Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

by Mark Binelli

  For those who wish to observe the effects of austerity measures taken to their natural extreme, one local Galapagos-scaled ecosystem worth studying is Highland Park. Located about six miles from downtown, Highland Park is technically not part of Detroit at all but its own separate municipality. (Though one surrounded on all sides by Detroit, so central on a map of the city it practically marks a bull’s-eye.) In the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1805, the federal government had given Michigan territorial officials permission to sell state property in order to fund the rebuilding of Detroit. Part of the unloaded land, a patch of mostly swamp, passed through the hands of a series of developers who hoped to turn the place into a viable township. As developers are wont, they seized upon one of the most appealing aspects of the local landscape—the few hills punctuating the marsh—to come up with the prototypically suburban name of Highland Park.1

  One of the would-be developers was Judge Augustus Woodward, who proposed naming the village Woodwardville. But his plans didn’t go anywhere, and nothing much happened with Highland Park until Captain Will H. Stevens, a one-eyed veteran and former Colorado prospector, managed to get the swamp drained, making the land inhabitable, if not yet desirable. When Henry Ford relocated to Highland Park in 1906 to radically expand his production capability, the area surrounding his new factory was predominantly farmland. There were also modest shoe and wagon factories, a general store, and a blacksmith’s. The site of Ford’s world-changing Model T plant had once been a hotel resort and spa, with mineral baths and a neighboring harness racing track. In 1910, the year the factory opened, the population of Highland Park was 425. By the following year, it had grown to 4,120, and by the end of the decade, it had become 46,000.2 Highland Park resisted annexation by Detroit at the behest of Ford, the city’s largest corporate citizen, as part of a blatant tax dodge. The tiny Polish enclave of Hamtramck, also surrounded by Detroit, pulled a similar move around the same time to create a tax haven for its Dodge plant, robbing Detroit, even in those boomtown years, of revenues from two of its most productive factories.

  As recently as the fifties, Highland Park, called the City of Trees, boasted one of the area’s most desirable addresses. Even after Ford decided he needed more space for his manufacturing operation and decamped to the Rouge plant, the city remained the world headquarters of Chrysler, founded in Highland Park in 1925.

  Ford’s Highland Park plant, ca. 1920

  By the early nineties, though, Chrysler chair Lee Iacocca had announced that the company would be moving to Auburn Hills, some fifty miles north of the city. With the departure of those final five thousand Chrysler employees, Highland Park lost a quarter of its tax base and 80 percent of its annual budget. Having spurned Detroit’s advances during Ford’s heyday, Highland Park now stood abandoned by its onetime corporate suitors for younger, prettier suburbs. There was occasionally talk of Detroit absorbing Highland Park, but that was just wishful thinking, Detroit at this point having zero interest in adding more crime, blight, and desperately poor people to its own mean buffet of urban pathologies.

  Today, driving north on Woodward Avenue, you’d never notice having crossed from one city to the other. You pass a combination fish market and takeout restaurant (“U Buy, We Fry”), and the Gold Nugget Pawn Shop, and Mo’ Money Tax Returns, and a Babes N Braids, and a place called Cherokee’s Hot Spot where you can get your ears or nose pierced or pick up some exotic dance wear (“Plus Sizes Available,” notes a sign in the window), alongside numerous other long-shuttered apartment complexes, municipal buildings, and storefronts (including the rubble of a florist).

  Yet Highland Park, officially the poorest city in Michigan, manages to tidily pack all of the problems of Detroit into just three square miles. In fact, fantastic as it might seem, the city is actually in much worse shape than Detroit proper, the one place Detroiters can gaze upon and say, “Man, those guys are fucked!” One afternoon, wandering around Highland Park, I must have accidentally stepped back over the border, because when I asked an older gentleman raking his lawn about Highland Park’s city services, he appeared deeply offended. “This is Detroit,” he snapped. “I don’t know anything about Highland Park. I don’t go over there.” We were two blocks away.

