by Tim Moore
Detroit was a car city before Henry Ford doubled down on Motown, and it seems a minor miracle that he just happened to grow up nearby: in some parallel universe, Henry is born in Kansas, never makes a single car and the twentieth century takes an awful lot longer to get going. In the 1900s Detroit was home to many carriage builders and bicycle manufacturers, which together offered the core skills that attracted many fledgling automotive concerns: by the time the Model T was launched, forty car makers and more than 200 vehicle component manufacturers were already based there.
But the T’s success and the phenomenon that was Highland Park elevated Detroit into a global industrial powerhouse. Huge new factories sprang up across the city, manufacturing rival motor vehicles, spark plugs, tyres and machine tools. Work-hungry migrants poured in from the white Appalachians and the black south, from Canada, from eastern and southern Europe. Ford outgrew the 120-acre Highland Park site, and in 1926 opened a substantially more enormous plant at River Rouge, a few miles west in Dearborn, Henry’s hometown. This 1,000-acre facility incorporated the world’s largest foundry, and employed a flabbergasting total of 103,000 people. Two million visitors a year were soon turning up to pay homage. By the late 1920s, Detroit had established itself as one of the wealthiest cities on the planet. It was still growing thirty years later, by then the fifth largest metropolis in the US with almost two million residents. Michigan Central Station was the tallest on earth, and Chrysler’s Detroit headquarters ranked as the second biggest office in the world, after the Pentagon.
But as you may be aware, the story of Detroit then took a rather dramatic turn for the worse. I did my best to review the evidence as I steered Mike through its outskirts, but when you’re driving a Model T up an urban dual carriageway you need both eyes on the road. Especially when that road is very wet and strewn with potholes. It didn’t help that my ears were picking up an ominous under-bonnet backbeat to the clatter of heavy rain on canvas, a muffled, percussive tonk-tonk-tonk, like someone trying to punch their way out of an oil drum.
The rain-fuzzed silhouette of a windowless factory, yawning roadside voids, a misty glimpse of Canada, there across the Detroit River. Tonk-tonk-TUNK-TUNK-TUNK. A derelict bus terminal. Ow: a spine-cracking kerb-side crater. More open space. TUNK-TUNKITY-TINKETY-TONK. Empty pavements. A tree growing out through a roof. The unsettling realisation that the traffic was steadily thinning as the downtown skyline approached.
‘We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city,’ Henry Ford once predicted, and Motown, a metropolis built on cars, was the first redrawn to suit them. From the 1940s, suburbs began to leach far out into the Michigan countryside, linked to the mid-town offices and factories by interconnected freeways. These were laid right through the original residential zones, destroying some and cutting others off, hemmed in by eight-lane barriers of concrete and speeding metal. But those new suburban dreamlands had been built with a particular kind of Detroiter in mind: the white kind. Detroit’s black residents, who in 1950 made up just 20 per cent of the city’s population, discovered that the federal government would only subsidise mortgage loans for white people to move to the suburbs. For good measure, suburban municipalities drew up policies to stop black people moving in – typically a points system that took account of religion, ethnicity, accent and ‘Americanisation’. ‘They can’t get in here,’ the mayor of Dearborn, Orville Hubbard, boasted to a reporter. ‘Every time we hear of a Negro moving, we respond quicker than you do to a fire.’
Detroit had been a pretty good place to be black up until then. Henry Ford was remarkably even-handed by the standards of the time, and his insistence that black workers were paid the same as their white counterparts helped establish the city as the birthplace of the black middle class. But now Detroit’s black population found itself imprisoned by giant highways in a deteriorating inner city, neglected by slum landlords and the authorities. In 1966, fewer than 5 per cent of Detroit’s inner-city homes were deemed to be in ‘sound condition’. It was such an unappealing environment that even the factories decamped to the suburbs, leaving central Detroit jobless as well as run-down.
