Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  When Nadine appealed to an official in the company’s labor management department, the official told her, “Take it or leave it. You do this or you’ll be out of a job.”

  Had Nadine turned down the offer, she would have been ineligible for unemployment. So she signed. Right away, her life went to hell, inside and outside the plant. As a single woman, Nadine had no one at home to share expenses. She canceled her cable and her Internet. That left her with just enough money to pay the mortgage.

  “I am living like I’m on unemployment or welfare,” Nadine said bitterly. “I’m struggling to make my mortgage payments, to live. I’m losing five hundred to seven hundred dollars a week. I can’t afford to do anything. At work, it’s ‘Oh, what are you doing on shutdown? I’m going to Florida.’ ‘Oh great, I’m trying not to lose my house.’ I have nothing in common with people I work with. After I put gas in my car, pay late bills and late fees, I have twenty dollars left to eat for a week and a half. I still owe money on a foot surgery from over two years ago. It’s devastated my life. I’ve lost friends over it. I’ve lost family over it. I can’t socialize.”

  GM promised to raise Nadine’s pay when it added a third shift but ended up filling those jobs with workers from Delphi Automotive, a parts supplier that had sold some of its operations to the company. Workers with less seniority were earning more money than Nadine, which “really raised my rage.” To add insult to poverty, Nadine was still working on the main assembly line instead of the easier, nonassembly work supposed to be assigned to Tier Twos. Whenever she got off the turnpike at Lordstown, her dread of the upcoming shift generated “a horrible feeling in the pit of [her] stomach.” All night, as she installed brake boosters, Nadine reminded herself that her situation was not the car’s fault or the customer’s fault. It was the only way to prevent her acid anger toward GM and the UAW from eroding her work ethic. Really, the only thing that kept her coming to the plant every day was the lawsuit against what she knew was an illegal contract. If she quit, she would lose her standing as an advocate for all the Tier Twos at all the GM plants.

  “The only reason I’m still there,” she said, “is that I know it’s easier to fight this battle from the inside.”

  TOM LAVEY FINALLY WENT BACK to work in the spring of 2010, designing floor mats for Ford. He was a contractor, meaning his company badge was piped with a green stripe, rather than the blue stripe that identified full-time employees.

  “I’m making more money than I did before the layoff, but it’s not secure,” he said. “Even if they give you a blue stripe, it’s not secure. A lot of people don’t trust the car industry anymore. A lot of engineers left to go to Indiana to work at Navistar. I’ve got a five-year-old car, and I’m going to drive it into the ground. I’m check to check. That’s the way everybody feels deep down.”

  IN MICHIGAN, the 2000s are known as “the Lost Decade.” The Rust Belt was the site of the nation’s first Great Recession, in the early 1980s. The first was deeper than the second—in 1982, Michigan’s unemployment rate was 14.3 percent, a figure not even 2009 could touch—but it was briefer, and it did not result in a permanent diminution of Michiganders’ standard of living. Michigan was the only state to lose population in the 2000s. In 2000, Michigan’s per capita income was eighteenth among states. By 2009, it was thirty-seventh. The poverty rate, once fifth lowest, was 14.4 percent—in the top twenty. Even the obesity rate ballooned to 31.5 percent, putting Michigan among the five fattest states, in the same league of avoirdupois as Alabama and West Virginia. In college degrees, Michigan fell from thirtieth to thirty-fifth as half the graduates left the state in search of work, like Okies with BAs and BSs, reversing the migration from the South that had built it into a mega-state of the mid-twentieth century. (By the early twenty-first, Michigan would be surpassed by Georgia and North Carolina.) “There’s nothing for them here,” explained a retired Oldsmobile engineer whose children had dispersed to Colorado and California. The unemployment, the low education rate, and the fissured, potholed roads inspired Michiganders to nickname their state “Michissippi.” It may be even more backward, as racial resentments dating back to the 1960s prevent black Detroit and its white-flight suburbs from acknowledging Michigan can no longer afford so many municipalities. That’s one reason Michigan’s cities are more decrepit and more destitute than any other state’s. Benton Harbor, Pontiac, and Flint are so broke their operations have been taken over by emergency financial managers, appointed by the governor. Detroit is to urban blight what Paris is to romance. In Lansing, the shopping center where my family once shopped for groceries, graduation clothes, haircuts, birthday cakes, and garden tools is now anchored by a Laundromat, a Food for Less, a dollar store, and a plasma center—our very own PoorMart, where a few faded Oldsmobiles and pickup trucks with “$500/ OBO” signs float on a lake of asphalt.

