http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x1_4hEhxGU

I know that you wrote a largely optimistic piece here, but I've got to point this out: There are NO chain grocery stores inside the city limits of Detroit. No Krogers, Farmer Jacks, Meijer's, Spartan Stores, Wal-Mart...Nothing. Single store mom & pops don't have purchasing power, so if someone inside the city can't afford to travel to the 'burbs, they pay higher prices in the city. That's a damned shame.

Michigan is a great vacation state there are 300 pristine golf courses and miles and miles of oil free beaches on the great lakes.
A true value for the few dollars you have to spend from the upper peninsula all the way down and God knows those people have had it rough since the crash in 1982 and do not forget all the great fishing.

America nurtured and fed our corporations...till they grew big and strong.

And then they moved out on their own.

I guess that makes us Americans "empty nesters"?

Hitsville, USA?

They aired it earlier this year and I was very moved by this documentary. There's indeed much to love about the city. I never visited it but I'm very curious.

Morte detroit love is to be found here.

- but this post made me think of a train trip I took from Toronto to New York City in 1980. The Amtrak route went through upstate NY to Albany, then south along the Hudson. I remember miles and miles of abandoned factories, slums and urban blight - it seemed to go on forever.

The countryside was green and bucolic, but in Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Rochester the sense of decay was really striking. The industrial area of Rochester looked like an old war zone. For the first time I understood what the term 'rust belt' meant. I had never seen anything like it in Canada.

I wonder what this region looks like now.

It is sad. I remember as a kid going to the 'road show' movies at the Fox Theater, staying at the Statler Hotel, shopping at Hudsons' huge downtown store, learning about the joys of corned beef at Brother's Deli, watching musicals at the Fisher Theater and hot fudge cream puffs at Saunders restaurant. It was less than 50 years ago.

a great american pastime, making crap smell and look good

Interesting watching Requiem for Detroit while sitting in the middle of Detroit. Been here for seven years and find it both fascinating/wonderful and exasperatingly frustrating. We had out-of-towners here last week and they had a good time.

Next up--our home and garden tour, right here in Detroit!

http://udcatour.com/

http://www.udcaonline.com/

I visited Detroit for Easter this year...

Sadly the area where I used to run up and down the sidewalks in the summertime as a kid on a visit with my grandma has too many burned out homes, and too many vacant lots where relatives' homes used to stand. The vacant lots grew wild grass and weeds like the land trying to heal itself after a brushfire caused by a lightning strike. When I roamed the sidewalks as a child, they were cracked and a challenge to traverse due to the large oak trees whose roots strained at the joints in the concrete, lifting the cement like a teepee. But we rode bikes and ran and walked down to the neighborhood A and P market. The old oak trees were mostly gone now, but a few remained, a testament to the changes that the neighborhood had endured. My grandma's home was still there but not as neat or tidy as it once was, but it was well cared for by the current owners except maybe the porch which could have used a new coat of paint. The porch used to be where family would gather on cool summer nights watching the flicker of the fireflies and talking with the neighbors. It was a different time- a time before people went indoors to watch the flickering of the TV instead.

The Catholic Church that used to conduct Sunday mass in Latin was still standing on the corner, but now it was a house of worship for some other faith. The main road leading to my grandma's house was being repaved and was torn up, and some streets fared better than others. Some burned out homes and businesses still stood, marking a different time with today's desperation. The neighborhood was made up of working class people. Ethnicity of Eastern Europeans. Many worked at the car factories but not all, some were plumbers, and painters, and milkmen from the days when the dairy still delivered fresh milk in bottles and butter to your home.

My Dad still lives in Detroit, a different area than the old neighborhood, but much like the one that my grandma used to live in, and not far from the fancy homes in Grosse Point. It's comforting, in a way, to visit his small two bedroom home and see the past. His neighbors are more diverse now than my grandma's ever was, but that's ok. They still seem like middle class folks, just trying to make ends meet and dreaming of a better life for their kids...

Eat at THE Original Pancake House. But go early. There are no reservations and you may need to wait until a table opens up. Best Breakfast in town.

A visit to watch the Detroit Tigers is always fun. And Hockeytown is a good place to visit.
And the Detroit Science Center was fun.
You can take a riverboat ride downtown and there used to be an old trolley that you could ride for fun as well.

And a visit to Detroit isn't complete without a visit to Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum or a visit to the factory to watch them build Ford trucks.

As a native Detroiter, I have watched the decline of the city with a tear in my eye. I lived there the first 17 years of my life and one of the joys of my teen years was moving equipment on- and offstage at The Grande Ballroom.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly how, where, and when it all went so wrong, but I'll start with the Detroit riot and then add other observations.

OH! You think I'm talking about the '67 riot. No, not that one.

If you have any sense of history you might be thinking of the 1943 riot, when an unfounded rumour that a Black man raped a White woman caused Whites to rampage against Blacks. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Race_Rio...)

But I'm not talking about THAT riot either. I'm talking about the FIRST Detroit riot in 1863. Whites were pissed off at this little thing that came out of Washington called The Emancipation Proclamation. They were determined to show Blacks who was really in charge.

At that time Detroit did not have a constabulary and it was quickly decided to create a police force, which was tasked to keep the Blacks in line. Some things never change.

In between the 1863 and 1943 riots was the incident in 1925 when a White mob terrorized Black doctor Ossian Sweet, who had recently moved into the wrong neighbourhood. In the ensuing violence a White man was killed and Sweet was charged with murder. Clarence Darrow managed to win the doctor a hung jury.

All this to say that race relations, or lack thereof, has always been at the bottom of Detroit's problems.

According to the book "Sundown Towns" by James Loewen, Detroit was always one of the most segregated cities in all of America. (Read the book. It's amazing and shows why American cities look the way they do and why the country still hasn't solved The Race Problem. http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/sundowntowns...)

After the 1967 riots the "White Flight" to the suburbs, which had already started in the late '50s, accelerated like crazy. When I was growing up in Detroit it was 'Merka's 5th most populous city with a population of about 1.8 million people. (I am going by memory for that figure.) Today it is the 11th most populous with half the number of people from its heyday, or 910,000 (according to the Wiki Wacky Woo).

What this managed to do is depress the tax rate. There was just not the money to deal with crumbling infrastructure and the loss of jobs when the automakers hit the highway. This allowed the city to rot from the downtown core outwards.

But make no mistake: It was all about race relations, or lack thereof.

I was recently back in Motown. Every time I visit I go back to my old neighbourhood (Greenfield & 8 Mile, for those who care). Over the 40 years since I've been gone I Have watched that neighbourhood slowly deteriorate. First it was the odd house here and there that was either boarded up, burned out, or was just a hole in the ground where a house once stood. However, each visit had more houses like this. On my most recent visit (on my birthday, oddly enough) I drove around the neighbourhood crying. It has gone past the tipping point. It is the worst blight I have ever seen in an American city in an area that used to be upper middle class. I'm not talking about the downtown area that everybody knows about. These were small post war houses that went up almost overnight to house all those returning soldiers. Now it appears to these eyes totally beyond repair, which is why they cried.

Everything that went wrong with Detroit has to do with race, and Detroit is a microcosm of everything wrong with America. It has always been about race. And, sadly, it appears it will always be about race.

With all my love,
Aunty Em
http://www.newshounds.us/auntys_antics/

A good virtual tour is aka the ruins of Detroit tour. As many commentators point out, Detroit's problems go back to well before the 80s and were evident even in the fifties. Note that the Packard plant was never repurposed and it shut down in the fifties. Anyway, the tour is visually striking and has lots of good information.