Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City
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For most of the twentieth century, Detroit was a symbol of American industrial might, a place of entrepreneurial and technical ingenuity where the latest consumer inventions were made available to everyone through the genius of mass production. Today, Detroit is better known for its dwindling population, moribund automobile industry, and alarmingly high murder rate. In Driving Detroit, author George Galster, a fifth-generation Detroiter and internationally known urbanist, sets out to understand how the city has come to represent both the best and worst of what cities can be, all within the span of a half century. Galster invites the reader to travel with him along the streets and into the soul of this place to grasp fully what drives the Motor City.
With a scholar's rigor and a local's perspective, Galster uncovers why metropolitan Detroit's cultural, commercial, and built landscape has been so radically transformed. He shows how geography, local government structure, and social forces created a housing development system that produced sprawl at the fringe and abandonment at the core. Galster argues that this system, in tandem with the region's automotive economic base, has chronically frustrated the population's quest for basic physical, social, and psychological resources. These frustrations, in turn, generated numerous adaptations—distrust, scapegoating, identity politics, segregation, unionization, and jurisdictional fragmentation—that collectively leave Detroit in an uncompetitive and unsustainable position.
Partly a self-portrait, in which Detroiters paint their own stories through songs, poems, and oral histories, Driving Detroit offers an intimate, insightful, and perhaps controversial explanation for the stunning contrasts—poverty and plenty, decay and splendor, despair and resilience—that characterize the once mighty city.
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Driving Detroit - George Galster
Preface
A great portrait executed in paint has many layers; it builds a depth of character corresponding to the pigment. The best portraits do not merely mimic the surface of their subjects; they also reveal their subjects’ characters. The same principles apply to executing in words a portrait of a place, which is the goal of the Metropolitan Portraits book series. In the case of Greater Detroit, many books have portrayed its various surfaces. None, however, have asked, Why Detroit? What makes it tick?
Portraits are inherently subjective. They can be flattering, like those of John Singer Sargent, or grotesque, like those of Francis Bacon. My portrait of Detroit combines perspectives that would make both Sargent and Bacon happy, because this place is both beauty and beast. But this portrait is also partly a self-portrait, wherein Detroiters paint their own stories through their lives’ brushstrokes. This rich texture of overlaid personal pigments is provided through songs, poems, and oral histories. In the oral history I eschew surnames; the attentive reader will realize identities by the time they have finished the book. At its core, however, the character of place I try to reveal in this portrait will emerge from multiple layers of principles gleaned from economics, sociology, political science, geography, history, and psychology. My goal is to paint a portrait that not only helps us see but, more importantly, understand why Detroit’s social, cultural, institutional, commercial, and built landscape is the way it is.
This goal has shaped my choice of title and subtitle. The title Driving Detroit certainly can be interpreted as what Detroit and its primary twentieth-century industry were all about: putting America on wheels (and then updating them every few years, the auto companies hoped). Equally, the title can be interpreted as the act of navigating one’s automobile around the environs of Detroit, as indeed I vicariously do with the reader in Chapter 1. But, most importantly, I hope the title is primarily interpreted as a revelation of causal forces that essentially shape this metropolitan area, as in "What drives Detroit? My answer is embodied in the subtitle. Like people everywhere, Greater Detroiters possess basic human drives to attain, retain, and expand basic physical, social and psychological resources, what I summarize in the term
respect. Unfortunately, in this metropolitan area the quest for respect has long been frustrated by three elements. The economy is dominated by the auto industry, which creates distinctive socioeconomic insecurities and psychic damages for its workers:
The Economic Engine of Anxiety. The geography is dominated by a permissive topography and fragmented local political structure spawning a development process that builds excess supplies of housing on the suburban fringe while rendering housing at the core redundant:
The Housing Disassembly Line. The society is dominated by two competitive tensions spawning insecurities: between capital and labor, blacks and whites:
The Dual Dialectic." In concert, these three elements of Greater Detroit make for a place that fundamentally disrespects the citizenry. Detroiters have reacted to the perpetual stresses generated by their disrespectful metropolis through a variety of individual coping mechanisms and collective adaptations that give the place its idiosyncratic characteristics: extremes of class and racial segregation, city-suburb disparities, identity politics, violence, intolerance, scapegoating, denial, and myopia. Ironically and perversely, these reactions collectively have frustrated everyone’s individual efforts to gain respect by rendering the region incapable of responding effectively to deindustrialization and globalization: Collective Irrationality.