  In other words, Highland Park is the Detroit of Detroit. In 2011, the Bing administration floated the possibility of closing eighteen of the city’s twenty-three public library branches; Highland Park’s entire library system has been closed since 2002. Detroit has shed more than half its population since the 1950s; Highland Park, over the same period, has lost four-fifths of its citizens. In Detroit, the streetlights are notoriously spotty, and there has been discussion of reducing their number by nearly half; Highland Park owed so much money to the electric company that it agreed to entirely decommission all lights on residential streets—which meant not only switching them off but physically removing the posts. (Residents have been asked by city officials to leave on their own porch lights as crime-prevention measures.) Detroit’s police force remains woefully understaffed; Highland Park fired its entire police department in 2001, outsourcing patrols to the Wayne County Sheriff ’s Department. Since its revival in 2007, the Highland Park PD has been headquartered in a ministation at a strip mall, where the jail is a makeshift chain-link cage.

  When I visited the Reverend David Bullock, head of the Highland Park chapter of the NAACP and pastor of Greater St. Matthew Baptist Church, he told me, “I always say to people, ‘You want to see what Detroit’s going to look like when the auto industry leaves? Come to Highland Park.’ It’s Detroit writ small.”

  * * *

  One day, my brother Paul called to tell me about one of his coworkers at Children’s Village, the juvenile detention center where he worked as a therapist. This particular colleague, Marvin Vaughn, held a staff position; his duties ranged from moderating group activities to restraining kids who became violent. The name Children’s Village took on a more sinister shading when you realized certain of the villagers had been accused of stomping random homeless guys to death or shooting people during violent carjackings. (Paul wasn’t allowed to talk about his clients, but the highest-profile cases always turned up in the papers.) Marvin, meanwhile, had a second job, in Highland Park, where, in addition to his full-time position at Children’s Village, he moonlighted another thirty hours each week as a firefighter.

  Marvin would often drive straight from Children’s Village to Highland Park and spend the night at the firehouse. (Those overnight hours were billable, which was how he managed to work seventy-hour weeks.) Per capita, Highland Park had an insanely busy engine house, averaging 150 fires each year: apartments, party stores, vacant homes, most probably arson, though this was always tricky to prove. When Paul told Marvin about my book, he suggested I swing by on Angel’s Night.

  I headed over to Highland Park around eight. It was unseasonably humid for a late October evening, nearly seventy degrees. On Oakland Avenue, I passed a couple of citizen patrollers in a gray Cadillac creeping along in the left lane at well below the speed limit. A yellow light, the sort an undercover detective in a seventies cop show would attach to his unmarked car if he needed to give sudden chase, flashed from their roof, its languid blink rate having seemingly been set to match the speed of the vehicle. It looked like the lead car in a funeral procession, if everyone else who might’ve attended the funeral had also met unexpected and horrible ends.

  Marvin had given me directions to the firehouse earlier in the day, but we’d had a bad phone connection and I assumed I’d misheard the address, because the only thing in the vicinity appeared to be an industrial park of cheap prefabricated warehouses. After circling for twenty minutes, I finally called Marvin back, and he told me to drive into the park, the former site of Chrysler’s world headquarters. Following a circuitous road past nondescript auto-parts factories (Magna Seating, Johnson Controls), I reached the edge of a cracked, weed-strewn parking lot, where I spotted a tiny blue sign reading Fire Department. On the far si
de of the lot, bordering a set of train tracks, an unmarked warehouse building stood, so anonymous and isolated you’d think it housed toxic waste material or a fleet of garbage trucks. A tall, full-figured guy wearing a Highland Park Fire Department sweatshirt emerged from a side door and waved me over.

