Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  “People get kilt down here. Not recently. It is mellow, but if you carrying the wrong kind of attitude, you gonna have problems.

  “I love Detroit. I wish I could be beneficial to the city and state but I really haven’t figured it out.”

  DETROIT/HAMTRAMCK ASSEMBLY brought blight to Chene Street. Of all GM’s plants, though, it’s the best hope of reversing the blight the auto industry’s failure has visited on the entire state of Michigan. Sacrificing a neighborhood to save a city, or a state, is the sort of tough executive decision that separates visionary mayors from panderers to the sensibilities of liberal do-gooders. At the end of burned-out Chene Street, GM is building the Chevy Volt, its hybrid electric car, the car designed to a) end America’s dependence on foreign oil, and b) make General Motors look as environmentally and technologically progressive as the Europeans or the Japanese.

  The first time I saw the Volt, it was only a battery. This was in November 2008, the same month that GM CEO Rick Wagoner went to Washington, D.C., to beg Congress for a bailout. I was in a sterile testing room at the GM Tech Center in the Detroit suburb of Warren. Andrew Farah, the Volt’s chief engineer, handed me a lithium-ion power pack in a plastic sleeve. Farah had big hopes for that flat, rectangular fuel cell. Hopes that it was, at last, the innovation that would reverse General Motors’ decades-long degeneration from 50 percent of the U.S. market to landlord of the largest vacant lots in Flint, Saginaw, and Lansing.

  Before the Volt, GM had not thought up an original idea since it put a V-8 engine in the Oldsmobile. This was GM vice chairman Robert Lutz’s reaction to the Toyota Prius: “Hybrids are an interesting curiosity and we will do some, but do they make sense at $1.50 a gallon? No, they do not.”

  Hybrids do make sense at $4 a gallon, but of course, Toyota had cornered that market. Now, for once, stodgy old Papa Jimmy was going to be first at something. As Toyota was the hybrid company, Chevy would be the electric company. As Prius was a metonym for a hybrid, the Volt would become the electric car.

  “I want that brand right on my forehead,” Farah said, pointing at the space above his safety glasses.

  Farah worked on GM’s first failed attempt at a battery-powered automobile: the EV1, subject of the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? The EV1’s problem: the battery weighed 1,200 pounds. To wring 40 miles out of a single charge, the car was a two-seater, with no trunk.

  “You had to build the car around the battery,” he said.

  The lithium-ion battery weighed a third of that. The Volt would be an “extended-range” vehicle. Once the charge ran down, a gasoline engine would take over. But it wouldn’t power a drive train, as on a traditional vehicle. It would power the electrical system running the car.

  Because an electrical system is 50 percent more efficient than a drive train, the energy required to drive 40 miles on battery power is less than a gallon of gasoline. Fueling the Volt costs 2 cents a mile. At $4 a gallon, a gasoline-powered car costs 13 cents a mile.

  One of my old high school classmates was so eager to buy an electric car that he flew to New York (like so many other newfangled ideas, the Volt was first marketed in the coastal states before working its way inland to the cautious heartland), bought a car, and drove it back to Michigan. As Matt Stehouwer reported on his blog, voltfansite.com, in his first three weeks of driving to work, he covered 627 miles on 4.2 gallons of gas. The only problem? Matt, a technology manager at Michigan State University, was told to stop “stealing electricity” by charging his Volt on campus. So he charged the Volt at home, at night. The local utility gave him a 25 percent discount on electricity drawn between eleven P.M. and six A.M. and a $7,500 rebate to match the $7,500 tax credit he received from the federal government. As a result, his monthly lease payment was $250, the electricity was $25, the gas $20. When Matt had leased a Chevy Malibu, he’d spent $200 a month on gas, so he figured his net cost for owning a Volt was fifty bucks a month.

  Matt and his Volt met me in the parking lot of a Sears on the East Side of Lansing. The car was tricked out with a “VOLT 974” license plate and a garish green hood, patterned with stylized leaves and the word “Volt,” so he can proselytize to fellow tech nerds. He’d testified about the Volt before the Michigan House of Representatives and was interviewed on WJR, Detroit’s fifty-thousand-watt radio station. (“I haven’t seen a vehicle attract this much attention since I ran into someone on a Segway. Lot of ’em want to know how much I spend on gas a month. I tell ’em, ‘I don’t even look at gas prices.’”)