The result is a dysfunctional, unsustainable metropolitan area: The Auto Mortropolis.
Consistent with the goals of the Metropolitan Portraits book series, the subject of Driving Detroit is the entire metropolitan area, what I call Greater Detroit. For most of the region’s history, the City of Detroit was essentially the only game in town, so of course the events, industries, and people I describe are often based in the city. Yet it is a huge mistake to focus solely on the City of Detroit, as do virtually all journalists visiting from around the globe. On the contrary, I argue that most of what we see in the city is a result of what transpires in the suburbs and is beyond the power of the city to control. The primary drivers of the region’s economy and housing market are geographically concentrated in Detroit’s suburbs, though their reckless driving victimizes the city. Similarly, the political and social dynamics of race and class polarization are characterized by a city-suburb dichotomy. It is impossible to understand what drives the City of Detroit by looking only within its jurisdictional boundaries; a metropolitan perspective is required.
Prologue
Two Daughters of Detroit
Detroit’s story is, of course, an amalgam of millions of stories of men, women, and children who have loved, toiled, played, and made lives in this place since 1701 when the city was founded. But the essence of what this city represents, both to itself and to larger social concerns about the role of cities, can be distilled in the lives of two daughters of Detroit: Marguerite (nicknamed lva) and Helen.
In the summer of 1925, these two preschool girls were about to become neighbors. Marguerite’s father, a prosperous physician, had just bought a substantial home in the east side of Detroit at the corner of Garland Street and Charlevoix Avenue for his wife and only child. Only two streets away on Hurlbut lived Helen, cramped among her four brothers and sisters in the modest home that their delicatessen-shopkeeper father had recently purchased. When they got a little older, Marguerite and Helen likely would attend the same Howe Elementary School and later the local Southeastern High School. They would enjoy the same safe, healthy neighborhood, solid schools, and recreational facilities and likely would become friends.
Their fathers, though neighbors, would perhaps have little in common about which to chat, however. After all, Marguerite’s father was not only much richer than Helen’s but much better educated and traveled, having been awarded bachelor’s and medical doctor’s degrees and a postdoctoral fellowship in Paris. Helen’s father never graduated from high school and had traveled little in the United States, let alone abroad. Marguerite’s father had deep American roots stretching back over a century, whereas Helen’s grandfathers had immigrated to the United States.
These facts alone might tempt one to predict that Marguerite would have superior opportunities for social and economic success in life than would Helen. But this is Detroit, and the geography of opportunity here is not described by the compass headings north and south, east and west. In Detroit, one’s life course is plotted according to the axes of labor and capital, black and white.
Chapter 1
Riding on the Freeway: A Riff on
the Place Called Motown
We’re goin’ riding on the freeway . . . in my pink Cadillac;
We’re goin’ riding on the freeway . . . and we ain’t coming back."
—Freeway of Love,
sung by Aretha Franklin in 1985
The Mother Lode of Symbolism
Made in Detroit.
This seems quaint, now that the label Made in China
screams at us from virtually every product we pick up, belying the proud industrial heritage that once was America’s. This heritage was forged and stamped and pressed and cut and molded in the long-abandoned temples of production that defined Detroit. To understand Detroit, you must understand one thing: in its soul, it is a place that makes things—metal things. Ever since it grew to be a metropolis in the late nineteenth century, its dominant businesses were about shaping metal into useful objects. Railway cars, stoves, marine engines, and work boats eventually gave way in the early twentieth century to automobiles, myriad gadgets that kept them running, and accessories that made them more comfortable to drive.
Forty years ago, Detroit also took the lead in making the ultimate auto accessory: driving music. This music was so infectious that it spread like an epidemic from the ghettoized airwaves of Negro music
into the homes of mainstream white teenagers, becoming The Sound of Young America.