  You could see how Marvin’s size would intimidate a misbehaving juvenile offender, but everything else about him exuded a laid-back, almost goofy affability. Marvin had grown up quite poor in Picayune, Mississippi, before his dad, following a well-trod African American migratory pattern, landed a job with Pontiac and moved the family to the metropolitan Detroit city of the same name. Marvin was in his midthirties, married, no kids yet, though his wife wanted some. There was a throat-clearing quality to his way of speaking that made it sound like at any moment he might suddenly burst into a raspy chuckle, and his voice darted up a couple of octaves whenever he became excited. Tonight, he wore a pair of thick-armed glasses that looked like they should be tinted. He also had a single patch of gray hair near the middle of his head, about the size of a large birthmark.

  A dirty secret of union towns like Detroit was how the historic battle for fair overtime pay, combined with the shrinking of benefits and real wages, had resulted in the strange phenomenon whereby, in the midst of deliriously high unemployment, the lucky people who’d somehow managed to hang on to their jobs might actually wind up overemployed, either via copious overtime—this worked out well for management, as overtime remained cheaper than covering the benefits of an entirely new hire—or, as in Marvin’s case, snagging second, lower-paying jobs, simply to maintain something approaching the middle-class lifestyle to which they’d grown accustomed.

  Marvin led me around back, through the wide-open bay doors. The Highland Park Fire Department, it turned out, was being housed—stored?—inside a warehouse. Marvin explained that the department’s poorly maintained former headquarters had been declared an environmental hazard by OSHA, so they’d come to occupy this temporary location. That was six years ago. Past a row of aged fire trucks, a white McDonald Modular Solutions trailer had been set up as an office. In front of it, an old stuffed couch and a pair of recliners, all scavenged from various curbs by the firefighters, had been arranged around a television set. A rack of oxygen tanks lined one of the walls like bottles of wine. Next to the trucks, the rest of the uniforms stood at the ready: boots on the ground, with thick, flame-retardant pants and suspenders already attached, so the firefighters could step right into their pant legs and yank up their suspenders with a single motion. The prepared uniforms drooped down over the boots like melted fireman candles.

  Firefighters milled in the dim light, chatting and eating. The ceiling of the warehouse rose nearly two floors above us. In a distant corner, I could make out a gym consisting of free weights and benches people had brought from home or picked up at garage sales. It had been a quiet night so far. Nearby, a blue plastic barrel with a handwritten sign taped to it read

  POP

  CAN$

  Beverage cans in Michigan were returnable for deposits.

  The firefighters had actually been evicted from their old firehouse while Highland Park’s finances were being controlled by the state of Michigan, under the auspices of an emergency manager. Rather than bring the old firehouse up to code or build a new one, the city had been paying several thousand dollars per month to heat the cavernous space each subsequent winter. Thanks to a proposal written by one of the department’s junior firefighters—on his own time and initiative, with no grant-writing training3—Highland Park received a $2.6 million federal FEMA grant for a new building. But after two years, the grant money still hadn’t been spent. Officials blamed the historic designation of the old firehouse, which made it difficult to tear down, though sources inside the department ascribed the delay to political infighting and shadier efforts to funnel the grant money to other city projects. Questions have also been raised about the way in which the architectural firm that contracted to design the new firehouse won its bid.

  In the meantime, the firefighters had made do. “We call this the Village,” Marvin said, leading me to the back of the warehouse. “One guy came up with this idea, because the trailer doesn’t hold us all.” In a dark corner, the firefighters had nailed together planks of raw plywood, constructing a multilevel warren of individual cells, a cross between a children’s box fort and the sort of slapdash partition undergraduate roommates might throw up in a dorm. They’d built twenty-six rooms in all; a Jolly Roger flag hung from the roof. Two of the firefighters, apparently preferring al fresco accommodations, slept in tents. Marvin pushed open the door to his room.

  “It’s small, but everyone’s got their own humble abode,” he said. The space was about the size of a large walk-in closet, with barely enough room for a twin bed and a television set. A framed photograph of a fierce-looking house fire hung next to the TV.

  “Were you there?” I asked.

  Marvin nodded and said, “It’s the fire devil holding on to the house—see it?” He stabbed the flames jutting from the roof with a thick finger. Sure enough, they resembled a cartoonish demon’s head, and you could even flesh out the pair of fiery arms reaching down to hug either wall of the place. “It’s not cropped or anything,” Marvin said.