  The last three chapters of this book will tell the stories of three Michigan cities—Detroit, Flint, and Lansing—at the end of the Lost Decade.

  14.

  The Corner of Palmer and Jesus Saves

  Perrien Park, on the East Side of Detroit, is a city block of unmown grass. Its rising green tide laps the legs of a jungle gym and a swing set, concealing the deck of a squeaky merry-go-round. “Keep Off the Grass” signs are unnecessary, because the grass grows waist high, almost as tall as on the prairie. Walking through the park, the only pedestrian on the concrete path that cuts a neat bend sinister through the disorderly vegetation, I spotted a house with this sign on its fence: “PUPPIES FOR SALE.” Not looking for a dog, just looking to talk to a stranger in a strange city, I crossed the street. In a penned-in dirt yard, a pit bull bitch nursed her eight-week-old litter. On the verge of weaning, the mother growled whenever a puppy nipped her teats.

  “You want one?” asked their owner, a bleary, redheaded man.

  “I live in Chicago,” I said. “I couldn’t get it home.”

  “I go to Chicago all the time. You know Fox Lake?” he asked, naming a resort village near Wisconsin. “I know a woman there. What are you doing in this neighborhood?”

  Not an unexpected inquiry. The East Side is the most depopulated quarter of the most depopulated city in the United States. Judging from Perrien Park, even Detroit city hall has forgotten it’s there. Across from Joe’s house was a six-unit brick apartment building, vintage pre-Depression, with six units to let.

  “I’m writing a book,” I said. I hesitated before making that confession, but Joe didn’t seem like the type of Detroiter who would scold me for voyeurism. He encouraged voyeurism.

  “Do you have a camera?” he asked.

  “Just the one on my cell phone. I left my big camera at the motel.”

  “You’ve got to see the Packard plant. You can get some great pictures. My buddy owns the six-plex, the Quonset hut.”

  “All right,” I said. “Get in the car.”

  If you’re watching a black-and-white movie starring William Powell, Monty Woolley, or Adolphe Menjou, and a touring sedan pulls up in front of a country manor, there’s a good chance that sedan is a Packard, one of the “three Ps” of American luxury cars, along with Pierce-Arrow and Peerless. In the chambers of the Packard plant, designed by renowned industrial architect Albert Kahn and constructed on thirty-seven acres of an old cattle pasture in the heart of Detroit, cars were not assembled, they were crafted. Woodworkers machined and varnished frames and trim. Coachwork was built by hand in the body shop; the chassis and undercarriage were painted with detailed brushstrokes.

  During World War II, Packard, like all American auto companies, shifted to defense work, building engines for aircraft and naval vessels. Unlike Ford, Chrysler, and GM, which grew to Big Threeness after the war by selling millions of cars to a nation with blue balls for American iron, Packard never recovered from the interruption. Military work damaged its tooling, and even before Pearl Harbor, it had outsourced body building to the Briggs Body Company. When Briggs sold out to Chrysler in 1953, Packard abandoned its anti
quated multistory factory and set up an assembly line in the vacant Briggs building.

  The new plant was so ill suited to mass production that cars came off the line with loose wires, doors that didn’t shut, radios that wouldn’t play music, clocks that couldn’t keep time. Packard lost $30 million that year. Five years later, it was out of business.

  Detroit has been called a calamity in slow motion. What war and natural disaster wreaked on Berlin and New Orleans, fifty years of neglect has wreaked on Detroit. But Detroit has been emptied out by two social forces that, in America, are more powerful than bombs or hurricanes: racial conflict and the free market.

  On the way to the plant, Joe insisted we stop at a party store.