The leading carrier of this epidemic was a home-grown, black-owned and operated record company whose moniker became the region’s unofficial nickname: Motown. Detroit’s marketing juggernaught used its cars and its music as the flux to weld youth culture to the myth of American freedom and rugged individualism. The result: the still-powerful visage of a muscular motor vehicle rolling along an endless, empty road, its retracted convertible top exposing flowing golden tresses, the wrinkle-free faces in the front seats breaking into satisfied smiles as their favorite Top-40s hit comes on the radio. One cannot imagine an America without the car-music culture Detroit created and so effectively embedded in the nation’s psyche. But can one now imagine an America without Detroit?
Detroit did more than just make cars and music to play while driving them; it made both in notably innovative ways. It is well known that Henry Ford designed the world’s first moving assembly line for autos in Ford Motor Company’s Highland Park plant. This was the largest auto factory in the world—six acres of floor space under one roof—when it came online in 1910. A decade later he could boast of the first vertically integrated auto production facility, at the River Rouge plant in Dearborn. In this wondrous complex, iron ore, coke, limestone, and glass were gulped in at one end and belched out as an automobile a few days later, spawned by the sweat of 102,811 workers at its peak in 1929. It is less well known that Detroit made music in similarly inventive ways. Berry Gordy, Motown Records’ founder, developed a record production system that mimicked Fordism
in its division of labor and its focus on a product attractive for the mass market. Motown Records even designed its music to be appropriate for the first generation of low-fidelity car radios. Long before MTV (or even videotape), it pioneered the pop musical video as a marketing device. The cultural symbiosis among youth, cars, and music was never more powerfully glorified than when Detroit’s Martha Reeves and the Vandellas were filmed singing Dancing in Street
sitting in the back of a Mustang convertible as it rolled down the assembly line at the Rouge in 1965. And it’s not surprising, with its alien-like work environments stressing machine-like precision, that Detroit later would become the acknowledged birthplace of Techno music.
Unfortunately, the tragedy of Detroit is that it has never resolved the fierce competition over who was going to make these things and who was going to enjoy the benefits of this production. Thus, Detroit also has innovated in many political ways, both radical and conservative. The Nation of Islam (the Black Muslims
) was founded in Detroit in 1930 by the visionary Wallace D. Fard. The sit-down strike, whereby a well-organized cadre of unionists occupy and then shut down production at a strategic choke point, was invented in the auto plants in the late 1930s and proved effective in shifting power from the capitalist to the laborer. The Republic of New Africa, a black nationalist group demanding black control of five U.S. states as reparations, was born in Detroit in 1968. Ironically, the segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, won the Michigan Democratic presidential primary campaign that same year, based on his electoral strength in Detroit’s prounion but racially and socially conservative white suburbs, the same places where Reagan Democrats
would help usher in American neoliberalism in 1980. In response, the Freedom Now Party, the nation’s first all-black political party with an unabashedly radical agenda, bloomed first in Detroit. Its sibling in the labor union arena, the Dodge Radical Union Movement, emerged at the same time. And though Detroit did not invent the politically potent race riot, it perfected it, with new models introduced with ever increasing ferocity in 1833, 1863, 1943, and 1967.
With this history of intense conflicts between labor and capital, black and white, it is no wonder that Detroit has been at the epicenter of tectonic shifts in national policy and legal precedents. The United Auto Workers’ early, decisive victories in Detroit spawned reactions as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled sit-down strikes illegal in 1939 and a conservative Congress passed the antiunion Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. The urban street disturbances (riots,
rebellions,
what have you) of the mid-1960s reached a crescendo when the last and biggest exploded in Detroit, prompting President Lyndon B. Johnson to appoint a blue-ribbon Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Emerging in 1968, its famous and prescient report cited Detroit as a prime example of how northern cites were moving inexorably toward two societies, separate and unequal.
White flight,
and resultant miserable failure of within-district busing in northern city school districts, was inevitable when the 1974 U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Milliken v. Bradley that suburban Detroit school districts were not culpable in producing segregated Detroit City schools, and thus remedies could not extend beyond the city school district.
