Another Fine Mess

by Tim Moore

  József Galamb at last had the raw material he needed, and drew up a design to Henry’s brief: a featherweight, functional family car, cheap to produce, buy, run and repair. The Model T was no looker – from an aesthetic perspective, it shared an awful lot with the ungainly predecessors lined up around me in the Piquette shadows. Most of its running gear – including that sodding planetary transmission – was lifted straight from previous Ford models. The Model T’s only significant innovations were its use of vanadium; a removable cylinder head, which would vastly simplify engine repairs; and Spider Huff’s flywheel magneto, an ambitious arrangement of magnets and copper coils which – uniquely for a low-priced car – allowed the T to operate without a battery of any sort, a huge attraction in rural areas at a time when batteries were horrendously unreliable. But as a cheap car that worked, it was an irresistible package.

  As the orders piled up, Sorensen and Martin began to dabble with moving assembly lines, putting a chassis on skis and dragging it by rope past various Piquette workstations. But the firm had simply outgrown the little plant, and before the year was out Henry started looking for a new home. He’d assembled and sold 14,000 Model Ts in little more than a year, and had $9 million in the bank. By the start of 1910, at a site four miles north in Highland Park, he also had the largest manufacturing facility in the world. Two days later, I drove a little black car there to meet its maker.

  East Side Detroit, so alarming in a semi-armoured pick-up with a meaty veteran at the wheel, seemed curiously benign when alone in an open-sided antique. Mike was such a disarming presence, so friendly and frail, that I increasingly struggled to imagine anyone wishing ill upon him or his occupants. And the car no longer advertised its approach with a painful steel-band drum roll. The previous afternoon, Peter and I had successfully installed the new piston rod in his sweltering garage: a task of unexpected precision, which required us to peel off papery brass shims in the quest for a microscopically perfect fit. I’d offered him my fulsome thanks, then puttered back to Grosse Pointe for a last night at Marshall’s. Sick as he’d been, Mike would never look more felicitously at home than he had outside that period executive residence, parked beneath a graceful brick arch that led to Marshall’s garage – so graceful that no modern car could squeeze through it. Now, after further farewells and expressions of deep gratitude, I was weaving around potholes through the dusty dereliction.

  I might not have been scared, but it was all still terribly affecting – doubly so from behind the wobbly wheel of the car that put this city on the map, and built so many of the smart new homes that had once annexed the East Side. Grubby tarpaulins flapped on punctured roofs and porches. Bleak home-made billboards sprouted above the tall grass: ‘AFTER YOU DIE, YOU WILL MEET GOD’; ‘I CASH CHECKS’; ‘SELLING THIS HOME DIRT CHEAP. PHONE NICK.’ I ticked up the full house of those endgame retailers of last resort: thrift stores, liquor stores, Bible book stores. Saddest, as ever, were the once proud and mighty public structures, all those schools and libraries, now daubed and glassless hulks lost in deep vegetation.

  Absolutely everyone was black. At 83 per cent, Detroit has the highest black population of any US city. Yet so entrenched is the segregation that in my five-day tour of car museums and humid suburban garages – the world of old white guys – I hadn’t really engaged with a single black person. Take the transport network. I kept wanting to get on buses, and kept being discouraged, often with dramatic urgency. ‘I was a police officer for a long time and I wouldn’t take it,’ said the security guard at Edsel’s gatehouse when I asked which bus went into town. ‘Just no, I’m serious.’ Others were no less alarmist, and none of them had the slightest idea how much a bus ticket might cost, or if I could buy one off the driver. So when the T was out of action, I travelled everywhere by Uber, or German au pair. It took me a while to realise it was a race thing: I never saw one white face in a passing bus. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what Rosa Parks made her stand for. This isn’t an implication of racial hatred, more a sad reflection of lives that never overlap, and the mutual wariness thus engendered. Still, as a Londoner, born and bred in one of the world’s most successfully multi-ethnic cities, I found it all rather shocking.