The 1967 Detroit riot ranks amongst the most shocking in American history. Of the forty-three people killed that July, thirty were shot dead by police and national guardsmen. More than 2,500 premises were looted or burned; there were 7,200 arrests. White flight, the ugly tag for Detroit’s urban-suburban segregation, accelerated dramatically thereafter. Within six years, half a million white residents had left for the suburbs, and the city that had been 80 per cent white in 1950 was soon 80 per cent black. The overall population fell and kept falling: America’s fifth largest city would soon drop out of the top twenty. Unemployment ballooned, urban decay redoubled, and the cash-strapped Detroit authorities floundered.
By the Eighties, there were more guns than people in Detroit, and the city’s murder rate was the highest in the country, three times that of New York’s. In 1986, a child was shot every day on average. There weren’t just crack houses but crack towers, derelict downtown office blocks repurposed by drug gangs. Arsonists torched entire streets of abandoned buildings. On a single night in 1984, 800 houses were razed to the ground. Yet there are still 70,000 derelict structures in Detroit, and some 40 square miles of empty land, an area larger than metropolitan Paris. In 2013, $18 billion in debt, the city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy. Once again, if you boil it all down and have a weakness for completely unfair sweeping judgements, there’s only one person to point the finger at. Cars made Detroit, then destroyed it. And who made the cars? Sorry, Henry.
TUNK-TUNK-DONKDONKDONKDONK-pttthhhhhhh. The rain had stopped when I put Mike out of his misery, killing the engine on the drive of a well-tended 1920s executive home. Every lawn on the street was a golf green, and a flag flew from every porch. This was a very different Detroit to the one I’d left just a couple of minutes before, turning off East Jefferson Avenue into the leafy confines of Grosse Pointe. Presently a vast pick-up rumbled to a stop, and a well-built man in a crisp pink shirt climbed down, strode over and shook me mightily by the hand.
My cousin Marshall, Patricia’s brother, is probably the most American American I know. When I first met him, as a teenager, he was a champion wrestler, and more than thirty years on he still has the neck to prove it. After many years in the Army, serving as a military intelligence officer in some of the sandier foreign theatres, Marshall took a white-collar job in Ford’s emerging-markets division. I’d phoned him a few mornings before, and he’d very kindly offered to host me at the house he shared with his wife Libby and their two young daughters. Now I explained Mike’s malaise to Marshall, adding that I’d already made contact with a kind local soul from the MTFCA – a chap called Peter who lived in Dearborn and had offered a mechanical assessment.
‘Sounds like you may be here a while,’ said Marshall. I smiled awkwardly. ‘Come on, I’ll give you the tour.’
A while later we were cruising through the dappled avenues. Marshall’s company pick-up seemed the right ride – the Ford F150 is America’s top-selling vehicle and a mobile MAGA metaphor. ‘The Ford F series doesn’t just raise the bar,’ growled the TV-ad voiceovers, ‘it IS the bar.’ What a classic slice of Trump-era rhetoric – it had a no-nonsense, tough-guy ring to it, but meant absolutely nothing. And though the F150 might have been the Model T’s successor as America’s four-wheeled favourite, it was the clod-hopping antithesis of Henry’s light and nimble Universal Car. However, the Marshallmobile proved admirably suited to ‘the tour’. Grosse Pointe was all manicured lawns and lakeside country clubs. Then we crossed an intersection, and suddenly found ourselves in Stalingrad.
‘It’s a lot better here than it was a few years ago,’ said Marshall, thundering through crater-grade potholes, ‘which I guess is kinda scary.’
I stared out of the window, dumbstruck by a spectacle that had largely eluded me from behind Mike’s spattered, juddering windshield. East Jefferson Avenue, the main thoroughfare into downtown
Detroit, was strewn with charred hulks, rusted shutters and boarded windows. Some of the vacant gas stations and warehouses had been reclaimed by scratchy-looking gyms and car washes, but most had been demolished, leaving huge voids of mossy, fractured concrete. Everyone in Grosse Pointe was white; now the few people out and about were all black. Marshall pointed to a derelict movie theatre with shrubs sprouting from its roof. ‘Just going to do a roll here,’ he muttered as we slid through a red light. ‘Buddy of mine stopped there a couple years back and had a bullet go straight through two windows.’ I nodded blankly and sunk down in my seat a little. Never have I experienced such a jarring, brutal shift in an urban setting, and I say that as someone who crawled through a hole in the Berlin Wall in 1990.