In 1980, Detroit became the first city to apply powers of eminent domain to acquiring private property that subsequently was transferred to other private concerns because it was in the public interest,
a brazen legal sleight-of-hand later vindicated by the Michigan Supreme Court. In the infamous Poletown
project, entire neighborhoods were forcibly acquired and demolished to make room for a new Cadillac assembly plant. And, of course, Detroit’s auto companies have taken the corporate lead in begging the federal government for aid in attempts to stave off bankruptcy. Chrysler Corporation successfully sought federal loan guarantees in 1979, setting the national precedent of too big to fail.
It then returned to Washington (in an ill-considered private jet) hat-in-hand in 2008, escorted by a humbled General Motors Corporation. Salvation was not at hand this time, however. Chrysler was forced into bankruptcy in May 2009 and General Motors followed within a month. In both cases, the federal government assumed dominant controlling interests in the companies, transferred substantial financial interests to the United Auto Workers, and circumvented the traditional legal rights of corporate debt holders, thereby setting yet another slew of policy precedents in the uncharted waters of mixed private-state-union capitalism.
Regardless of how the auto companies fare in the future, what has happened in Detroit represents the cutting edge of what will happen across America: an unraveling of the post-World War II social compact originally made in Detroit. This compact had government explicitly and implicitly supporting big businesses that, in turn, would provide welfare-state-like benefits, such as health insurance and generous pensions, to their workers. It was a compact so consensual that Charles Wilson, president of General Motors, could testify before Congress in 1953, without the trace of a smirk or fear of derision, that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.
What far-reaching changes in the American political economy will be associated with the dissolution of this social compact can only be guessed.
But Detroit’s most important product is not cars, music, politics, or precedents. It is symbolism. What Detroit inadvertently has always been best at making is a symbol of itself. Americans, and indeed much of the world, have held up Detroit as an icon of either the best or the worst of what a metropolis can be, depending on the era. One hundred years ago, Detroit represented the archetypical industrial boom town,
a place of rampant entrepreneurial and technical ingenuity where the latest, greatest consumer invention was being made affordable to almost everyone through the genius of mass production. By the 1930s, it had come to be seen as the cradle of industrial unionism,
with the UAW rising to preeminence among U.S. industrial unions, a position it held for decades. During World War II, Detroit was known as the Arsenal of Democracy,
a manufacturing behemoth where workers of all races and genders labored tirelessly, side by side, in a gallant effort to defeat the Axis Powers. In the postwar boom, Detroit’s product epitomized the ascendancy of American consumerism. It was also, believe it or not, a place widely hailed for its enlightened urban planning and its successful embrace of the Model Cities
philosophy of the War on Poverty. On the heels of its 1967 upheavals, with its first black mayor elected in 1973 and the first Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo in 1973, Detroit’s image morphed yet again into one of postindustrial apocalypse. It came to symbolize the nation’s murder capital,
a place of unbridled crime, violence, and racial strife that could be patrolled successfully only by robocops. Detroit became a place dominated by an antiquated industry, glacial in its response to changing international market conditions, instead smugly churning out shoddily built gas guzzlers.
The Lemon Capital of the World,
wags called it. On its better days, contemporary Detroit ought to be represented as resilient people demonstrating amazing perseverance and creativity in the face of enormous obstacles, but it rarely is. With the local Big Three
automakers shedding so many employees that they more resemble the Little Three,
Detroit is teetering on the brink of another image makeover: ghost town. However represented, the symbolic value of Detroit seems indispensable. If there were no Detroit, America would need to invent one.
As the nature of Detroit’s symbolism changed over the last century, so has the nature of those who come to this city seeking enlightenment. It used to be that aspiring industrialists and civil engineers from all over the world visited Detroit’s cutting-edge industrial complexes, laboratories, and technical centers. Similarly, progressive international unionists once called reverently at Solidarity House, the UAW headquarters nestled scenically between the Detroit River and Jefferson Avenue. By the 1970s, the curious visitors more often than not were furrowed-browed sociologists asking What went wrong?
and journalists excavating for the latest outrageous dysfunction that they could sensationalize. Most recently, they come as archeologists to search for clues to the whereabouts of a lost city or as agricultural scientists to explore the feasibility of oxymoronic urban farming
on its abandoned plains.
