An old woman stood up.
“All of a sudden, everybody want to put farms in here,” she complained. “What about housing? We’re an industrial city. We want houses!”
Janice did not explain that housing was not a profitable use of land on the East Side. In 2011, nobody was building houses anywhere. Property values were wallowing all over the country. Nowhere were they wallowing deeper than inner-city Detroit, where houses were selling for less than $20,000. What builder could turn a profit in that market? To sell a house in Detroit, you had to find someone who wanted to live in Detroit, and over the last decade, people had been leaving for heaven, the suburbs, or Alabama at the rate of fifty-five a day. The demographers predicted Detroit would bottom out at half a million, one-quarter its peak population. Janice didn’t say any of that. She said: “One of the reasons we have so little as we have is we are not together.”
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Janice met me at a Coney Island diner on the corner of Mack and Mount Elliot Avenues. The Coney Island—a wiener with both tails overlapping the bun, smothered in loose chili and mustard—is a delicacy invented in Detroit and as central to its culinary identity as crab cakes are to Baltimore. A Coney dog, a basket of French fries, and a can of Vernor’s constitutes a complete Detroit dinner.
I arrived at the diner early, allowing me to witness a confrontation between the Asian owner and a customer who insisted he was entitled to a can of pop with his order.
“The sign outside said you get a pop with your meal,” the customer argued.
“Only from eleven to two,” the owner pointed out.
“Well, it didn’t say that.”
After much aggrieved shouting, the man got his pop. But even as he drank it, another argument was taking place at the counter of a takeout joint or a party store somewhere else in the city. The owners were always Asian or Arab. The customers were always black. Only one thing would have shocked me more than seeing an African-American standing next to a cash register of a liquor store: seeing an Arab buy a can of beer there. Detroit’s politics are based on the postcolonial relationship between the black city and the white suburbs. In his last election before going to jail, Kwame Kilpatrick had won a come-from-behind victory by campaigning on the slogan “Our Mayor” (not Theirs) and spreading the word on the street that his mulatto opponent was the son of an Austrian war bride. For the electoral whipping he received, the hapless opponent might as well have been all white. At the retail level of racial resentment, though, most of the animosity is directed toward foreigners. Outside a Chinese restaurant, I heard a man complain, “The Asians lost the war, now they’re trying to win the economic war, by ripping off black people and white people.” Chaldeans, the Iraqi Christians who own most of the liquor stores, are referred to as “motherfucking Caledonians.” The Arabs return the suspicion by doing business behind bulletproof glass that, were it ice, would be thick enough to drive a four-by-four across.
As a fellow American and English speaker, I rarely received dirty looks on the East Side. There was the guy in the park at the corner of Chene and Ferry who suspected I was a cop because “it’s not normal to see a white person sitting out here,” but that had more to do with the kind of white person I am—clean-cut, bespectacled. Plenty of poor white folks showed up at Pastor Steve’s church for free clothes, but no one suspected them of being undercover.
LIKE HER NEIGHBORS, Janice Harvey wanted housing, too. So many houses had disappeared from the East Side during her seven decades, and with them all the other appurtenances of urban life. First went the white people, most of them Italian. Then after the “rebellion” of 1967, the bakeries, the movie theaters, the bowling alleys, the schools, and the supermarkets closed. Finally, the next-door neighbor moved out. Then the man on the corner. A film of the neighborhood’s history would run forward for 266 years from the arrival of French explorer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac to the riot, then backward at triple speed. Janice’s block consisted of three houses, followed by three vacant lots. Dot, dot, dot. Dash, dash, dash. The missing houses had been abandoned, lost for back taxes and bulldozed, or burned down by absentee owners.
(After 1967, Janice also started seeing the bulletproof glass and behind it, the Levantine faces, “’cause black folks weren’t about to take that chance.”)
Living in the Motor City without a car, Janice bought her office supplies, computer supplies, and cleaning supplies online, bought her food at the markets that marked up prices as the fruit spoiled. Once a month, she took a bus to a suburban mall. (“They got everything out in the suburbs,” she marveled. “You go down those Mile Roads, and they got all kinds of devices.”)