  Downtown Detroit, until a few years back a photogenic ruin, has of late been slickly regenerated through the billion-dollar input of a local boy made good, Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans (from manufacturing to mortgages – a hundred-year spin on Detroit’s millionaire merry-go-round). Its wonderful Aztec-tiled art deco skyscrapers have been reglazed, reroofed and reoccupied. There’s a swish new tram line. Marshall and Libby took me into the centre one evening, admitting that before the makeover they never went downtown after dark. ‘We weren’t scared – there was just nothing open, no people, nothing to do.’ When they fancied a night out, they hit the Ambassador Bridge and crossed over to Canada. So vast was the glut of unwanted and derelict real estate back then that the city authorities started building a huge prison right in the middle of town, though the burdens of corruption and inefficiency meant they never finished it.

  These days the students and hipsters are downtown in force, bringing their vape pens and cupcake factories, their bike paths and farmers’ markets. Yet in Detroit’s bigger picture, the desolate landscape I was now bumping slowly across, downtown is no more than a shiny detail. However glitzy and appealing, it is dwarfed and engulfed by post-suburban wastelands that will never be repopulated. The one million residents who have moved away since the 1950s – two-thirds of the city’s population – are never coming back. As I drove through another urban forest it struck me that what Detroit really needs is a boil wash and a big round of urban Tetris: shrink it down, then fill in the gaps.

  At length I hit Woodward Avenue, turned right, and there it was: a battered four-storey old office with a flagless pole on the roof and ivy spreading up its front. Behind it stood a six-floor stack of more industrial aspect, with huge, filthy windows framed in rust-streaked concrete and wonky fire escapes laddering its flanks. Beyond, occupying several toes of Highland Park’s former footprint, lay the ‘Model T Plaza’: two shoe shops, a dollar store and a McDonald’s, all engulfed by acres of empty parking. There was a certain rough justice in seeing the Universal Car’s home annexed by the lowest form of mall shopping, that defining legacy of America’s automobile age. I bumped on to a forecourt of broken, moss-veined concrete, then pushed all the levers up and croaked to a halt. Well, there we were. Welcome home, Michael.

  A faded historical marker stood outside the office, slightly tilted in the daisy-dotted grass. ‘HOME OF MODEL T’ read its headline.

  Here at his Highland Park Plant, Henry Ford in 1913 began the mass production of automobiles on a moving assembly line. By 1915 Ford built a million Model Ts. In 1925, over 9,000 were assembled in a single day. Mass production soon spread from here to all phases of American industry and set the pattern of abundance for 20th Century living.

  Emotions fizzed down my spine and back up. How, how was a machine that first rumbled to life outside this ruin still at it? Whither the ‘14,000, raving, tearing maniacs’ who once worked here, as described by a visiting journalist in a shell-shocked account of Highland Park’s hyper-productive cacophony? It was too much to imagine. The Model T’s gawky, amateur demeanour seemed perfectly consistent with the Piquette plant, where artisan mechanics bolted together a couple of dozen a day. The vision of hundreds being spewed out of this place every single hour – almost a million a year for seventeen years – just didn’t make sense. Inside Highland Park, a mighty automatic drill press machined a whole Model T cylinder block in one go, boring forty-five simultaneous holes from four directions. But outside, most of the raw materials were still creaking up on horse-carts.

  Woodward Avenue was the world’s first concrete highway, the first road ever divided by a painted line, the first cleared by a snowplough. In its raucous heyday, Woodward hosted America’s earliest street-drag races (the rod in ‘hot rod’ is a compaction of roadster, the two
-seat Model T that was the platform of choice for pioneering speed tweakers). But its six lanes were now four too many for the threadbare traffic droning fitfully past. Highland Park, a separate municipality surrounded by Detroit on all sides, has shed 80 per cent of its population since the 1950s. A few years ago, to keep its creditors at the electric company happy, the city pulled down all its street lights. In 2001, the entire Highland Park police department was fired. The city no longer has an ambulance. Its fire department, which operates out of an old warehouse and pays its crews $10 an hour, deals with 150 fires every year, nearly all of them started deliberately in derelict buildings. In the words of Mark Binelli, author of The Last Days of Detroit, ‘Highland Park is the Detroit of Detroit.’

  ‘This one of those T Models?’

  I turned around and was met by a trim black woman with pressed white jeans and a big smile, dragging a very noisy trash sack.

  ‘Ain’t that something, never saw one before, and I lived in this city since 1956.’