  Marvin had started out as a firefighter in Pontiac. “Before that, I was a junior engineer,” he said. “Sucked! I tried nursing. Sucked! I said, ‘I need something exciting.’” Eventually, a friend told him, “You want to see some real fires? Come down to Highland Park.” At the time, Republican governor John Engler had just modified the residency rules in Michigan, allowing city workers to live outside the community employing them, so Marvin was able to transfer to Highland Park without moving there. None of the Highland Park firefighters I met actually lived in the city, except when they slept at the warehouse.

  An average night found eight firefighters on duty. Normally, this level of staffing would be more than adequate for a city of Highland Park’s size. But considering the firehouse often saw multiple structure blazes over the course of a single evening, the place eked out its defensive duties with an absurdly skeletal crew. One of Marvin’s lieutenants, Eric Hollowell, told me about a time when eleven houses burned in one night. Hollowell’s entire seven-person unit—one of the eight firefighters on duty must always remain behind to answer incoming calls—had been in the midst of combating the first three fires, a trio of neighboring houses, when they got word of several more fires breaking out at the opposite end of the block, forcing Hollowell to split up his already overstretched crew. (Normal procedure would call for three trucks—about fifteen people—when responding to a single residential fire.) Not long after that, a resident approached Hollowell at the scene and informed him of another abandoned house that had caught fire, on the next block over. Hollowell had to let that one free-burn for an hour. He couldn’t spare any more guys.

  One of the fire trucks came from Texas, used; another, also used, from Arizona or Georgia, no one could remember which. All were ancient by fire engine standards, twenty years old, leaky. One had a five-hundred-gallon tank that, by the end of an average night, would lose three-fifths of its water; another’s ladder, so rickety, had everyone afraid to climb it.

  “You know how we communicate at fire scenes?” Hollowell asked me.

  A part-timer named Chuck, sitting nearby, glanced up and muttered, “You telling him everything?”

  Hollowell continued, “We only have three radios. We communicate by voice. Once people are inside a building, I have no way to know if they’re okay. Chuck is driving our main truck and he doesn’t have a radio. If people are called to another scene, he can’t communicate.”

  Chuck, nodding glumly, admitted, “It’s like in baseball: all hand signals.”

  Then he did an imitation of a catcher flashing dispatches to the mound.

  * * *

  Angel’s Night had been slow, so Marvin invited me to come back to the station on another occasion. Even by Hig
hland Park standards, the week of my return had been a rough one. A two-hundred-unit apartment complex had burned several days earlier, one of the residents dying after leaping from a second-story window. “Definitely arson,” a firefighter who wished to remain anonymous told me. “Either an insurance job or some kind of retaliation.”

  When I showed up, several of the men had arranged their folding chairs in the mouth of the bay doors, facing the train tracks. They all looked crispy and adrenaline-deprived. Even Marvin, outwardly jovial as ever, had exhausted, vacant eyes. The night before, there had been only two fires, but afterwards, Marvin hadn’t been able to fall back asleep. “Every time gas prices drop, we see an increase in fires,” he noted. A Bluetooth device blinked from one of his ears. He delivered the line matter-of-factly, like an observational comic doing a bit about airplane food.

  Hollowell sat nearby, chain-smoking and drinking coffee from a thermos. A trim black man with a cleanly shaved head and a wispy mustache, he wore a blue Highland Park Fire Department polo shirt tucked into dark slacks. Hollowell was thirty-seven. He’d grown up in Highland Park, just a few blocks from the warehouse; so few houses remained on Hollowell’s old street, one of his coworkers told me, “I call that block We Lost It.” Hollowell’s mother had been a teacher at Highland Park High. His father died when Hollowell was only ten years old. An electrician, he’d been doing work in a friend’s basement as a favor and stepped into a puddle of water, not realizing someone had cut the power back on.