Borderland - Windsor and Detroit - part four

I’m home and will conclude my walks in Detroit.

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Of America’s large cities, Detroit has the highest rate of violent crime. It can take police an hour to respond to a ‘priority one’ call. I ask at the Institute of Arts if it’s safe to walk the two-and-a-half miles (a little over four kilometres) back into the core. On a weekday afternoon, I’m told it should be fine, but don’t wander too far off the main street.

Okay, here I (somewhat cautiously) go: prepare yourselves for a Detroit potpourri. 

These medieval warriors keep watch over the entrance to the splendid Maccabees Building, erected by the Fraternal Order of the Knights of the Maccabees. The order provided low-cost insurance for much of the last century.

Unlike thousands of buildings, the onetime warehouse below has survived by becoming trendy lofts. ‘Now you can call it home from the low $100's,’ says the website. I’ve checked and that just might buy a decidedly untrendy condo in arguably the most violent (not by Detroit standards) suburban area of Toronto. This, however, is a short walk from downtown.

Nearby, a wonderful art deco facade on the Majestic Theater molders.

Not far from the theatre, a vacant factory.

The Italian Renaissance Hotel Eddystone was built in the city’s Twenties heyday. The Eddystone went from posh hostelry to transient shelter and then closed. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places, but that won’t save it from demolition.

In deserted side streets, there’s an unsettling absence of people and traffic. A person could be knocked on the head - or worse - and there’d be no-one to help.

I stand in front of once charming family homes thinking gloomy thoughts. A hundred years ago, prosperous businessmen could easily stroll or take a tram to downtown offices. What would the original occupants think if they could stand here now?

Click on the picture and note the fire damage.

In 1926, the Wurlitzer Building was one of the world’s larger music stores. Although masonry was reportedly falling from the fourteen story structure, a shortage of pedestrians means no-one's been hurt ... yet.

The Park Avenue Building’s restaurant isn’t open.

Across the street is a commuter rail car. ‘NOT IN SERVICE’ states the obvious.

I try to enter the oddly named ‘The Detroit Shoppe’, which, as you can see, claims ‘Nothing Stops Detroit’. However, it’s ‘not In service’, too. A locked door and no sales people prevent me from making a modest contribution to the local economy.

However, the resplendent Fox Theater with its stunning box office is open, although not this afternoon. It claims to have been the world’s first cinema with built-in sound equipment.

A short car ride from the city centre - now with my friends - takes me to a scene of apocalyptic devastation.

Among the most quoted statistics are that forty percent of the streetlights don't work and seventy to eighty thousand buildings are vacant. Where properties have been demolished to discourage crime, lots are overgrown. Scrubby bushes and trees give a bizarrely rural feel within sight of downtown towers. 

The inspiration for Rivera’s celebration of Detroit industry is no more.

‘Home folks think I'm big in Detroit city,

From the letters that I write they think I'm fine,

But by day I make the cars,

by night I make the bars,

If only they could read between the lines …’

(Bobby Bare - 'Detroit City')

The massive Packard Plant - parts date from before the Great War - has become something of a poster child for Detroit’s decline. For decades, cars were made here.  Here, from my recent Route 66 blog, is a Packard.

Now the plant and its namesake motel are a destination for the desperate homeless, druggies, metal scavengers and those who revel in photogenic urban decay.

The Michigan Central Railroad Station is particularly sad for someone of my age. When I was three, my mother and I travelled by rail from Vancouver to Washington, D.C., from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The power and glamour and comfort of crack trains were part of my upbringing. And the great railway stations - cathedrals they were - reflected the centrality of rail in people's lives.

It can be no hyperbole to say that millions must have passed through this terminal. Now pigeons, feral cats and phantom passengers haunt the platforms. 

But, let’s not end in complete gloom. I survived walking on my own in Detroit, although I certainly wouldn’t do it at night.

Here and there are signs Detroit may just be able to pick itself up from the canvas and bloodily stagger through the fight without being counted out. Islets of residential near-normality remain mid the aforementioned apocalyptic devastation. Glorious and interesting buildings (but only a few) are converted to new uses. In the place that produced Motown - some of the Twentieth Century’s signature music - innovative entertainment venues still attract patrons. Work - mostly related to new technology - trickles in. There are even hopes city farming - on fields that once had homes - may offer a fresh vision for postindustrial conurbations.