  She stooped, picked up a Dr Pepper can, and dropped it into her sack with a reedy clink.

  ‘Got burned out on Grand a few years back and they moved me down here.’ Her smile faltered briefly; she turned her head Mike-wards and it recovered. ‘What a neat ride. You have yourself a wonderful day.’ And she was off, dragging a very different pattern of abundance away into the twenty-first century.

  I climbed heavily back in, fired Mike up and eased away down the track that once led right through the heart of Highland Park. This was where Henry and his band of brothers had miraculously translated Piquette’s cottage industry into a 120-acre machine that put the world on wheels. And how well he had rewarded them. Peter Martin, ‘apostle of the conveyor’, was paid an $18,000 bonus in 1913, enough to buy forty Model Ts, and Henry later put him in charge of the River Rouge plant. Promoting Martin to vice president, the old man rather pettily ensured he was paid more than the president – his own son, Edsel. Charles Sorensen, the Danish pattern maker, also wound up as a vice president, and during the war oversaw what must rank as the assembly line’s crowning achievement: under his direction, Ford’s Willow Run facility turned 488,193 component parts into a B-24 bomber every single hour. Everyone who played a part in the T’s genesis found themselves handsomely rewarded. Harold Wills, the engineer who drafted that fabled Ford logo using a script font from a child’s printing set, died a millionaire.

  Henry wasn’t afraid to bear a grudge, but he even did right by the team members who he felt had done him wrong. He fell out with James Couzens, but after his general manager resigned to pursue a political career, Henry purchased Couzens’s shares in the company for an astounding $30 million. In the most trying circumstances, he even stood by the wayward Spider Huff – the magneto wizard who had clung to Henry’s running-boards in the race that made his name.

  Huff had always seemed an unlikely member of Ford’s inner circle. Their lifestyles were glaringly at odds: Spider married four times, drank hard and chewed so much tobacco that he had a spittoon installed in his car. He routinely vanished on benders that sometimes lasted weeks. Once, exasperated to find Huff’s Highland Park office empty yet again, Henry dispatched an assistant to track him down. It didn’t take long. The man went to Spider’s favoured bordello, and knocked on every door shouting, ‘Huff, you in there?’ At last he procured a response: ‘No, I’m not.’ The assistant flung the door open and found Spider in bed with two female employees.

  In 1920, Spider quit Ford and set up his own firm, Huff Laboratories. To no one’s great surprise it swiftly folded, leaving him deeply in debt. At this point Huff decided that although Henry had paid him a hefty $10,000 bonus for designing the T’s flywheel magneto, he would now be suing his old friend for unpaid royalties: $2.50 per magneto on the 4.5 million Model Ts thus far produced, generously rounded down to $11 million. The court wasted little time in throwing the case out. Henry’s response? He offered Spider a senior position in Ford’s Experimental Electoral department, where Huff would work until his death. A Ford executive summarised this extraordinary relationship in his memoir: ‘Huff was the only man who could tell Mr Ford what was wrong with his cars and not get fired.’

  I puttered past a few surviving chunks of the Highland Park plant, cobbled into a half-arsed industrial estate. Then the remains of the world’s biggest factory took shape before me: a massive, looming hump of demolished brick and concrete, an Ayers Rock of rubble. It was almost unbearable. So many tales, so much history, and all of it buried in that mountain of masonry. ‘Detroit was the birthplace of modernity,’ a local photographer told Mark Binelli, ‘but it’s also the graveyard of modernity.’ How right she was. So too was Geoff Dyer, in his essay on Detroit as a modern Pompeii: ‘This is what the future will end up like. This is what the future has always ended up looking like.’ All that thrilling, vibrant productivity smashed into silence. I felt like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, confronted by the beached remains of the Statue of Liberty. And then, because you generally have the Detroit East Side all to yourself, I very loudly sounded like him too: ‘YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! DAMN YOU! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!’

  CHAPTER 7

  ‘Smooth, brother – Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, we love yew!’

