Nicholas LaClair Photographer and Director for Print and Film

primitive and beautiful

Detroit 1917

I've spent the past week in Detroit visiting family for the holidays and doing some of my own documentary work. Wandering, shooting, interviewing, researching, spending time. Learning. In a way, I'm just using the tools of my trade to rediscover this place for myself.

I knew the recent demise of the auto industry put my city in the national spotlight - even on the east coast, I've heard a constant stream of stories of this city in the past year. Detroiters are aware of it, but what I found everyone talking about most is the house Time Magazine recently bought downtown to use as staff headquarters of a year-long project - detailed in The Detroit Blog - to tell the tale of the city. Vagrants in abandonments and veterans in the American Legion all proudly announced its existence, knowing the rest of the world cares about what goes on here.

Of the reasons behind the house and the project, Time's editor-in-chief  John Huey writes: "... we believe that Detroit right now is a great American story. No city has had more influence on the country's economic and social evolution. Detroit was the birthplace of both the industrial age and the nation's middle class, and the city's rise and fall — and struggle to rise again — are a window into the challenges facing all of modern America. From urban planning to the crisis of manufacturing, from the lingering role of race and class in our society to the struggle for better health care and education, it's all happening at its most extreme in the Motor City."

The big question is whether Detroit's current misfortune is the canary in the coal mine or simply a warning of what can happen to cities that don't pull up on the controls in time to become 21st century cities with 21st century job markets rather than crashing into third-world hardship. But something to remember is this: though the demise of the auto industry is relatively new, Detroit's malady is chronic and long-lived. The charred abandonments that stand alone on neighborhood blocks have stood silent this way for 20, 30 years or longer.

In a lot of respects, Detroit's been like the terminally ill or mentally unsound, packed away out of sight and forgotten by the rest of the healthy country - hell, even its healthy surrounding suburbs. But now there's an epidemic, and everyone's again keenly interested in the old patient because there may be something to gain from the observation.

I wandered an enormous old Packard plant earlier this week that used to produce some of the most expensive and prestigious automobiles available. Packard rolled out its last car around 1956, and since then the factory has been a gargantuan empty shell for better than 50 years. There's a definite culture of abandonment, some of which acts as fertile soil for art and music. This Beatportal article describes how the plant also helped launch techno music. "It represents a virtual who’s-who of techno elite ... and was host to several late-night parties at a time that the music was barely bubbling up from the underground during the 1990s."

All this ruin is documented beautifully in the work of photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

While wandering the building, we ran across four men who make Detroit's abandoned hulls their chosen hang. Dressed in worn Carhartts with small sledgeammers hanging from the loops on their work pants,  they looked like factory line workers. Drinking from 40's and 22's of beer, and definitely holstering protection under their coats, they detailed their favorite spots in the city (most of them never guarded or patrolled). One of the guys lit a cigarette and announced that nobody ever cares about gunshots. "I emptied two hi-cap mags into a wall of windows just the other week; police have better things to do". All of a sudden the spent hollow point bullet I found on the sidewalk earlier this week while leaving Detroit Institute of Arts seems understandable. Also understandable is how the city's unsolved murder rate stands around 70%. We said our goodbyes and headed to the corridor south toward the overpass while they headed up to the roof, inviting us to join. "We'll be building a fire up there if you want to get warm later."

Packard Plant

It's a city of many, living off very little. Any building forced to shut down for a short period is immediately picked apart by scrappers. Cars disappear. Pedestrians are mugged. It's survival of the fittest, or in some cases the most ruthless. Across the street from the back end of the Packard plant is the headquarters of a motorcycle gang - a boarded up storefront building standing alone on an empty block with the name of the gang tagged brightly on the front and sides. Safety in numbers - the pack mentality.

And so the once-beautiful city is now sparse. The two images below are from 1961 and the present, and were taken from the blog Sweet Juniper. Click on them to read the post in which they were used (much more eloquent than my own). What once was dense housing is now just ... empty space, where the land is taking back its rightful ownership and packs of feral dogs roam the land.

There's a lot of talk about two or more Detroits, and the photo essays on countless abandonments only tell the story of the most obvious of them. They're striking and detail very first thing you see: tracts of open land, littered with piles of tires like detritus in the hamster cage of the auto industry.

The second narrative is of crooked politicians ... years of crooked politicians. Taking care of yourself at the cost of others isn't only a phenomenon at the bottom. Ten years ago Bob Thompson tried to donate $200 million to the city, partly to create charter schools and help fix the city's miserable 21% graduation rate and 50% rate of functional illiteracy. However, the teacher's union blocked it from being accepted. After many years of fighting, Mr. Thompson has succeeded in opening a few schools. Everyone out for themselves. Then there's Kwame Kilpatrick and, long before him, Coleman Young - all benefiting at the expense of others.

However there's another, more subtle story of the city that's a brighter tale being written by people like Mark Covington, who built the Georgia St. Community Garden, buying a storefront and house for $1 and growing crops on empty lots to provide food to residents. He's currently building a community center, giving the children of his impoverished neighborhood access to an education, computers, and most importantly, people who care about how they're raised.

This is a Detroit also built by families like the Griffioens who made the choice to raise their children (now 2 and 5, I believe) in this same area. Jim raises his kids and writes the blog Sweet Juniper while his wife (who goes by the moniker "Wood" to protect her day job) works as a lawyer.

Part of Detroit's potential is its sheer lack of property value. Have a project or want to try any sort of new thing you'd like? Buy a $100 house. As NYT's Toby Barlow (recently relocated to Detroit from NYC) points out, "In a way, a strange, new American dream can be found here, amid the crumbling, semi-majestic ruins of a half-century’s industrial decline." This appeals to people like Gina and Mitch Cope, who bought a vacant house at the end of their block for $3000 and are turning it into the Power House Project - converting it through solar and wind to a source of green energy to provide power to itself and at least one other home on the block. It gives the neighborhood purpose and serves as "a platform for communication between members of the community."

But this trend started long before - some 25 years ago when an artist named Tyree Guyton started The Heidelberg Project, in an attempt to make use of an abandoned block by turning it into a folk art project that could unite the community of all races, colors and creeds to an otherwise segregated city. Sometimes political, his work has won the disapproval of prior city administrations (who, it's told, would bulldoze some of his buildings in the middle of the night to prevent further attention). But the project is still alive, and acts as a beacon to every artist who's contemplated buying a useless property and creating something of interest.

They've all chosen to stick it out and, from hardness and desolation, attempt to build an alternative to the 21st century economy as we know it. Where the old (post revolution/riot) Detroit was built on a social structure of prejudice and fear and an economic structure of locked-step stability, the new Detroit will hopefully be one of inclusion, integration and cooperation borne of an economic climate of uncertainty, instability, but creativity, freedom, and grassroots potential.

Detroit hasn't seen its communities grow into the inevitability of chain stores and large housing developments. Those of its residents who choose to eschew two-car garages and popup housing communities whose names resemble retirement homes, instead value a small community structure. They're like Brooklyners, favoring local businesses with rich family histories over nameless, faceless box stores and a sense of seclusion in anonymity. They look for communities where the simple act of buying milk or cheese means belonging ... connecting. In small markets, it's impossible to buy provisions without trading stories and updates, keeping in touch - the backbone of pioneer communities. This kind of return to the small agrarian community is building the kind of city that has a working goat farm close to the city center (one of a few nearby, I hear).

Primitive and beautiful.

[I have to give Jim Griffioen credit for all of this. Most of my research into the city and all these links I found on his blog. Really, all of this research is his hard work, not mine - I'm just re-reporting what he lives every day. Follow his blog; it's well worth it.]

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