Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  (When I attended Mass at St. Hyacinth, a parishioner asked whether I was “one of the urban farming kids.” It was a sign of the archdiocese’s desperation in a city where the white population has declined from 1.6 million to 75,000. The newcomers are the kind of white people who go to goth clubs on Saturday night, not Mass on Sunday morning. St. Hyacinth’s congregation seemed to consist of legacy suburbanites who parked their sedans in a gated, guarded lot, huddled in the first few rows of the sanctuary, then drove back to Livonia. Weekday masses had been canceled, since the celebrant died. Only a portly midvocation priest from Poland remained. “The church may be in danger of closing if we don’t get more people,” the parishioner explained.)

  The urban pioneers are part of a movement called “Rust Belt chic.” I first heard that term in Youngstown, Ohio, from a thirty-three-year-old college graduate named John Slanina. Slanina had taken his Youngstown State degree to the Netherlands, then to Atlanta, but he’d brought it back, along with an urban aesthetic evident in his chunky glasses, goatee, and red sneakers. While working at the University of Delft, Slanina started a blog called I Shout Youngstown! to tell the people back home, “Hey, there are all these neat things in the Netherlands that you can emulate.” Then he decided to move home and emulate them himself.

  “You can get a house in a nice neighborhood for forty thousand,” Slanina said of Youngstown. “And you don’t need to hang around the Kiwanis Club for twenty years to have an impact on what’s going on here.”

  (Youngstown’s mayor and congressman were both in their thirties. The older generation of politicians—including imprisoned congressman James Traficant—had been discredited by their ties to the Mafia.)

  In no other city has the term “Rust Belt” been so embraced—but only by those too young to have lost a job on Black Monday, the September day in 1977 when Youngstown Sheet and Tube announced it would close by the end of the week, laying off five thousand workers. The Rust Belt Theater Company produces work by Youngstown playwrights. The Rust Belt Brewing Company crafts Blast Furnace Blond Ale, and the Artists of the Rust Belt build mobiles out of steel salvaged from scrap yards.

  For Slanina, Rust Belt chic is also a way of carrying on the urban, Slavic-American culture into which he was born. It’s slivovitz, pierogis, and pepper-and-egg sandwiches. It’s polka karaoke at Polish happy hour, Slovak language lessons and ice hockey in an old steel mill. It’s a wedding with a kolaches, pizzelle, and baklava on the cookie table—“a fantastic example of Rust Belt chic and classic Youngstown.”

  If it’s true that every trend skips a generation before returning to fashion, then the young people who embrace Rust Belt chic are celebrating their World War II–era grandparents’ urban, blue-collar lifestyles and rejecting their baby boomer parents’ flight from the cities and from their ethnic heritage. In the 1970s, polka, bowling, and Hamm’s on tap at the Polish National Alliance were not hip: they were symbols of a reactionary culture, the white ethnic hard hat. Vilified as a blindly patriotic bigot by upper-class liberals and black militants alike, lampooned on All in the Family, forced to pay for the racial sins of someone else’s ancestors by sacrificing his children to forced busing, his career to affirmative action, and his tax money to welfare, he retaliated by buying a ranch house in an inner-ring suburb and voting for Ronald Reagan. Slanina’s grandfather was a steelworker. His parents were schoolteachers.

  Plenty of Rust Belt cities are trying to repatriate the grandchildren of steelworkers, although the return to urban living is a creative-class movement, not a working-class movement. After NAFTA passed in 1993, the small textile shops on Cleveland’s industrial East Side began moving to Mexico. The city noticed that artists looking for cheap studios were moving into the old brick factories. So in 2000, the city council rezoned a light industrial district for live/work spaces.

  The live/work ordinance was one reason downtown Cleveland gained 1,300 residents in the 2010 census, making it the only growing neighborhood in a city that lost 83,000 people. Councilman Joe Cimperman—the loquacious politician who tried to unseat Dennis Kucinich in 2008—helped pass the ordinance. Artists’ lofts don’t employ as many people as factories, Cimperman says, but they’re “a hell of a lot better than vacant.” The artists who occupied a shut-down elementary school opened their studios once a month to give art lessons to the neighborhood kids, “kids who were doing drugs, having sex, setting cars on fire.”