“We’re well suited for housing,” Janice said of her neighborhood. “GM people need houses, all the sports arenas. We’re right here in the midst of everything. There’s no reason we can’t bring back the fabric of the neighborhood. There are folks who had to leave because the houses fell down around them. They would come back to be near family. They can’t afford a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar house.”
Until the housing market recovered, though Janice didn’t mind living near a farm.
“I could see it as a temporary Band-Aid for vacant land to be cared for, and when the dollars are there again, we can build,” she said. “People are concerned about odors and rodents, but it makes a monkey out of doing nothing. It’s stimulating some conversation on what else can we do?”
AT THE CORNER of Palmer and Jesus Saves, Eric the scrapper was cutting apart an elevator frame with a propane blowtorch. Inside the shaft was one of Packard’s spookiest vistas. Bricks knocked out of the wall had left a hole with digital outlines. Staring back through that glassless window was a graffito face, its mouth puckered in surprise. From the right distance and the right angle, the outline of the face and the edges of the hole aligned perfectly, as though a man were trapped back there. Adding to the image of confinement, the elevator cage had collapsed over the opening, once Eric cut away its supporting struts.
To protect his eyes, Eric wore a pair of metal sunglasses. Work gloves covered less than half his bare forearms. Eric’s jeans were heavy with dirt and sweat. With his stringy hair, ropy frame, and gaunt forty-five-year-old face, he looked like a junkyard Iggy Pop. As his focused blue flame burned through the steel, a fountain of miniature fireworks sparkled on the metal.
Eric tossed a cut away beam onto a clanking pile. The cage door sagged, until it dangled from a chain beyond the blowtorch’s reach.
“There’s probably three, four hundred dollars here,” he said. “This is going to be melted down and turned into a car, turned into a toaster, whatever. This is the hardest work I’ve ever done, and I’ve worked seven days a week. I can only do this for two or three more weeks and then I have to figure something else to do.”
That sounds like a lot of work for $400, but it was the only work that suited Eric: he was a felon, he didn’t like “dealing with a boss,” and he’d dropped out of school at fourteen to learn how to wield a blowtorch in his father’s auto body shop.
“There’s scrap yards all over town. It’s metal. Doesn’t matter how dirty or rusty it is, they’ll take it.”
As Eric carried the propane torch and tank back to his truck, a goth scrapper with a silver nose ring and gray face tattoos ran out of a building across the alley. In one hand, he carried a circular saw. In the other, a coiled rope.
“Look at this!” he shouted. “I’ll bet this hasn’t been seen by human eyes in eighty years. This is good quality hemp. You could probably smoke it.”
It seems astonishing that, after five decades of scavenging, there is anything of value left in the Packard plant. But the freelance dismantling of Packard is a microcosm of the scrapping of an entire neighborhood. There are no longer enough jobs to support the citizenry, so the citizenry is consuming every last bit of leftover wealth it can find. It’s a given that any abandoned house will be stripped of its copper pipes and its boiler. The crews don’t always wait until a house is abando
ned. Crack-heads pry bricks off houses, sell them for a dime apiece. East Siders have returned from two-week vacations to find their homes looted.
“Once somebody knows you’re not living in a house, they will take everything,” a former neighborhood resident told me. “The windows, the plumbing. My mother moved to the West Side because they were shooting every day, shooting the windows. She said she’d rather move to a safe neighborhood than stay where she’s been the last twenty-five years. She was thinking of renting the house or giving it to the church. Once someone knew we weren’t living there, they stole the stove. They stole my six-thousand-dollar gym, and then they burned the house up.”
Eric threw the propane tank into the bed of his truck.
“You know,” he told me, “when you started coming around here, I thought you were a cop, ’cause you were asking so many questions.”
“I’m not a cop,” I said. “I’m an author. I showed you that book I wrote, Young Mr. Obama, with my picture on the cover.”
“Yeah, but they coulda had that printed up,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing they do to make you undercover.”
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, Chene Street. Chene Street, in high summer, is a timeless place. Nobody moves fast, because nobody has any place to go. On Chene Street, there is no place to go. The only businesses: a liquor store, run by Yemenis, selling cans of beer and bottles of sweet wine that slow the street people even more; a deli and a gas station that stay open only because they’re close to the General Motors plant across the highway.
