Detroit Broke My Heart

A lot lately has appeared in the press on the subject of Detroit. It hasn’t been confined to last week, when the city filed for bankruptcy. Over the last few years, journalists anxious to have a byline attached to a story of depth have descended upon the Motor City to pound out paint-by-numbers profiles of the decline of an ailing post-industrial municipality.

They make identical references—the Opera House, the Heidelberg Project, obligatory mentions of Cass Corridor, