Green Detroit, 1942

[David Conwill]

I just wanted to share this picture with you. I can’t stop staring at it. It makes me feel exactly the way I feel when I’m actually in the city, and its bittersweet, because I can imagine how great the city could be again, if folks would just give it a chance.

The photo is looking north along Woodward Avenue, toward Grand Boulevard. The DIA and Detroit Public Library are in the foreground, and the silhouette of the Fisher Building is visible in the distance.

-Dave

 

[dhermann1]

Ohhhh . . . . Shorpy.com can break your heart sometimes, can't it?

 

[Talbot]

Sad how things have changed. Beautifull pic.

 

[DetroitFalcons]

It makes me feel exactly the way I feel when I’m actually in the city, and its bittersweet, because I can imagine how great the city could be again, if folks would just give it a chance.

-Dave

I was reading an article in the WSJ yesterday (but I found it on a search...not sure of the date), and if Boston Edison, Palmer Woods, and English Village are failing, that city has no chance. It's dead (albeit with a downtown fortress on life support).

 

[David Conwill]

I was reading an article in the WSJ yesterday (but I found it on a search...not sure of the date), and if Boston Edison, Palmer Woods, and English Village are failing, that city has no chance. It's dead (albeit with a downtown fortress on life support).

It's from this week, methinks. One of my partners is a huge WSJ reader, and he mentioned it over lunch a day or two ago. You're referring to the article about the woman who was pulling out after trying like mad to make a go of it?

Still, I think the WSJ is just as biased as the NYT, albeit in the other direction. Its readers would like Detroit to fail, as it would just prove their thesis about what is wrong with America.

I think Mayor Bing is going to eventually be hailed as the one who started the turnaround, we just need to be patient.

I'd love to see them remove most of the freeways running through town, ala Portland, Oregon. They divide the downtown from the neighborhoods, and keep the city from feeling like a cohesive unit.

-Dave

 

[Bill Greene]

Look at that striped grass, too. Very impressive photo.

 

[HarpPlayerGene]

I was born in Detroit. So was my dad, and his dad, and his dad... I was a child when my father got us out and headed for Florida. My father was born in 1914 which means he was in his thirties in the '40s. Wow, that must have been sumthin'! They called Detroit "The Paris of the West" back then. A real jewel.

But it was a boomtown with all its eggs in one basket, believeing no one could ever compete or beat them at the automotive game. When you think of Boston or Chicago or New York, you don't immediately think of only ONE industry on which everything depends. Detroit had a great run at it but I think by being so narrowly focused and by virtue of the enormous reinvestment in culture and architecture that made it look so impressive, financial failure was always inevitable.

 

[David Conwill]

But it was a boomtown with all its eggs in one basket, believeing no one could ever compete or beat them at the automotive game. When you think of Boston or Chicago or New York, you don't immediately think of only ONE industry on which everything depends. Detroit had a great run at it but I think by being so narrowly focused and by virtue of the enormous reinvestment in culture and architecture that made it look so impressive, financial failure was always inevitable.

Your dad was the same age as my paternal grandfather who grew up in Chicago. My paternal grandmother grew up in Flint, Michigan, which was another one-industry town.

The crazy and sad part of all this is that if you look at Detroit, Flint, and Saginaw (the three Michigan cities where most of the auto industry in this state was located - I'm counting Dearborn as akin to Hamtramck and Highland Park, just part of Detroit really), they all had really diverse manufacturing economies pre-automobile.

Heck, Detroit became the auto capital pretty much because of the thriving boat industry. Michigan coal is of crummy quality, so anybody building yachts and runabouts in Detroit in the late 19th Century was gathering tons of good experience with gasoline engines.

Cigars, stoves, clothing, steel. You name it, and they probably made it in Michigan at one time, but then along came this golden goose and hopped on board. So many of us piled on, we killed it.

I would love to see Detroit become the city of high quality goods produced in small batches. I don't think sheer quantity at low cost is ever going to be an attribute of American industry again, but there's so much manufacturing skill in southeast and central Michigan, that something has got to come of it.

European goods sold in the U.S. in the 20th Century had a certain panache derived from quality and exclusivity. I think we could be that for the emerging Asian market. The success of Buick over there gives a hint as to what a Golden Era brand name can do in a market that's been cut off since the 1940s.

-Dave

 

[StraightEight]

Great photo! Looks like a relatively quiet Saturday in the summer. I'm wondering why you can't see the letters on the GM building. Did those come later? Recently, a friend pointed them out as we drove down I-275 near the airport, lying in a scrap yard.

 

[Fletch]

You know, I've known people who remembered many a ravaged city in its prime. Youngstown. Bridgeport. Newark. "You should've seen this place." Stories of medium-big cities that felt like small towns because they had neighborhoods, and good schools, and downtowns that aspired to something, with stores and theaters and foot traffic well into the night.

None of those stories, poignant tho they all are, are as sad as Detroit's. In the '30s and '40s it was the fourth largest city in the country. None of the others have fallen so far, over such a long period, from what they used to be.

And I would say none is less celebrated than Detroit for what it used to be. I don't know why. Maybe it's literary - being too far west, or too much of a melting pot to have its own Philip Roth (altho there is Philip Levine). People forget, or keep it on the level of nostalgia. By and by a city's past passes from the popular imagination. Detroit is remembered as a blander Newark, Bridgeport a second-rate Brooklyn.

Standing zone, Washington Blvd., 1939. You could doublepark if the driver stayed with the car. Few drove alone.

 

[Widebrim]

It is sad. What is that building on the left, in the background? It looks a lot like L.A.'s city hall...

 

[Fletch]

That is the Art Deco tour de force Fisher Building, once home to Bodies By Fisher and radio station WJR.

 

[repeatclicks]

Its not sad. Its not depressing or miserable. I'm from Detroit and just visited again last month.

The city is still full of beautiful architecture and now even the worst areas are showing major signs of growth and regeneration. I used to visit Bricktown off Jefferson to photograph the warehouses, chat (very briefly) with the homeless and I would never go alone. These days they are building small bike paths and parks where I watched a homeless guy build his house from garbage.

Its beautiful to see the old warehouses being converted into loft space on the riverfront. Its growth, its change and its a good thing.

 

[Fletch]

I hope you're right and that it continues...

 

[repeatclicks]

I hope you're right and that it continues...

Mate, when you've hit the bottom, there's only one way to go, and thats up. Our old mayor is now safely behind bars, and we have a new mayor who is really showing potential.

No city is anything like how it used to be, every city evolves and continues to change, for better or for worse. Detroit has so much heart and character to it that its impossible for it to not continue.

 

[Fletch]

As I said - hope you're right. And yes, I have some personal angle here: I spent most of the 1980s in Michigan getting an education.