Not really my taste, but an art installation - the Heidelberg Project - has attracted international attention. Look it up on the internet.  Many of the reviews are laudatory, although I suspect some are kind simply for the sheer guts of the idea. Houses that might have been vandalized, burned down or demolished become canvases. It ain’t Rivera, but it does demonstrate resilience.

Detroit is a city blighted by a history of inequality. I am charmed by a middle-aged black lady walking towards me on an otherwise empty street. Our eyes cross, she smiles and says, “Have a good weekend!” Her civility to a white stranger made me feel unexpectedly good about Detroit. Lady, with people like you, there’s hope.

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Thanks to my dear friends and onetime newsroom companions - Thomas who was an editor and Vince a cameraman. They made my time in Detroit and Windsor enjoyable and informative. We're already planning for next year.

Borderland - Windsor and Detroit - part three

It was, as the postcard says, the ‘motor capital of the world’. In the 1940s, Detroit was America’s fourth-largest city, aiming - as its skyscrapers grew higher - to compete with New York. The city’s population reached nearly two million. It is now seven hundred thousand and falling. 

One of the friends and former colleagues I’m visiting this trip - Vince - is a Windsor native. He remembers standing on the Canadian side of the river in 1967 and watching smoke drift across Detroit; army tanks were on the streets and forty-three died. Whites left the city in ever greater numbers; Japanese automakers began their onslaught on the old American ‘big three’ and Detroit was said to be, not the motor, but ‘murder capital of the world’. 

Before boarding my bus, I peer into the United States, glimpsing buildings that once trumpeted Detroit’s elegance, power and prosperity. I’m heading for the biggest U.S. municipality ever to declare bankruptcy. The city owes $18 billion - or $19 billion, figures vary -  it can’t pay. 

Eight dollars return buys a ticket on a quite normal Windsor Transit bus that takes me to another country.  

A mugger’s pushover, I uneasily recall a T-shirt slogan: I’M SO TOUGH I VACATION IN DETROIT. To my surprise, on stepping off the bus, I am not immediately murdered/robbed/accosted by an aggressive panhandler. However, a fireman in uniform does politely ask for a donation to help keep the fire trucks running. 

Nearby, the 1902 Wayne County Building (Detroit is the country seat) is empty. Henry Ford once worked here and famed lawyer Clarence Darrow appeared on a case.

Despite expected signs of decay, I didn’t anticipate being so captivated by downtown Detroit. Many buildings in the core remain impressive and, at least, partly occupied. The ‘Flatiron-style’ structure on the right is the 1896 Reid Building. In the distance is the Union Guardian Building.

The Guardian Building was a product of the Roaring Twenties. Unfortunately, it opened in 1929, not the most propitious of years. 

If you turn off the irritating music, the building’s website makes for revealing reading, offering, as it does, ‘aggressive office space rates!’ This means going cheap.

http://guardianbuilding.com/

According to The Detroit News, the downtown office vacancy rate is about 27% (although this presumably does not include the many crumbling commercial buildings beyond use). In downtown Toronto, the rate is a touch over 4%.

Another Twenties’ creation is the largely empty David Stott Building. It will be auctioned in September with a suggested starting bid of three-and-a-half million dollars. 

The Penobscot Building, named for an Indian tribe, was bought by a Toronto company last year for what accounts say was a bargain basement five million dollars. 

I find a taxi, garrulous driver and head uptown.

Finances here are so desperate that, shortly before my arrival, Christie’s, the auction house, was summoned to appraise The Detroit Institute of Arts. The city paper reported that, “while the move doesn’t signal a liquidation of artworks is imminent or inevitable, it is bound to explode fears that one of the country’s most significant publicly owned art museums is vulnerable…’’

I want to visit in the unlikely event the bankruptcy administrator tries to sell off the family silver. My reason is not so much Rembrandts and Canalettos, but Diego Rivera’s extraordinary ‘Detroit Industry’ frescos.

Commissioned by Edsel Ford, the Mexican muralist painted the vast cycle on four courtyard walls. It cost $20,889, no small potatoes in the 1930s; Rivera considered it his greatest work. The sometimes controversial frescos portray Detroit manufacturing at very near the city’s height.