  “A guy who owes me money is there,” he said.

  Once Joe had his money, he directed me down East Palmer Street. We passed a brick viaduct lettered like an unfinished crossword: “MO OR CITY IN U TR L PARK.” At a telephone pole with a crosswise board painted “JESUS SAVES,” I turned right, down an alley whose east side was defined by a three-story factory. A Quonset-hut skyline defined its west. An ochre pit bull walked a butterfly path between them.

  “That’s my dog Bruno,” Joe said.

  Nearly sixty years after the last Packard left, the building still contained enough steel, timber, and rope to provide income for a tribe of scrappers who worked and lived there. Joe pushed aside a chain-link gate barring a Quonset hut’s bay door. An RV loomed in the doorway. In the darkness, in the depths, was a vintage Cadillac.

  “They do a lot of body work here,” Joe explained.

  The chief body man was sitting in a lawn chair with a bottle of Wild Irish Rose between his feet. His name was Al, and he lived in an apartment somewhere in this garage, with his roommate, Greg, a black exjunkie.

  “Are you going to heaven?” Al shouted rheumily at me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Only God knows.”

  “Do you believe Jesus Christ is the son of God and your personal savior?” Al demanded.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then you’re going to heaven!” he shouted. “You should know that!”

  Al unscrewed the bottlecap to pour another inch of bellicosity into himself. Following his bibulous example, Greg pulled a half pint of vodka out of his shorts, leaning on a cane for balance as he lifted the bottle.

  “So when are you going to show me around this place?” I asked Joe.

  “You haven’t quite met my terms,” he said.

  “I’ll buy you a beer after we go,” I promised.

  We set off down the alley, toward the berm of rubble blocking its far end.

  “In here,” Joe directed, guiding me through a doorless doorway into a room I can only describe as a gallery of destruction. The floor was covered in soaked and yellowed papers, timbers broken raggedly in half, bricks pried from walls, garbage bags, cinder blocks, plastic water bottles. (Beer and pop bottles would have been collected and redeemed for their deposits, in the spirit of stripping the plant down to its last dime of salvageable material.) The graffiti was as intricate as Islamic design or the most heavily decorated New York subway car of 1977. “DECAY,” read one message. (The British graffiti artist Banksy had visited Packard, either to validate it as one of the world’s great spray-can art collections, or to validate himself by working among urban blight impossible to find in Europe, where socialistic governments don’t allow cities to fall apart. Banksy painted a boy holding a bucket of paint, next to the words “I remember when this was all trees.” Suddenly valuable, the wall was cut away and peddled to an art gallery. The producers of the third Transformers movie filmed several crash/explosion scenes at the plant.)

  We inched up a ramp, Joe stopping every few feet to aspirate a high-G whistle that reverberated in the empty room. Was he communicating with a confederate, hidden behind one of the pillars that formed a grove of concrete trunks? Following a stranger through an abandoned building—especially a dipsomaniac, pit-bull-breeding stranger—only a fool wouldn’t be wary of a mugging. Detroit is both the friendliest and deadliest big city in America, for the same reason: it’s poor. If poor people have anything to share—beer, tobacco, food—they’ll share it with you. If they don’t, they’ll knock you over the head and make you share what you have. If I talked to a stranger about his dog in Bloomfield Hills, suburban hometown of Mitt Romney, he wouldn’t invite me to the country club. But I wouldn’t have to worry about getting jumped, either. I had to hope Joe was showing me Detroit’s generous side.

  In the next room, we encountered a bearded young man burdened by a college student’s backpack. He was staring at a clipboard.

  “This is kind of like real-life Dungeons and Dragons,” I said.

  Now that our expedition had a third member, Joe played it like a trucker who’s just picked up a spare hitchhiker.

  “Do you guys want to go up on the roof?” he asked me and the bearded kid, a broad-faced Pole from Hamtramck named Bartosz. “If you do, we’re going to have to negotiate a fee. I don’t do this for free. I know this place like the back of my hand.”

  Joe flashed his florid knuckles.

  “How long is the tour?” Bartosz asked.

  “About half an hour.”

  “How about five dollars?”