  Matt let me drive the car. On the highway. There is something anodyne about a Volt. It’s a car for people who need to get somewhere but would to like imagine they’re not getting there in a car. As satirist Neal Pollack once wrote about the Volt’s nemesis, the Prius, it’s “the concept of the car as energy-saving household appliance, something as utilitarian as a low-flow dishwasher.” The Volt makes no noise. It emits no exhaust. A graph of its acceleration would follow a perfectly flat forty-five-degree incline, because it has no gears. There’s no lag between second and third, but neither does the Volt communicate any feeling of power to its driver. The car barely offers a physical experience at all. Unlike every other vehicle in its price range, the Volt is not a luxury car or a muscle car. The cramped backseat is divided by the battery pack into two buckets. Volt buyers aren’t spending forty grand on aesthetics or mechanics; they want to make a social statement. Chuck Frank, an apostate Chevy dealer from Chicago who became one of the Sierra Club’s most generous donors, bought a Volt “because [he] wanted to reinforce [his] environmental credentials.” Matt didn’t care about the environment; he wanted to screw OPEC.

  “The energy is made by Americans, the car is made by Americans, and most of the parts are made by Americans,” he said. “You’re going to see a lot more Volts soon. Five dollars a gallon will force people into more economical cars. I keep telling my kids that they will not drive a gas car.”

  GM sold only 7,671 Volts in 2011, about three-quarters of its 10,000-car goal. Sales were so bad that Detroit/Hamtramck Assembly’s Volt line shut down for five weeks in the spring of 2012, so dealers could sell off some of the 150-day backlog. (During that layoff, former president George H. W. Bush bought a Volt for his son Neil, which may help overcome Tea Partyish hostility to a car that doesn’t run on gasoline, qualifies for a tax credit, and was built by “Government Motors.”)

  In year one, the car’s sales were less important than its Chevy name-plate. Even though the Volt is a tiny, expensive toy for environmental and technological fanboys—a $20,000 car for twice the money—GM made the right decision by rushing it into showrooms before the Chevy-, Honda-, and Toyota-driving masses could afford to buy one. Eventually, lithium-ion batteries will be cheaper. Eventually, apartment buildings and gas stations will install charging stations. Eventually, gas will cost $5 a gallon. When all that happens, a lot of people will buy electric cars. GM hopes that brand on its forehead is big enough to make them buy Volts.

  THURSDAY EVENING, Fort Street and Jefferson Avenue. Because the Packard Inn was the East Side’s only hostelry, I was staying in Cork-town, near the grassy lot representing the footprint of the old Tiger Stadium. My hotel’s parking lot was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, with a gate that squeaked aside when I swiped my room key. Before supper, I went for a run toward Hart Plaza, the spot along the Detroit River where Cadillac, the city’s founder, landed in 1701. (Detroit is the third-oldest city on the Great Lakes, after Sault Ste. Marie and Mackinac Island. All three occupied equally strategic positions for the French fur trade: the Soo controlled canoe traffic between lacs Huron et Superieur, Mackinac between Huron et Michigan, Detroit between Huron et Erie.) Downtown, all the traffic lights were blank. Cars lined up ten and twenty deep at the intersections. The next day, I planned to do some historical research at the Detroit Public Library on Woodward Avenue, the city’s longest, widest thoroughfare (Detroit is the best city in America for making a U-turn, because the streets are so broad a
nd so empty). The library was closed, due to the power outage. I crossed the street to the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, at Wayne State University. The lights were out there, too. All Wayne State was dark.