  The live/work ordinance “was almost like a blessing by the city,” Cimperman said. “The artists realized that we cherished them. That they weren’t squatters. I think the fact that we finally have a policy for bringing people back to the city is kind of generational. People in my generation—you know, you don’t really realize your population is declining when you are in it. But you see these buildings and you are thinking, ‘If there’s one artist in there, why wouldn’t there be ten?’”

  Detroit is experiencing the same contradictory population trends as Cleveland. While Detroit lost a quarter of its people in the 2000s, the population of under-thirty-fives with college degrees increased 59 percent. In Detroit’s case, that’s significant because they’re the first postriot generation, who grew up without their parents’ antagonism toward blacks, Detroit, and black Detroiters. They’re the reason the city’s white population increased in 2008 and 2009, for the first time since the early 1950s.

  Sarah Szurpicki grew up in the suburbs and studied environmental science and public policy at Harvard. When she got married, Szurpicki and her husband bought a three-bedroom Mies van der Rohe condo in Detroit’s Lafayette Park, for $70,000. Szurpicki is a founder of GLUE, the Great Lakes Urban Exchange, a network of twenty- and thirtysome-things in Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cleveland who trade ideas about redeveloping their Rust Belt (a term GLUE embraces) hometowns. I brunched with Sarah at the Russell Street Deli, a restaurant across the street from Eastern Market. Most of the diners appeared to be hipsters. Needless to say, so did all the waitstaff.

  “The younger generation is not as racially divided,” she told me as we ate omelets from the veggie side of the deli’s menu. “A lot of it is pop culture. If you grew up in the eighties, The Cosby Show was on TV. We didn’t fight those battles during and after the riot. We don’t carry those scars.”

  After brunch, Sarah showed me her condo. It was severely square, severely glassy, and severely narrow—modern in the way that only the architects of the 1950s and the 1960s understood modernism. The back door opened onto the park. Sarah pointed across the grass at a school.

  “And there’s even a school right here in the neighborhood for when our kids are old enough,” she said.

  At the time, that elementary school was 98 percent black, and the Detroit public schools had a 25 percent graduation rate. It’s one thing to attract young people looking for a hiatus from suburbia. Convincing them to raise families in the city is another. Ben Schmitt, an ex-reporter for the Detroit Free Press, passed the first gut check—sending his daughters to kindergarten in Detroit. But when a flagstone crashed through the front window of his house in East English Village, Schmitt short-sold his home—worth $100,000 less than he’d paid for it—and moved his family to his native Pittsburgh.

  “For a while I believed in [Detroit],” Schmitt wrote in an op-ed for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, after he was safely out of Detroit and in a new career at a marketing firm. “I purchased a home in one of the city’s stable neighborhoods nine years earlier because it felt real. I scoffed at other colleagues and editors who drove to work on the freeways and never spent a minute in the city they covered.

  “But when I heard my daughters’ screams that evening, I knew I was gone. No more compromises.”

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, Pastor Steve led a prayer service around a wooden cross rising from a pot of orange lilies in a landscaped lot across Chene Street from his church. His vestments consisted of a gray cutoff T-shirt, knee-length khaki cargo shorts, a turquoise belt, black socks, and black sn
eakers. His congregation—some black, some white, all too poor to live anywhere but the East Side—stood in a loose circle.

  “God is doing something on Chene Street, and you’re drawn by the precious Holy Spirit,” Pastor Steve told them. “Drug addicts, prostitutes, criminals out of the system, people that are bound by alcohol and sexual practices, we thank you, Lord, for bringing them to us. Thank you, Lord, for bringing us to Chene. Thank you, Lord, for bringing us to the heart of hell.”

  A bearded man in a “John 3:16” T-shirt, a fringe of hair blowing over his ears. A short stout woman propped up by a cane. A black kid wearing a T-shirt depicting an old English D—the emblem of Detroit—shaped like a hand grenade. Pastor Steve called this place the heart of hell, but it may have been closer to heaven than anywhere in Michigan. To live on Chene Street was to have failed by all social, financial, and legal standards. These people would never make it out to the suburbs. Their only hope for personal advancement was to become angels in the next world. (Pastor Steve lived in the suburbs: he’d moved to Utica, the same town as Gary Wozniak, after his wife was mugged.)

