Urban Prairie

Alright okay yes yes I said I was going to write a post about Fritz Hollings. Let's take a look at his political career:

Born 1922
Elected to SC House of Representatives, 1948
Elected Lieutenant Governor of SC in 1954
Elected Governor in 1958
Governor of South Carolina, 1959-1963
Senator from South Carolina, 1966-2005
Did not seek reelection in 2004
Is not yet dead

He's been around. Unfortunately, he's been around way too long for one entry to be satisfactory! Also I didn't want to write a comprehensive entry on him that badly. All I want to do is throw up some Hollings quotes and talk about his positions on trade and the Pirates of the Intertubes and copyright. Ugh. So screw Fritz Hollings! Let's talk about what I was reading about last night...Detroit.

A couple years ago I read a book called Inside USA by John Gunther. It was written in the late 1940s and describes a vastly different American than ours. Back then, those wonderful Rust Belt cities stood proud and tall. The South was like a third world country in some places. Texas was growing (and Texans were ferociously proud of Texas then, too) but all the major cities were much smaller. Houston had less than 400,000 people. In 1950 the census would record Detroit with 1.8 million people, its most ever then and now.

What happened? The answers are easy and true. Detroit made cars, and cars enabled people to escape past the city limits. (The metro area, unlike Detroit, has not declined in population.) A lot of black folks moved to the city to work at auto factories. Detroit had a lot of racial tension, most dramatically illustrated in the 1967 riot. The 1970s contained oil shocks and the coming of the Japanese auto industry. Ever since the 1970s Detroit's been dying. It's been dying my whole life.

And today! Detroit: where the Detroit Lions became the first NFL team to go 0-16 in a season. The whole Kwame Kilpatrick scandal - a pretty lurid odyssey, full of sex and corruption. Where urban prairie exists. You look at satellite photos: it's not rare to see blocks of Detroit that are mostly green. The buildings are gone, so the grass can grow again. Some buildings aren't gone, they're abandoned.

That's what strikes me: the empty buildings. How proud they once were! What dreams occurred to the people who once lived and worked in them! A lot of these abandoned buildings are heavily graffitied. Sometimes drug dealers live in them, sometimes more harmless squatters, sometimes pigeons, covering the floors with pigeon shit.

Another thing: These abandoned buildings include pretty important and beautiful buildings of the time. There's a lot of grand architecture in Detroit. There are whole skyscrapers abandoned, leaving Detroit at night looking like a gappy smile, or so I have heard. A lot of these buildings are pretty beautiful even today. Houston's a very new city, we know that. And a place like York is a very old city. But by American standards Detroit is pretty old.

I guess the building I want to emphasize the most is the poor Michigan Central Station. It is this building that makes me painfully wish I could travel in time to 1920 or even 1955 when people trod its steps. Look at these photos. It brings to mind the surreal scene from Going Postal when Moist von Lipwig hallucinates the old decrepit post office as a place of bustling activity. Poor Detroit.

I must also mention another piece of beautiful architecture, not in Detroit - the Buffalo City Hall. Buffalo was always smaller than Detroit but similar situation - steel industry collapsed, now there's urban prairie.

The obvious question is: what now for Detroit? It's been dying for so long. It's still dying. The car industry is still dying, and sadly it's still pretty important to Detroit. You all know about their bailouts. Detroit needs new blood, but who wants to relocate there? One thing they tried was casinos. People aren't going to casinos so much these days. (Not to go off on a tangent, but I've heard casinos proposed for Galveston.) Beyond that...I have no answer. None at all. In fact, the only Rust Belt city that I can think of that did make the transition to a different economy is Pittsburgh: formerly a steel town, now a high-tech center. The presence of important universities there helps. Detroit probably has some universities that I can't think of, but Michigan is in Ann Arbor. No, the future should perhaps look more like Eastern Germany after 1989 or Youngstown today: downsizing.

That's a little misleading: Detroit's lost half of its population since 1950. It's involuntarily downsized. Something similar happened with Youngstown, but instead of trying to think up new grand schemes to attract businesses (these don't work well enough) - it has accepted that it will be smaller than it once was. You can read about it here. I understand Youngstown is being closely watched by other old Midwest, Rust Belt cities.

I've gotta say this: reading about Detroit kind of reminds me of watching Michael Moore's Roger & Me. Yeah, I know, Moore is kinda truthy in the film. But he's right about the larger point: Flint was once a nice place to live, and now it's Flint. The film concerns Flint's efforts to diversify beyond the auto industry - some efforts are pretty funny, and they mostly fail. And so with Detroit.

Another thought: Reading about Detroit is like reading some postapocalyptic novel where the unfortunate survivors come across some once great city, and it is in ruins. Detroit's not that far gone in some places. And in other places it is.

The most interesting article I read about Detroit last night is from, oddly enough, the Weekly Standard. That's one of those conservative ideas magazines, small in size and circulation, like the American Spectator or National Review. The liberal analogues would be the Nation or Mother Jones or the Progressive. Anyway, the Weekly Standard published an absolutely top-flight article on Detroit, which I am proud to link to here. But a warning: it's really, really long. It took me 25 or 30 minutes to read. I was reading it slowly to absorb the article, and I succeeded.

Other links:
Can't end this post without mentioning Hudson's Department Store. I really wish I could see that back in the 1950s. It's gone now.
detroitfunk: chronicling the abandoned buildings and decay of Detroit. This blog probably contains pictures of all the old great buildings of Detroit, and I plan to look at every archived post eventually.
The Urbanophile: Discussion of Midwest cities and what is to be done with them.