  The Detroit Public Lighting Department, the decrepit municipal utility, had shorted out under a hot-weather load. The blowout shut down most of Detroit’s public institutions, including city hall and the court house. That was my WTF moment in Detroit. That was the moment I thought, “I’m glad my boyhood dreams of Detroit didn’t come true.” It wasn’t the crime, or the arson, or the abandoned buildings, or the wild foxes denning among the weeds. Detroit was as incapable as Port-au-Prince or Lagos of keeping all its lights on all the time. The lighting company only collects half its bills, but even if it collected all the money, it couldn’t afford the $250 million necessary to modernize the system. The customer base is shrinking, but the grid stays the same size. That’s modern Detroit’s malady: it is no longer a functional city. It’s the lower-class district of a metropolitan area. The middle class has fled north, east, and west (and would flee south, too, if not for the international border), taking along the department stores, the supermarkets, the basketball team, the white-collar jobs, the movie theaters and concert halls, and prevented the poor from building a train to chase after them. (The suburb of Troy vetoed a terminal for a light rail line that would have followed Woodward Avenue out of Detroit, calling it a “heroin train.”) There is just no way that three-quarters of a million maids, busboys, bus drivers, scrap collectors, schoolteachers, artists, home health care aides, and secretaries can generate enough tax money to maintain an infrastructure built for two million autoworkers, engineers, dentists, accountants, professors, and electricians. Detroit levies a 2.5 percent income tax on residents and a 1.25 percent tax on commuters. Yet I know a woman whose neighborhood hires a private plowing service in the winter, because it’s the only way to guarantee snowless streets.

  “I wouldn’t move back to Detroit even if someone gave me a free house,” I once heard from a white riverboat captain who grew up on, then escaped, the city’s Southwest Side. “The garbage never gets picked up there.”

  The fewer services Detroit provides, the more residents it loses. The more residents it loses, the less it can afford to provide services. Highland Park, the city-within-the-city that is Detroit distilled to a few square miles of weedy streets, recently tore out 90 percent of its streetlights, because it can no longer pay the electric bill. Meanwhile, tony Oakland County, on the other side of 8 Mile Road, has one of the highest per capita incomes in the nation. Detroit can only become a city again by following the examples of Toronto and Indianapolis and consolidating the old urban core with the suburbs. That’s not likely to happen; the whites would complain about sharing tax dollars, the blacks about sharing power. (Detroiters are jealous of their control over the area’s water system.) Detroit and its suburbs will continue to revolve around each other like twinned planets, one black, one white, never touching but never able to break free into broader orbits.

  Janice Harvey had given me Detroit’s side of the urban-suburban antagonism: “Every time they want to talk regionalism, I get an attitude,” she said. “They owe Detroit an apology. They left us, they deserted us, they consumed us, and the courts said our infrastructure had to save them. They left their trash, they caused us problems, they burned their houses.”

  In 2012, the Detroit city council voted to accept a consent decree, which gave an unelected board oversight over Detroit’s finances. It was seen as the best way to avoid a state-appointed emergency manager with dictatorial powers. Benton Harbor and Flint, two other cities with large black populations, have been run by emergency managers, who are supposed to clean up the mess left by corrupt and/or incompetent mayors—Kwame Kilpatrick was corrupt and/or incompetent (he turned down a multimillion-dollar donation for new schools because he would not have had complete control over the money), but Detroit’s problems are deeper than the misrule of any hinky, kinky politician.

  Detroit may be the most American city. Europeans are fascinated by Detroit because their socialistic societies would never allow a city to rot. There’s no such thing as white flight in England or Germany, at least not on a metropolitan scale. And government-planned greenbelts prevent the urban sprawl that encourages escape from used-up cities. Detroit would even be impossible across the river in Canada, whose social planning does not allow cities (or individuals) to fail as they do in the United States. (In the song “American Woman,” the Canadian band the Guess Who tells the title character, “I don’t need your ghetto scenes.”)

  “It’s unique,” remarked an Irish tourist I met at Hostel Detroit. He was in town for Movement, the electronic music festival that attracts fans from all over the globe. “It went from being nothing to being the richest city in the world to this in a hundred years. There’s no other city like it in the world.”

  ON FRIDAY EVENING, Mike Hartnett stood on St. Aubin Street outside a restaurant named the Polish Yacht Club, overseeing the parking of Lincoln Navigators, Chrysler Sebrings, and Cadillac Escalades that were notably well polished and undented for the East Side.