We turned north off Jefferson into a residential side street, and the mood took another shift. The first few houses looked fairly trim and prosperous, of similar style and vintage to Marshall’s. A couple even had pleasure boats in their driveways. ‘You could pick one of these homes up for $30,000 here in the East Side,’ he murmured. ‘Same house in Grosse Pointe would cost a half-million.’ I understood this disparity when the housing stock grew scrappier, and thinner, then presently vanished entirely, replaced by wispy grassland crowned here and there with mature trees.
‘This was the Italian neighbourhood back in the Fifties and Sixties.’ Marshall’s voice was now muted to an Attenborough whisper. ‘One of my best friends grew up here.’
I gazed at the yawning savannah around, thinking: Who was he, then – Mowgli? Without all the forlorn fire hydrants and Marshall’s commentary I could never have believed that this was once a densely populated residential area.
‘When I say things have improved, what I really mean is that the city has got a lot better at pulling down empty buildings. Every house in this area was derelict or burned-out when we relocated here twenty years ago. Even in the better districts, when people moved out they just threw the keys on the lawn. You couldn’t give houses away.’
We drove on through freshly planted commercial forests, hardwood saplings laid out in neat grids across ex-residential meadows. Marshall told me that wild turkeys and pheasants are now a common sight in the more rural swathes of East Side Detroit, roaming those fledgling forests and the 1,400 vegetable gardens and orchards that have been planted over recent years. On some streets a single remaining home stood marooned amidst the encroaching overgrowth, like a lonely farmhouse. In many areas only the churches survived, by virtue of their non-combustible stone construction (American housebuilders retain a stubborn, pioneer attachment to wood: the walls and roofs of the typical home are considered consumable features with a twenty-year lifespan). But most of these churches lay derelict, and the only one we passed that remained open for ecclesiastical business had a sign outside promising free hot meals every Tuesday. Grass leached ever further into the road, along with broken furniture, tyres and dumped cars. Even the less desperate-looking streets, those with a decent quorum of glazed homes and vehicles, lay eerily silent. The only people enjoying the summer breeze were a few old black guys, each sitting alone on a battered porch, watching what was left of the world go by.
It went on and on, and we said less and less. Every few blocks Marshall would quietly call my attention to some point of interest. The gas station Libby once pulled into, only for the cashier to run outside and scream at her to drive on. The terrace of derelict shops that marked the starting point of the 1967 riot. Henry Ford’s first grand home, on Edison Street, where a fair number of rival mansions now stood torched and roofless. The much grander home that his great-grandson Alfred had transformed, to the Ford family’s mortification, into a Hare Krishna temple. ‘Lotta peacocks get out of there,’ said Marshall as we drove past the scabby wrought-iron gates. ‘One took up in our street for a few years – we called him Fred.’
Just round the corner we passed by a gracefully low-slung modernist structure with ‘Stark School of Technology’ above its shuttered entrance, behind a sign that read: ‘FOR SALE/LEASE CONTACT DETROIT PUBLIC SCHOOLS’. In case you need a reminder of Detroit’s decline, seventy-nine abandoned schools are now for sale across the city, on account of an ever-dwindling intake: as late as 2003 there were 170,000 kids in the Detroit public school system, compared to 50,000 today. And in case you need another: the Stark School of Technology was built on the site of the Grosse Pointe race track, where in 1901 Henry Ford had made his name.
It was awful and tragic, but my word it was grimly compelling. Detroiters have grown forgivably weary of ‘ruin porn’ tourists, though I sensed that Marshall was secretly enjoying himself just a little too. ‘See, I know what dead bodies smell like,’ he breathed dramatically as we drove through a ramshackle waterfront park, ‘and the first time I got out of the car in this place, I smelled ’em.’