Symbols, of course, may be based on some core reality but obscure the deeper reality through simplification and exaggeration. Visit the metropolis called Detroit with me now, and look more deeply: what will you find?
Driving the D
Coming to Detroit by air means almost certainly flying Delta Airlines because it accounts for over 80 percent of the flights to the region at one of the nation’s busiest airports. But, as in so many realms of this metropolis’s life, most passengers here are neither arriving nor departing, merely passing through. As if to compensate for the airport’s self-effacing name—Wayne County Metropolitan Airport—the terminal’s name reeks with overblown self-importance: the Edward McNamara World Gateway.
Disembarking at the Big Mac
for the first time is slightly disconcerting for anyone even mildly infected with contemporary Detroit symbolism. This terminal truly is world-class: airy, clean, efficient, safe, multilingual, high-tech, straightforward. You can be excused for allowing the thought to cross your mind, "This can’t be Detroit; perhaps I got on the wrong flight! Welcome to
The D," a place that simultaneously manages to confirm and shatter all its stereotypes, a place of stark contrasts juxtaposed in remarkable proximity.
Arriving at luggage claim, immediate reassurance that you got the correct flight appears because Detroit proclaims its identity loud and clear. Ancient visitors to imperial Rome knew they had arrived because of the heroic stone friezes adorning public buildings. The Big Mac’s equivalents are four heraldic photomontages adorning the ends of the luggage claim areas. If you are a domestic visitor, you immediately recognize that this place is about sports and politics. On the north wall, there are heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, Isiah Thomas of the Pistons, Gordie Howe and Steve Yzerman of the Red Wings, Ty Cobb of the Tigers, Bobby Layne and Barry Sanders of the Lions, and then, as a politically correct nod to the distaff side, Kate Sobrero Markgraf of the U.S. national soccer team and Olympic figure-skating champion Tara Lipinski. And, yes, in case you were wondering, deeply bowing from the waist as you pass these murals is encouraged, so long as you do not trip over someone’s luggage in the process.
The second montage in the domestic baggage claim area portrays three home-grown first
public servants: Coleman Young (Detroit’s first black mayor, serving from 1974 to 1993), Ralph Bunche (who in 1950 became the first black to win the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Palestine conflict), and Martha Griffiths (Michigan’s first female elected to Congress, serving from 1955 to 1974). It includes four union leaders: Walter Reuther and Stephen Yokich, past presidents of the UAW (from 1946 to his death in 1970, and 1994 to 2002, respectively); and James R. Hoffa (past, 1958–1971), and James P. Hoffa, current (since 1999) presidents of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and native Detroiters. The selection of Jimmy Hoffa, Senior, is curious, given his intimate Mafiosi knowledge and felony convictions and the fact that he was last seen alive (or dead, for that matter) near a restaurant in Bloomfield Township, a northern Detroit suburb. The largest picture of all is reserved for Rosa Parks, the paragon of nonviolent civil rights principles, which also is curious. Although she lived in Detroit most of her adult life and is buried here, Parks acquired her political education and is lionized for her act of civil disobedience in Montgomery, Alabama. I do not know whether her picture adorns the wall of the Montgomery airport and personally have no objections to municipal double-dipping.
Perhaps she appears in Detroit’s airport because our two home-grown national civil rights leaders, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, are a bit too radical for the delicate constitutions of white travelers or white local politicians.
By contrast, international visitors see two quite different photomontages, suggesting that this is a place about songs and cars. On the south wall appear the smiling visages of Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, The Supremes, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, and the founder of Motown Records who brought them fame, Berry Gordy, Jr. It is not uncommon for international visitors to see this mural and spontaneously start humming. Detroit’s cultural reach still extends that far: Motown music remains the city’s best ambassador.