  How good to be back on the open road, heading south-west, reeling in the miles and the redneck greetings under a cloudless sky. Keeping off the interstates meant plotting an Etch-A-Sketch route down backroads that gridded the hot, flat fields of ripening corn: 10 miles down, 10 miles across, 10 miles down. The farms began to look a little scrappy, their barns ventilated by age and neglect. An old guy was selling hay by the road for $3.75 a bale. I crossed back into Ohio, then Indiana, chewing tubes of dried meat, gulping tepid water and taurine, dodging roadkill.

  The towns were sleepy and well spaced. Some of the larger ones would be girdled with a scrappy hinterland of gas stations and dollar stores, two or three flat-pack churches, perhaps a Walmart, perhaps a motel, always an assortment of defunct commercial units. If the town had a restaurant, it would be here, and it would be Mexican. Then I’d pass beneath a big water tower on stilts with a union flag and the town’s name painted on it, and head down the old main street. This was dead straight and dependably run-down, a memorial to a prosperous past. Half a dozen careworn Victorian mansions, with rotting verandas and the odd crooked turret. A couple of grandly proportioned general stores with decaying Wild West style false fronts, now selling junk and yard-art two mornings a week, or nothing, ever. Peeling old adverts decorously hand-painted on brick and wood, promoting Champion Spark Plugs or American Wire Fence. Right in the centre I’d rattle over a rusty railway line with a flaky grain elevator the size of a moon rocket looking down on it, then repeat the above sequence in reverse.

  The names of these towns, I began to note, fell into three categories. Some were evidently christened by homesick settlers (Berne, Warsaw, Antwerp); some in stark reference to a resident industry (Saline, Cement City); and some in tribute to an eventful past that they couldn’t wait to share. ‘DEFIANCE – On this site, in the center of Indian country, General “Mad” Anthony Wayne ordered a fort built in August 1794. He said: “I defy the English, Indians, and all the devils of hell to take it,” and named it Defiance.’ ‘FORT BINGAMON – Near this fort, established as defense against Indians, stood Samuel Bingamon’s cabin. His home attacked and his wife wounded, Bingamon single-handedly shot and clubbed to death all but one of a party of seven Indians.’

  Those rare settlements cursed with entirely nondescript names felt obliged to trumpet some homespun claim to fame, generally by painting it in huge letters on the water tower: ‘HUDSON – DIVISION 4 WRESTLING CHAMPIONS 2008.’ ‘WREN – OFFICIAL WIFFLEBALL CAPITAL OF OHIO.’ Small-towners really do like to educate and inspire passers-by. And they absolutely love to bemuse and unsettle them, through the medium of front-yard and forecourt placards. ‘FLAT RACCOON ANIMAL HOSPITAL – DID YOU KNOW THAT MANATEES CAN LIVE FOR 60 YEARS?’ ‘LYNNVIEW N
URSERY – FREEDOM IS NOT FREE.’ ‘DO YOU LOVE PLEASURE MORE THAN GOD?’

  Mike was hitting his stride now, cruising smooth in the high 30s, knocking out the big miles: 170, 180, sometimes 200 a day as we motored through the fields. The traffic was ever sparser and I began to relax as much as you are ever likely to in a car whose steering wheel needs tightening on the move every half-hour, and which careers madly across the road whenever you drive over an errant speck of gravel. My thousand-mile Model T apprenticeship was now up, and I realised this was about as confident as I’d ever feel driving one.

  For the first time I began to take one hand off the wheel, dangling it in the breeze, with the throttle set as a sort of redneck cruise control and my unemployed feet stretched out astride the pedals. On the endless straights it felt more like piloting a narrow-boat down a canal: set your speed, hold a course, steady as she goes. The corners were more art than science, and before tackling one I called all limbs back from holiday. Close the throttle a touch, maybe change down, then coax the car round by feel, hoping the wriggles and slithers cancelled each other out. And all the while the settlements thinned and the landscape seemed to expand around me: the wide-open space of a big country getting bigger all the while.

  The motels began to deteriorate as I nosed into the lower Midwest, though the welcoming geniality remained undimmed. One morning a desk manager greeted me with a very different face from the one I’d pulled on opening my room fridge, and finding it stacked with a previous occupant’s furry leftovers. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he beamed. Bet you’re looking forward to a cup of our coffee? It’s a beautiful day out there!’ He was half right. I knew the coffee would be dreadful.