The plant is officially known as Detroit/Hamtramck Assembly, but everyone calls it Poletown, after the ethnic ghetto that was torn down to make room for it in 1981. When GM chose Detroit as the site of its first new auto plant in Michigan since the 1950s, Mayor Coleman Young was so eager to accommodate the company that he rammed a “quick take” eminent domain law through the state legislature, then used it to condemn fourteen hundred houses and sixteen churches. Poletown, Young said, was marked for demolition because it surrounded the recently closed Dodge Main plant, the only suitable site for an auto factory. Young’s critics accused him of serving up Poletown because it accomplished two political ends: portraying himself as the mayor who was reindustrializing Detroit, and ridding the city of thousands of white voters whose political philosophy went no farther than the third letter of the alphabet: Anybody But Coleman. The news media loved the conflict, because it gave them an opportunity to portray urban working-class ethnics as victims, not racists. Poletown flipped the embattled-white-neighborhood narrative on its head. These hardworking Catholics were defending their parishes not from infiltration by poor blacks, but from destruction by a powerful black mayor. This time, the blacks were the racists, not the whites. Ralph Nader, who had made his name by taking on GM, returned to Detroit for another round, organizing the Poletown Support Team to help residents fight eviction. The left-wing Village Voice ran a cover story condemning Detroit for giving tax abatements to GM. William Safire, the New York Times’s house conservative, praised the Poletowners for defending their property rights. The story reached a picturesque crescendo when a SWAT team evicted bitter-end parishioners from the basement of Immaculate Conception Church. A Detroit Free Press photographer snapped a picture of a seventy-year-old woman in crepe-soled shoes shouting from the back of a paddy wagon. That fall, Young was reelected to a third term, by his biggest margin ever.
Detroit/Hamtramck Assembly eventually employed six thousand autoworkers, but it was another disaster for the East Side. Chene Street had once run straight through to Hamtramck. Now it dead-ended into an auto plant, cutting off the neighborhood from the Midwestern Warszawa to the north.
“When they put that in, it completely sealed off Chene Street from Hamtramck,” said Marian Krzykowski, the Chene Street historian. “It was a nail in the coffin. It was devastating. It was a working-class, diverse, viable area. There were a lot of businesses. It was alive. Once that plant came in, that was the end. For the next twenty years, they just went down, down.”
None of those six thousand autoworkers moved into the neighborhood; anyone earning UAW wages could afford a house in the suburbs. (Managers in Detroit auto plants observe a “thirty-mile rule” when determining a safe distance to raise their families from Detroit.) Chene Street is now bleak enough to have provided the view out the window during Eminem’s bus ride in 8 Mile.
I bought a Daily 3 lottery ticket and a scratch-off at the deli. (The lottery terminal was perfectly located in the intertidal zone between the auto plant and the ghetto.) Then I walked south on Chene. The East-own Bar’s roof tiles had burned away, exposing blackened joists that a strong wind could have crumbled to ash. Carved below the flat roofline of another building: “W SMUCZYNSKI.” A windowless storefront church whose only sunlight struggled through bulletproof glass blocks. The Black Bottom Social Club, booming dance music. On the walls of an empty hip-hop clothing store (Rocawear, Sean John, Phat Farm) an artistic war was taking place. Guerilla art from a local commune competed with gang graffiti. It was the Yes Farm’s faceless red yogi, emanating rising-sun stripes, versus the tags of the Scorpios, 4 Life, East Side BG, and Black Gangstas. (What had happened to the cleverly named Chene Gang?)
In Chene-Ferry Park, I sat down next to a man drinking a can of Milwaukee’s Best Ice and scratched the gray latex off my lottery ticket with a quarter. Then I gave the quarter to the beer drinker.
“If you win the lottery, come back with a drink,” he requested. “You drink?”
I do, but not in the way he meant it, not as a pastime.
On the way back up the street, I paused in front of a bakery so freshly arsoned it smelled like cinders, and exhaled cool air. The Yes Farm had struck here, too, replacing the pastries with concrete layer cakes, painted pink and turquoise: Miami Beach colors for black-and-white Chene Street. Oscar Watkins, a fifty-year-old man wearing all his worldly possessions, stopped there, too. For two bucks—the price of checkbook journalism on Chene—he narrated the street’s commercial history.
