“At the end of the 2007 school year, Jane Cooper Elementary (built in 1920) was left unsecured in the middle of the wasteland where a middle-class neighborhood once stood. It took “scrappers” only a few months to strip the building of every last ounce of metal and leave it looking as though it hadn’t been […]

(Detroit Police Chief William Hart and Mayor Coleman A. Young in better days. Photo Detroit Free Press.) When you grow up in a town north of Canada, all directions are down from the Pole. That is the way it seems, anyway, since the accident of the Detroit River and the protrusion of Ontario below the […]

(Ford Model T assembly line. Photo FoMoCo.) With all the talk about jobs these days, it makes a Boomer sigh. We have all done some work we didn’t like much, but we lucky ones got a chance to see some things that really suck. I worked on a farm one summer, and that was an […]

I stopped at Willow after work, no surprise, still thinking about the husk of the city. I had looked for a limo to do a tour of some of the ruins, a delicate matter, since those that dwell too deeply on what is so sad are said to indulge in a fetish called “ruin porn,” […]

(Detroit Skyline, 1929.) Writing about Detroit means writing about The Line. Manufacturing stuff was what provided the economic base that produced the graceful boulevards and avenues that made the city once called- without irony- “The Paris of the Midwest.” Detroit ranked third in the nation, after New York and Chicago, in the number of major […]

(1973 GMC Chevy Vega Kammback Wagon. Photo Socotra.) I can’t talk about the creation of the fabulous ruins of Detroit without mentioning the ride I had at the time. Raven bought it, brand new, and gave it to me to ensure that I had reliable transportation to get to work. It was part of the […]

(Coleman A. Young stands atop the Riverfront Apartments he encouraged as Mayor. Detroit Free Press photo by Tony Spina) So, Coleman Young grabbed Detroit by the throat and shook it so hard that the fifth largest city in These United States had its neck broken. Nah, didn’t happen that way. Walk with me back a […]

(The enigmatic cover of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.) I threatened you that I was going to take you back to 1973. Fasten your seatbelt and turn up the iPod. You have to put tunes to the year, that is the way it was. The Allman Brothers might have peaked that year, and […]

(The lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, five years after Katrina.) So, the morning jig through the very strange year of 1973 in the Motor City was interrupted by a call from my Coon-Ass buddy, Boats. He was up early to head to his current position as a moderately senior Government employee involved in Homeland […]