  Joe hedged.

  “I’ll buy you some beer,” I offered again.

  “I’ll buy you some beer too,” Bartosz said.

  “Okay,” Joe said. “That sounds good.”

  Joe whistled as he entered each cavern, mumbling, “The boys might be here.” Finally, we arrived in a roofless arena known as “the Boathouse,” a dumping ground for speedboats and fishing boats whose owners who couldn’t make the payments and wanted to report a theft. Michigan has more licensed watercraft than any state, so why wouldn’t some of them end their voyages three miles from the river? Discarded itself, the plant collects discards—commercial, animal, and human. A brand-new pickup truck had been driven into an empty elevator shaft. Its hood was tilted into darkness, but its tailpipe angled toward the sky. The sun set its glossy golden paint aglow.

  “This thing has current tags,” I said, whipping out my cell phone to photograph the license plate.

  “Don’t take a picture of that,” Joe said, warning me. “It’s probably an insurance job. It won’t be discovered for three or four months. By then, they’ve got the money.”

  We climbed a stairwell of which nothing remained but chipped concrete stairs. On the roof, cottonwood trees grew from puddles in the asphalt. I looked over a ledge at an elementary school whose last pupils had left high school by now. Over another ledge was the only business in sight, the Packard Motel, a $50-a-night hostelry.

  “What brought you to this place?” Bartosz asked me.

  “I told Joe I was writing a book, and he told me I had to see this place.”

  “Oh, you’re writing a book,” he said. “I thought you were just some asshole from Chicago.”

  “You can do one and be the other,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve heard about this place ever since my family moved here from Poland, but this is the first time I’ve ever been here.”

  There’s a term for what Bartosz and I were doing in the Packard plant: urban exploration, the pastime of breaking into abandoned buildings for voyeuristic purposes. Urbex—its shorthand name—was popularized and promoted in the zine Infiltration, published by a Canadian trespasser who called himself Ninjalicious. Infiltration offered tips on scaling barbed wire fences, crawling through windows, disabling alarms, and evading security guards. Ninjalicious eventually compiled the handbook Access All Areas, as essential an urbex accessory as a flashlight or a digital camera.

  The Rust Belt, of course, is the heartland of urban exploration. Besides Detroit, the other golden cities are Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Gary—all places where manufacturing wealth paid for Gothic masterpieces which were left to rot when manufacturing disappeared. Buffalo’s grain elevators, for examp
le, are too expensive to maintain and too expensive to tear down—a perfect situation for urban explorers. Gary’s City Methodist Church looks as though it was shaken by an earthquake—rubble covers the floors, and the brick walls have split open, offering arbored vistas. City Methodist is so popular with photographers that Gary is considering preserving it as a “ruin garden.” Gary Screw and Bolt, where trees grow through fissures in the concrete and ten-foot-high drifts of old work uniforms molder on the shop floor, is such a trip into the Ozymandian future that it was featured on the History Channel’s Life After People. Packard is not even Detroit’s number one urbex destination: that would be the Michigan Central train station. The station is more convenient to the hostel, and its dome-ceilinged Great Hall is a work of architectural beauty whose disintegration is more poignant than that of a functional automobile plant. (Actor Michael Cera sneaked in while filming Youth in Revolt in Detroit, telling late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon he heard “terrifying” gunshots.) Urbex tourism is a conundrum for Detroit. The city can’t promote these attractions, for reasons of public safety and public image, so it discourages the tourists. “No Trespassing” signs are one method. Shame is another. Detroiters call photographs of their city’s collapse “ruin porn.” Ruin porn was actually pioneered by Detroiter Lowell Boileau on his website The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, which compares Detroit to Zimbabwe, Ephesus, El Tajin, Athens, and Rome. However, it was most successfully exploited for commercial and artistic purposes by photographer Andrew Moore, who spent three months among the ruins to produce Detroit Disassembled, a $50 coffee table book and a traveling exhibit that I happened to see at the Akron Art Museum. Its most arresting images were a Dali-inspired photograph of a melting clock, found in an old school, and an empty mental health ward in which someone had scrawled “God has left Detroit.”