“This was Max’s Furniture Store, before it was converted into a bakery,” he said of the building in front of us. “That was Kowalski Sausage, then it turned into a T-shirt shop. Over there was a bank. Then it was a Coney Island. Then it went out of business.”
Oscar himself had been a fixture on the street since 1984, shortly after the GM plant opened. He’d intended to get into the auto industry himself, but after he could no longer afford tuition at a technical school, and his mother died, he “got weak, started selling crack and heroin.” He said, “I know the Chambers Brothers. I was my best fuckin’ customer. Before I knew it, I had a motherfuckin’ jones.” Unable to find a job because of a retail fraud conviction, he’d turned in bricks, aluminum, and pallets at the Chene-Ferry Market, when it was a recycling center.
“Now I just do the hustle,” he said. “One of my son’s friends is moving out and he’s paid up until the third of next month, so I can stay at his place. Rest of the time, I stay at vacant houses here and there.”
On my way back up the street, a man ran out of Peacemakers International—Pastor Steve’s church—calling after me, “You got a cell phone? There’s some guy laying in the grass.”
On our way to investigate, we passed the Milwaukee’s Best Ice drinker, walking in the opposite direction.
“Hey,” he asked me. “Can you give me a ride home?”
“I gotta deal with this,” I said, to put him off.
We searched the lot but didn’t find anyone lying drunk among the weeds.
“You know, I think that guy who walked past us was him,” the man said. “I remember when he still had his mind.”
The last thing I did before leaving Chene-Ferry Park was buy a camera for three dollars. I didn’t need a camera, especially not a point-and-shoot film camera, but I wanted to talk to the gaunt man who was trying to sell it, and I thought three dollars would be an icebreaker. Here at the very bottom of the economy, even human interaction has a financi
al component, especially when someone like this author, who looks like he has disposable income—or at least loose change—appears on the scene. Because at the corner of Chene and Ferry, everyone needs money, all the time. Let the investment counselors at T. Rowe Price talk about thirty-year bond yields and long-term financial planning. The guys who hang out at Chene and Ferry measure their financial goals in minutes and hours. Habitually destitute, they are looking for just enough to pay for the next $5 rock of crack, the next $1.99 can of beer, the next 99 cent bag of potato chips. Besides a camera, I got this story for my three dollars:
“Do you mind if I drink? I keep it in the bag. I’m solo. I just come out here and sit under the tree. My name is J. C. Hood, all good in the neighborhood. I’ve been over here since ’07. My people have a house over here they let me stay in. I’m upstairs and my uncle downstairs. It’s an old house, almost on its last legs. No utilities, no heat, no water, no lights. No phone. I got a propane heater and a bed. I eat out and I bathe out, at the Capuchin Soup Kitchen at Mount Elliot and St. Paul. I get my clothes from Crossroads and Capuchin. I earn about five thousand dollars a year, hustling. I collect cans at Tigers games. Any kind of major event, I’m gonna try to catch it. I ride my bike, man, for hours, looking for stuff. I found a pair of boots. I can get five dollars. Houses, doors be open. You go in there, you can find a lot of stuff. Foreclosures, people just leave their stuff there. I’ve found TVs, stereos. I eat and take a bath and try to hustle, get money for cigarettes or something, and then my day is over.
“I went to high school in Alabama. I moved up to Detroit when I was twenty-two, to stay with my father. I went to prison for petty armed robbery. I used a knife. I got eighty-one dollars. When I ran around the corner, I thought I’d got away but my man was on me. When the police drew down on me, I thought, ‘Man, I should have kept running.’
“I got five to fifteen years. I did all of it. I’ve been to every joint in Michigan. I learned a cooking trade, but the people in the restaurants, they be afraid to hire me. I worked in a 3M welding plant, but they fired me for poor work performance. I was having incidents with the other guys. On the job, people will try to get you fired. I’m unemployed. I collect food stamps. I’m trying to see what my disability’s going to be. The correction officers bent my hands back when I was locked up. I also suffer from depression. I’ve had a rough life. I’ve turned my life over to the Lord, and I think I’m over that drug thing.
Nothin' but Blue Skies Page 35