What international visitors see on the opposite wall are legends of the auto industry, past and present. The mural not surprisingly includes Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company in 1903 and its president until his death in 1947, William Durant, founder of General Motors in 1908, and Walter Chrysler, founder of the Chrysler Corporation in 1925 and its head until 1936. We also see Henry Ford II, Henry’s grandson and Ford’s head from 1945 until 1979, and Horace and John (Jack) Dodge, who in 1900 founded the Dodge Brothers Company supplying parts to other nascent auto companies until they rolled out their own eponymous auto in 1917. Two other giants of GM are portrayed: Charles Kettering, head of research from 1920 to 1947, who invented the electric starter; and Alfred Sloan, president from 1923 to 1946, who introduced planned obsolescence
with annual styling changes and the GM brand price-status hierarchy (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac). It is ironic, however, that there are no pictures of the local people after whom the General Motors divisions were named: Louis Chevrolet, Chief Pontiac of the Chippewas and Ottawas, Ransom Olds, David Buick, and Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. In a poignant (if unintended) testimony to how unstable the industry has become, the mural also portrays the heads of the Big Three when the McNamara Terminal was opened: Robert Eaton (GM), Jürgen Schrempp (Daimler-Chrysler), and William Clay Ford, Jr. Only the last currently retains his position as Executive Chairman.
Got your bags? OK, hop into my SUV. No, we can’t take train, subway, or light-rail from the airport because there are no such rail lines. As a matter of fact, there are no fixed-rail passenger lines anywhere in metropolitan Detroit, by far the largest metro area in the country with that dubious distinction. The People Mover,
the two-mile monorail system encircling downtown, doesn’t count as fixed rail. It indeed moves, but typically with few people: truth-in-advertising would suggest that it be renamed the No People Mover.
Nor does Amtrak count, with its two inconveniently scheduled trains daily sneaking through the city. No one has come to Detroit by train for a long, long time, as a view of the old train station will soon make clear. Come on! This is the Motor City, after all, and that means car motors, not train motors! As for buses, ehhh . . . no. Any metro Detroiters will tell you: buses are for the poor, the elderly, and especially the blacks.
So, driving it is. And don’t even think of suggesting that I trade in my SUV for one of those sissy, hypotestosterone hybrids; we’re riding in a Detroit car—and one built by the Big Three, at that: 88 percent of Michigan’s auto sales are still held by the Big Three, compared to only 55 percent nationwide.
As you try to navigate metropolitan Detroit for the first time, relax. It’s hard to get lost in this place. (Should you somehow manage to get lost, however, act like a native and ask, "Where am I at?.). The region’s surface street system has a simple design: spokes of strategic radial roads extending from the city center superimposed on a grid. Until this system confronts a river or lake shoreline, each surface road is essentially arrow-straight. If the Detroit region were scaled down to the size of a pancake, its topography would be flatter. The median reference point for this system is located on the central radial thoroughfare, Woodward Avenue, a few blocks up from the Detroit River where the first recorded French explorers landed and later built their stockade. The immediate environs are the only confusing exception to the above scheme, modeled as they were in early nineteenth-century fashion on Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s plan for the District of Columbia. This complex, irregular street design was made possible by the
urban renewal provided by an 1805 fire, which conveniently burned down every building in the town, save one. The pseudo-L’Enfant plan was soon abandoned, however, as the city forsook notions of European urban grandeur to embrace more straightforward American pragmatism. So, all subsequent surface streets were laid out either as radii or on an east-west/north-south grid. The
Big Three are not only auto companies but the main radial avenues that split the compass in roughly equal segments from northwest to northeast. Carrying Michigan state highway numbers to emphasize their primacy—Woodward (M1, heading north), Gratiot (M3, heading northeast), and Grand River (M5, heading northwest)— they are
prime" roads in more ways than one. Several supplemental radial highways also emanate from downtown: Michigan Avenue (U.S.12, heading west), Fort Street (M85 heading southwest), and Jefferson Avenue (heading east). To aid the cartographically challenged, major east-west streets were established at one-mile intervals from the intersection of the three prime highways and then named according to the number of miles distant from it (see Figure 1). Though several of the lower numbered mile roads
have subsequently been renamed, beginning with Seven Mile Road the system proceeds unbroken through the tricounty metropolitan area. As of fall 2011, development is occurring at 32 Mile Road in northern Macomb County.
Figure 1. Detroit and its immediate environs.
