worked an eight hour shift and hooked up dope twenty-four hours a day.”

  Jones bought a Corvette every week, until he owned enough to organize a Vette parade to Cedar Point, an amusement park in Ohio. He bought a DeLorean, but like most DeLoreans, it shorted out on the highway, so he traded it in for another Corvette. After four years as the CEO of a heroin ring, Jones estimated he had saved $5 million. He was the Henry Ford II, the Berry Gordy Jr., and the Lee Iacocca of the heroin trade.

  YBI first came to the attention of Carl Taylor outside a Gap Band concert at Joe Louis Arena, the city’s hockey rink/music hall. Taylor, a former Michigan State University football player, had a Ph.D. in sociology but was enough of a tough guy to run a security company with a contract to keep peace at big shows. When he saw a fleet of limousines pull up, he thought the band had arrived. Then five young men in matching red sweatsuits and white sneakers stepped out. Taylor thought the boys might be a track team, until he noticed the gold cables around their necks. From the police, Taylor learned they were heroin dealers, operating in his old neighborhood. Taylor had seen plenty of drug dealers, but none with so much money—at the concession stand, they paid from many-leaved discs of cash—or so much cool. Seeing a way to combine his doctorate and his street knowledge, Taylor spent most of the 1980s interviewing Detroit gangbangers, during the years when crack replaced heroin as the drug Nancy Reagan told America to turn down.

  (When Butch Jones was arrested in 1982, he blamed the First Lady’s visit to Detroit for bringing heat on him: “She’d gotten information that we were sellin’ drugs to children, which was a lie, but that’s all she needed to hear. After she got back to Washington, in no time at all, a task force was sent back to Detroit to hunt us down and break up Young Boys Incorporated.” Jones was sentenced to twelve years in federal prison, which he thought was unjust, since he’d only committed state crimes. As he wrote, “either we have laws or we don’t.” After Jones was released, the feds pinned sixty-eight murders on him and he took another thirty-year sentence to avoid becoming the first Michigander in a hundred and fifty years to receive the death penalty.)

  Detroit’s heroin trade even had its own novelist. Donald Goines got hooked on heroin while serving a stint in the army, in the early 1950s. When he came home to Detroit, he was a full-blown junkie, pimping, dealing drugs, bootlegging liquor, and breaking into houses to get money for a fix. This landed him in the state penitentiary at Jackson, where he began writing blaxploitation novels inspired by his idol, ghetto author Iceberg Slim.

  Dopefiend, Goines’s first published book, is the story of Porky, an obese, misanthropic pusher who relishes the power drugs give him over his customers. When a pregnant woman visits his house, desperate for a score, Porky orders her to have sex with a dog. Humiliated, she hangs herself. Porky also delights in hooking an innocent department store clerk on heroin. Fired for stealing a dress to support her habit, she ends up selling her car, then herself.

  In the three years after Dopefiend’s publication, Goines wrote like a teletype machine, cranking out another fifteen novels. His career was brief. In 1974, Goines and his wife were murdered in their Highland Park apartment, victims of the same street violence the author had chronicled. Since his death, Goines’s books have sold over five million copies. His novel Never Die Alone was made into a movie starring DMX, and he has won a place as a godfather of rap, inspiring lyrics by Nas, Tupac Shakur, Grand Puba, and Ludacris.

  Crack was Detroit’s second-generation drug. Heroin created the gang culture that sold the new drug, and the underclass of fiends who consumed it. Crack was made for the eighties—it was a bigger rush than heroin, and it was smoked, rather than injected, sparing the user the risk of AIDS. Crack was much more popular, and much more profitable, than heroin. As a result, the competition to sell it was even more violent.

  John Givans, who’d been a young man living near Chene Street during the Detroit riot, joined the army in 1984. After three years in Germany, he mustered out to look after his declining grandfather. As a welcome home, Givans’s best friend invited him to share a bag of weed and a pint of Hennessey, just like they’d done before he went into the service. But this time, Givans’s best friend had something new to smoke. He called it a rock. Everyone up and down Chene was smoking it now. It made the women even skinnier than junkies.

  “I saw girls that I went to school with that looked like they were seventy, eighty years old,” Givans remembered. “No teeth. They looked like Jewish POWs from the Holocaust.”

  A mile east of Chene, at 1350 East Grand Boulevard, was a four-story vintage apartment building known in its respectable days as the Broad-moor. The Broadmoor would become the most renowned dope house in the history of crack. The Chambers Brothers, a family of poor blacks from the Arkansas Delta, had migrated to Detroit looking for factory work. They discovered they could make a lot more money dealing drugs. The brothers got their start selling nickel bags and pills from a party store owned by a family friend on Chalmers Street. (The friend had opened the store after receiving a $20,000 severance check from Ford.) When crack hit the Midwest, in the mid-1980s, the brothers were well capitalized enough to expand their line.

  “I saved some mon
ey,” Billy Joe Chambers explained to a radio interviewer decades later, after he’d done a twenty-piece in federal prison. “When the heavy stuff came, which was cocaine, I had the money to jump. It exploded into one of the world’s largest epidemics, not just in Detroit. This was something flagrant in every state and city. It was pretty much like running a business. You’ve got to keep cars on the road. You’ve got to keep houses supplied. Money piles up every day. You’ve got girls everywhere. You’ve got people trying to get on the payroll. You’re buying whatever you want, you’re eating whatever you want, you’re going wherever you want. And all the time, you’ve got the police gunning for you.”

  The Chambers Brothers sold drugs from dozens of bungalows on the East Side, but they made the Broadmoor their flagship location, just as the Hudson’s in downtown Detroit had been the flagship of the department store chain, until it closed in 1983. People would no longer come into the city to buy clothes, but they would come in to buy crack. Slinging rock was the most profitable trade the East Side had to offer. In their best year, the Chambers brothers grossed $55 million, more money than any legitimate merchant in Detroit.