At length, with shadows spreading over the grassy sidewalks, we headed back towards East Jefferson. A few blocks before that extraordinary intersection, the unseen wall between black and white, wealth and poverty, life and death, Marshall jabbed a finger down a lonely lane. ‘Couple years back, five kids from my neighbourhood were sat down there one night, smoking pot in a car. You can’t do that shit in Grosse Pointe without getting caught. Anyway, some guy drives by and just lets off thirty rounds with an AK, one of the girls is killed and three are shot up pretty bad. They never caught him.’ He put his foot down and we sped over East Jefferson and into Grosse Pointe. ‘I’ve told my daughters that I never, ever want to see them cross that street.’ Less than a mile later we pulled up at his house.
In the morning I followed Marshall’s F150 to Dearborn, through a thousand traffic lights and as many potholes. The awful shudders and bangs cost me a little chrome hubcap and perhaps 5 per cent of my liver function, but did at least drown out the worst of Mike’s ever-deepening engine knock. After an hour we pulled into our first stop, in a convoy of like-minded, like-gendered pilgrims: The Henry Ford, America’s largest indoor-outdoor museum complex, is Disneyland for old men.
Henry might not have been flash, but he wasn’t exactly humble. The Model T phenomenon blurred the line between arrogance and plain realism: when Ford described himself as ‘the author of the industrial age’, he was simply stating a fair-minded fact. As the T era’s dust settled in the late 1920s, Henry began to take stock of his revolutionary achievements. In a few short decades, America had exploded into a manufacturing superpower, and changed the world for ever. And it had done so largely thanks to him and a clutch of kindred spirits, men like Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, the Wright brothers and Henry J. Heinz: Middle Americans of everyday origin, without a college degree between them. These were the underpinnings of Ford’s most fabled quote: ‘History is more or less bunk. It is tradition. The only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.’ Why trouble yourself with the dusty past, in other words, when my friends and I are forging all these shiny chunks of present? In this spirit, we can at least try to forgive him for devoting much of his later life to enshrining a slavish personality cult at a museum he named after himself.
Built on a vast site three miles from his childhood home, The Henry Ford first opened to the public in 1933. Its cavernous exhibition halls were dutifully stocked with machines from Henry’s private collection: player pianos, steam engines, grease pumps and a fleet of significant motor vehicles. But the site’s spiritual home lay in the landscaped acreage outside. Greenfield Village, whose verdant outskirts Marshall and I now strolled across, was a homespun shrine to the legends, most of them then living, who had built this bold new America. The parochial buildings sunning themselves around us were transplanted by Henry from their original sites: that was the actual bike shop where the Wright brothers first conceived their flying machine, and over there stood H. J. Heinz’s actual childhood home. And there: the garden office of Luther Burbank, the amateur biologist who created the Russet Burbank, the Model T of spuds that remains the world’s most widely cultivated potato. Workshops and laboratories ass
ociated with his best mates Edison and Firestone were given especial prominence; I was intrigued to see the three legendary figures photographed together on what were apparently regular camping trips. You might be interested to learn that Thomas Edison invented the beer bong on the first of these outings, although you shouldn’t be as I just made that up.
But most attention was focused on Henry, by Henry, and with a breezy lack of restraint. At Greenfield Village’s inauguration, the old man strode portentously into the very schoolhouse in which he had daydreamed his first machines, sat down at a desk placed in the same location as his had been, and carved his initials into it, as his eight-year-old self had done. This building was overlooked by an exact replica of the school Henry subsequently attended, and by his favourite teacher’s house. Refitting Ford’s childhood home to the last detail was a particular labour of self-love. These days the Greenfield staff are all dressed in period costume, and a kindly old dear in a pinafore buttonholed me as I bent down to inspect the panelling around the dining-room stove, hoping to spot shrapnel damage caused by those youthful dabblings with steam power. ‘Mr Ford sent teams of people all across the country looking for that precise type of stove,’ she trilled. ‘Everything had to be just right. We’re told they took eighteen months to find it.’ A similar quest was launched after Henry kicked up a shard of patterned pottery in the farmhouse yard. Eight staff were employed on this nationwide ephemera hunt, sometimes exchanging a hundred letters in pursuit of a single item. Ford’s own history was never bunk.