No one knows whether the designation Mile Roads
was done as a low-tech Geographic Positioning System or because Detroiters had so much trouble pronouncing other street names. About the only thing visitors need to remember if they want to pronounce roads correctly in Detroit vernacular is to forget any foreign languages they may have learned. Other tongues are absolutely deadly when deciphering the host of non-English road names that are the region’s concrete legacy of a rich immigrant history. It goes without saying that the surfeit of French origin names are usually mangled, which would be expected in a place that calls itself Duh-troit or Dee-troit, instead of Deh-twah. So, St. Aubin Street becomes aw-bin instead of Aw-bahn, Livernois Avenue becomes livver-noiz instead of Lee-vair-nwah and, most infamously, Gratiot Avenue becomes graaa-shit instead of Grah-tee-oh. In fairness, one crucial French-origin place name is pronounced half correctly: the old-money suburb of Grosse Pointe; the first part is never, never pronounced grow-see, though the second part is pronounced Point, not Pwahnt. Detroiters don’t often practice equal opportunity, but mispronunciation is an exception. Thus, the Dutch-based Groesbeck Road is gross-bek, not hroos-bek, and the German-based Goethe Street is go-thee, not gair-tuh. Clarence Darrow famously used this latter linguistic peculiarity in his 1925 defense of a black homeowner accused of murder while defending his Detroit home against a white mob. Darrow suggested that white witnesses were willing to lie under oath because they were such a prejudiced, uncultured lot they did not even know how to pronounce their own parents’ language. Perhaps Darrow was being unfair about lack of intelligence. Perhaps metro Detroiters suffer collectively from dyslexia. How else can you explain the common pronunciation of Lahser Road as lash-er?
As for freeways, there is no better way for you to understand than by first hand experience. So, as we leave Metro Airport, we zip onto Interstate 94 and set the cruise control at five miles per hour over the posted limit, then stay out of the left lane because that’s reserved for folks who really want to go fast. I-94, as with so much of prosaic Detroit, has a rich history largely unknown to thousands of daily commuters. Like much modern infrastructure, it roughly follows Native American footpaths. During the nineteenth century it was improved
to accommodate stagecoaches bumpily plying the Detroit-Chicago route. It assumed its current incarnation as a limited access, divided highway in the early 1940s, as a way to speed commuters to the new Willow Run B-24 Liberator bomber plant, just west of the current Metro Airport. In Detroit I-94 gets personalized with a name, that of Edsel Ford, Henry’s only son, who preceded him in death. One only hopes that this appellation was in memory of Edsel’s timeless design of the 1940 Lincoln, not the considerably less elegant 1950s Ford model that posthumously bore his name above its hideous grille shaped like a toilet seat. There are several Detroit freeways named after famous locals: Walter Chrysler (I-75), Walter Reuther (I-696), and two Detroit mayors: Edward Jeffries (I-96), 1940–1948, and John C. Lodge (M10), 1922–1924 and 1927–1929. No one calls these freeways by their full names, though. They are simply the Ford, the Chrysler, the Reuther, the Jeffries, the Lodge. Other freeways are named for their location, such as the Southfield and the Davison. No one seems to shorten these; I have never heard them called the Field
or the Dave.
Perhaps they are holding these roads in anonymous reserve so the city can sell the naming rights when things get especially tight financially. Whatever the oddities of naming conventions, one thing is certain about metro Detroit freeways: they are plentiful and comparatively uncongested.
There are days I own
this speeding,
sprawled-
out
mess,
drive the freeways
end to end
just to feel connected.
Other days it’s too much,
this crazy, cramped culture,
zipping us down freeways
vital as veins, spindly things,
crisscrossing counties,
linking us in ways
we never touch. No standing
on the bus or squeezing
onto subways here—
Jesus, we rarely even walk
to the corner—
just 2.2 million half-ton
capsules cruising highways
as familiar as grandparents,
so integral we name them—
Fisher, Jefferies, Lodge—
memorize each pothole
and speed trap in pathetic attempts
to expedite commutes, reach
wherever we’re going
to move on
to the next place
and the next,
always late and never
time to stay, damn
the traffic jam, construction,
anything that slows us down.
"Motor City