I have long admired Rivera’s oeuvre, but with a superficial understanding of his beliefs and techniques. Although a poor substitute for coming here, I recommend the Institute’s Rivera website and excellent iPad app, well worth reading and viewing:

http://www.dia.org/art/rivera-court.aspx

As I visit on a sunny day, shadows from the protective glass roof add to the cycle’s fascinating complexity.

In a limited blog, there is too much to adequately describe. However, one panel is - in the current context - particularly apt and the picture worth clicking on. Sinister figures prepare gas bombs. Chemical weapons were the atomic bombs of their day and there were many - my uncle included - gassed in the Great War. As Syria reminds us, gas is just as lethal in 2013. 

Oh well, at least a fresco can’t be chiseled off a wall and sold to a private collector. At least, I presume it can’t.

Borderland - Windsor and Detroit - part two

With early morning coffee, I walk to the river. 

In 2013, there are still said to be Windsorites who live comfortably from the legacies of fortunes made during Prohibition. The Detroit River’s bottom is, anecdotally, carpeted with liquor bottles - by now well covered in silt - dumped as American authorities swooped on Canadian bootleggers. Studies suggest only five percent of the alcohol smuggled into the States was ever seized.

More than ninety years later, new fortunes are made from trade between Canada and the States, the biggest of any two countries. 

Kaye E. Barker - a self-unloading bulk carrier for ore and coal - passes under the Ambassador Bridge. A quarter of Canada-U.S. trade crosses that span.

This is the Baie St. Paul, another bulk carrier. The second picture gives a sense of the length of Great Lakes freighters.

Other than shipping, a Night Heron, quite unusual to spot during the day ...

… and a gaggle of irritating, self-important, territorial Canada Geese whose defecatory output is unbelievable. Still, they are lovely in flight. 

Speaking of flight, pleased to see a large, model, World War Two Lancaster, supported by an arch, soaring over the riverfront park. It commemorates Canadians who served in Bomber Command. Nearby, another monument is inscribed ‘Pray for Peace.’

And, in the city’s central Jackson Park, a Spitfire and Hurricane take off, one of a number of war memorials.

There are signs that Windsor - like Detroit a city with car manufacturing in its blood - has had difficult times.

The main street has a number of boarded-up stores and shabby shopfronts. Shanfields Meyers, a fixture since the 1940s, is closing (although locals say it's been closing for years).

However, there’s a proliferation of outlets happily selling expensive Cuban cigars to Americans, who then - in a replay of the Twenties - smuggle them past U.S. Customs. For those who don’t know, Cuban products are verboten in the States. 

But, the visit’s revised my uninformed (having briefly been here once thirty years ago) opinion of Windsor as a down-at-heels dump. Take Windsor’s glum, former bus terminal. 

At first glance, another of those lovely, streamlined, Greyhound stations architecturally abused and then abandoned. Here it is in the 1930s with steel and neon (and Union Jack).

One would assume destined for demolition, but it’s to be taken over by the University of Windsor and the art deco style restored.

The 1927 Windsor Star building - opened when newspapers made money - is empty, but also slated for university use. 

A downtown campus will bring hundreds of students into the relatively small core revitalizing the area. Hurrah for Windsor! Good grief! Is someone from Toronto actually saying that?

To the north, Hiram Walker distillers, unlike newspapers, continues to make pots of money, even without Prohibition. The source of much wealth dominates Walkerville, now part of Windsor, 

St. Mary’s Anglican Church was consecrated in 1904 as a memorial to Hiram Walker and his wife. It suggests how accommodating the Church of England could be to rich purveyors of intoxicating beverages. Presumably no sermons on demon rum here. The very English Gothic Revival church and Tudor rectory were designed by a New York architect.

The neighbourhood’s lovely homes thrill my Anglo heart.

As with this eavestrough downspout and brickwork, there are delightful decorative flourishes.

Even these modest apartments command respect with a castle gateway.

Walkerville’s jewel is Willistead Manor House, a Tudor-Jacobean mansion built in 1906 for one of Hiram Walker’s sons. For all its English style, it also was designed by an American architect.

As you can see, the home is operated by a Windsor City department that clearly could use a copy editor.

Walkerville is so trendy, it doesn’t have a funeral home, it has a Life Celebration Centre - ugh! What happens if your life isn’t worth celebrating? 

Signs like this bring out my insecurities. I’m reminded of how unfashionable I am, more a common-garden, blueberry muffin sort of a guy.