  Pastor Steve continued. “Probably represented here is every kind of crime you can imagine. Every background from drug dealing to homelessness, to prostitution, to people who are highly educated who think they’re good old boys. Sometimes, they’re the hardest to reach. When you’re in this area, remember where you came from. Don’t be afraid to break bread with anyone.”

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON, the biker apostle roared up to Chene-Ferry Park on a flatulent Harley with a glossy Jesus painted on the fuel tank. Removing his black helmet, which proclaimed “FAITH” beneath a silver sword and shield, Pastor Steve groomed his white beard, smoothing strands that depended from his chin like a Hebrew’s payot. Fishing-lure earrings dangled from his lobes. Silver and turquoise rings sparkled on his fingers. On the north side of the plaza, the church had painted the same sunrise emblem as the Chene-Ferry Market, but with purple rays, an orange cross, and the motto “LOVE WINS.”

  The occasion was the Peacemakers International Singing Contest. A guitar, bass, and drum combo—the musical accompaniment for every storefront church—was setting up on a temporary stage. I recognized several people I’d met on the street. Joe was walking one of his unsold pit bull puppies. Oscar Watkins sat on a bench, preparing to sing “Amazing Grace.” The church handed out commodities every Tuesday—a schedule known up and down Chene Street—and its front door was always open, so anyone could page through the piles of old clothes on fold-out tables. Oscar had lived for several months at Jesus House, a home for recovering junkies run by one of Pastor Steve’s white-boy sidekicks, a husky young man who’d beaten a cocaine habit with God’s help.

  “I gutted the basement and made it my room,” Oscar said of his stay at Jesus House. “I was saving and paying my taxes and then they accused me of getting high. Fuck it, if you think I’m getting high, I might as well get high. I think there’s some racism there. Some of the white guys had different privileges. Pastor Steve’s a good guy and all that. He’s doing good for the community, but there’s more than meets the eye. They don’t like me down there. They know I speak my mind. Steve keeps trying to get me to go back to Jesus House. He calls me ‘deacon.’ I don’t see no deacon. It’d be a waste of my time, anyway. I’m fifty years old. I ain’t got that much time. I’m gettin’ tired of these streets, though, the heroin. Just when you do good, that’s when the devil steps in. Paul said in the Bible, ‘I’m the chief of sinners.’ I feel like that.”

  Before the singing started, Pastor Steve bowed his head and raised a palm to heaven.

  “Lord Jesus Christ, I believe in all my heart that you’re the son of the living God, and you died for my sins. I open up my heart, Jesus, to you.”

  Joe answered the altar call. So did his puppy. At least, the dog was dragged up there on a leash.

  When the contest began, the first performer declared that God had commanded her to sing, not in our language, but in the spirit. I wish I could transcribe the lyrics of her wordless psalmody, but it was in the tongue of angels, not humans. Oscar was next, with a penetrating rendering of “Amazing Grace.” The truest artists are not those with the grandest voices, but those whose voices make the singer indistinguishable from his song. Frank Sinatra was never more convincing as a brokenhearted loser than Oscar as the wretch who narrates the hymnal’s greatest hit, a hymn that makes more sense coming from the mouth of a homeless drug addict than a nylon-robed choir in a church with a $5,000 weekly collection plate. There was no collection at this service, because nobody had any money. A thirteen-year-old sang a verse of R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly.” In the alley behind him, a spindly, bearded man in laceless shoes, who believed no such thing, searched a garbage bin for the last salvageable discard on the block.

  Finally, Joe sat up on the speaker and took the microphone. “I’m gettin’ some feedback,” he mumbled. Four o’clock on Saturday afternoon was not likely a sober hour. “I’ve got just a few words to say.”

  Joe moaned the first word of a hymn—“Shiii-lohhh.” The rest was as incomprehensible as the woman who’d sung in tongues.

  ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, at three o’clock, Detroit’s home of the blues is a vacant lot at the corner of Frederick and St. Aubin streets. This is the site of John’s Carpet House, a music festival that rises from the weeds during every fair-weather weekend. It got started in a house across the street—when there was a house across the street. John Estes, a blues musician, ran his own juke joint—just opened up his doors and let anyone come inside and sing. So many sang that John built an addition, just for the bands, insulating the walls with carpeting. Hence the nickname. Carl Carlton, who nearly won a Grammy for “She’s a Bad Mama Jama,” played in the Carpet House. So did some of the Motown stars who stayed in Motown after Berry Gordy took the label (and all the royalties) to Los Angeles. Martha Reeves (who became a city councilwoman after her recording career ended), the Contours, Alberta Adams, Thornetta Davis. Forty years after Motown, John’s Carpet House was their only stage.

  After John died, crack dealers took over his house. The neighbors firebombed it, to fumigate the drug trade, and the city bulldozed the cinders. The music moved across the street, into a vacant corner lot, but the name didn’t change: the show was still called John’s Carpet House, even though the house was gone. In exchange for the space, John’s old friend Pete Barrow mowed the grass once a week.

  An hour before showtime, Pete—a big man with a straw hat and a mustache that followed the contours of his frown—began setting up the temporary wooden stage, an old deck covered with carpet scraps. Pete swept the carpet with a push broom and uncoiled the orange cords connecting the amplifiers and the sound board. The cars—every damn one of them American—began arriving, parking on the perimeter of the field until it looked like a drive-in picnic, leaving the grass in front of the stage open as a dance floor. The mobile barbecue wagons lit their grills and the saucy smoke drifted all the way to Chene Street. Hand-lettered signs advertised “WING DINGS $3.00. HALF SLAB $9.00. WHOLE SLAB $15.00.”

  “Anybody who’s anybody in Detroit plays here,” Big Pete explained. “We try to stick strictly to blues. I don’t want no mess. We had one guy tried to rap. I told him, ‘Don’t play none of that hip-hop shit. You stick strictly to blues.’”

  As blues fans unfolded chairs beneath the canopies of wild trees, rippling motorcycle engines announced the disembarkation of Big Pete’s “security force”—the Outcasts, the Detroit Gentlemen, and the Hell’s Lovers. The Hell’s Lovers wore their philosophy—“Ride for Peace”—on the backs of their leather jackets. The mamas’ jackets advertised the pussy magnetism of motorcycles by declaring their wearers “Property of Hell’s Lovers.” A Detroit police car cruised up and down Frederick Street to keep the street clear of motorcycles, but its hood was etched with abrasions and its rearview mirror was cracked. The cops looked less threatening and less sexy than the bikes.

  The music: Leila
ni, two women in matching zebra-print blouses, sang Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love” over a karaoke track. Mr. Romance, a man wearing a bling cross and a backward baseball cap, surprised the entire meadow with a version of K’Jon’s “On the Ocean” that started down around his ankles before writhing through his vocal cords. Then a Caucasian gentleman in a zoot suit bastardized Robert Johnson by singing “Come on, baby, don’t you want to go? / Well I really love Chicago, but take me home to Detroit.”

  (This was an actual blues number, but it was clear that Big Pete’s definition included rhythm and blues, this great musical city’s greatest musical contribution to the world.)

  Then came Harmonica Shah. Harmonica Shah was a bluesman: the harmonica belt around his waist had holsters for seven harps, one for each musical key: A B C D E F G. When he sang his cheatin’-woman ballad “I Heard You Was at the Casino,” he blew his sorrow through the reeds. During “Hey, Detroit”—“Detroit ain’t no hippie town / If I feel like this tomorrow, I’ll be Mississippi bound”—an old man in a striped suit and two-tone shoes danced around the meadow, intensifying the music by inhaling from a joint pinned in a roach clip. After the set, I ran behind the speakers to a) buy a copy of Harmonica Shah’s CD Tell It to Your Landlord, and b) meet Harmonica Shah.

  Harmonica Shah was a Muslim in a Christian city (albeit the city where the Nation of Islam was founded) and a blues singer in a soul town. He had this in common with his fellow Southern blacks: he’d moved to Detroit to work in an auto plant. After Ford fired him for absenteeism, he picked up the harmonica while driving a taxicab.

  “I got fired out of Ford’s, I got serious about the harmonica, and I traveled around the world,” Harmonica Shah said. “White folks just started sending me around the world. The white people kept the blues alive. Black people were ashamed of it. When they did Motown, they wanted to get away from the old wagon wheels and cotton farms, and sound modern.”