  The Polish Yacht Club is always busy on Fridays, because it serves fried perch, an end-of-the-week sacrament for Roman Catholics. It was founded as a tavern in 1909, by an immigrant named Stanislaus Grendzinsk, who named it the Ivanhoe Café after its telephone exchange. (During Prohibition, Grendzinsk turned the tavern into a restaurant, serving fish because, at ten cents a pound, it was cheaper than meat.) Sometime in the pre-riot 1960s, a patron instructed the bartender to tell his wife he was “at the Polish Yacht Club.” The joke caught on. The regulars printed up cards, designed a pennant, bought captain’s hats and sailing jackets, and held annual elections for commodore. The winners’ photos are all displayed on the back wall of the dining room. There’s not a black (or, to be fair, Anglo-Saxon) face among them. The back room is the Pope’s Corner, commemorating a 1970s visit by Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, Archbishop of Kraków, who had distant cousins in Hamtramck. Behind the bar, bottles were topped with Dixie cups, a rotary phone awaited a wife’s summons, and a sign demanded “BE NICE OR LEAVE!” For most customers, the fish fry is a visit to the Old Neighborhood.

  “I’m basically like a scarecrow,” Mike explained. “When people come down here, they want their cars looked after. What they used to do, they would break the window, take everything inside, and then open the door. The alarm wouldn’t go off until then. We had three cars stolen. You’ve got a lot of nice cars here. Cadillacs. They’re not used to that in this neighborhood. They’ll be waiting in the weeds.”

  The Polish Yacht Club is one of the last places in Detroit to absorb white ethnic saltiness. Surly humor is the default civic mood of Buffalo, Milwaukee, and Chicago, but I didn’t get hit with it in Detroit until my second visit to the Yacht Club.

  “You’re Patti, right?” I said, reintroducing myself to the founder’s great-granddaughter Patti Galen, a short, round forty-nine-year old.

  “That’s still my name,” she said in a po-faced monotone.

  Patti, a cop’s wife, had grown up in the neighborhood and lived in Detroit until 2001, when the city stopped enforcing its residency requirement. The white cops moved to the suburbs, taking their white-cop attitudes with them.

  “People in this neighborhood keep telling me I look like a cop,” I said to Patti.

  “No,” said the woman who slept with a cop. “You don’t look like a cop.”

  A man at the bar offered the opinion that Mike’s scarecrow act wasn’t as necessary as it used to be, now that there were more weeds, and fewer criminals to hide in them.

  “I used to drive people down here and scare the shit out of ’em,” he boasted. “Now there’s hardly anything left to be scared of.”

  There are white people moving into the East Side. Young urban pioneers have colonized an entire block of Farnsworth Street, in the shadow of St. Hyacinth, the neighborhood’s last survivin
g Catholic church. It is an unusual block for this part of Detroit, because every house is occupied. The first time I walked it with Gary Wozniak, I did not encounter any white people, but I saw everywhere signs of their presence: the outer wall of a house decorated in red, blue, green, and yellow stripes; a hand-painted “SLOW CHILDREN” placard, nailed to a tree; foreign cars parked along the curb with bumper stickers for the Detroit Waldorf School and the “Kill Your TV” movement. On one corner of Farns-worth and Moran was the Yes Farm, the art collective that competed with the graffiti taggers on Chene Street. On the other corner, the Farnsworth Community Garden, where the homesteaders raised their crops. A flyer requested volunteers to build beehives.

  “In the summer, it’s almost like San Francisco,” Gary said. “There’s people on the porches drinking beer, smoking weed. It’s like a hippie commune, which is cool.”

  The East Side is the perfect hippie environment, because it is simultaneously premodern and postmodern. You can go back to the land and attend all-night raves in empty factories. The $12,000 houses offer grace from mortgages and material pressures. The second time I walked the block, I met a Yes Farmer, a young man from Oakland County who worked in a print shop downtown. His background was typical of Farns-worth Street. Most white people who grew up in Detroit have either moved out or are trying to get out. Only suburbanites romanticize the city.

  “They’re all young, hip-hop, techno, hippie,” said Patti Galen at the Polish Yacht Club. “Tattoos, piercings. They all have visions. They want to change the world. They made cement cakes and put them in the window of the bakery on Chene Street after it burned down. They were smashed up in a day. You can’t change this neighborhood.”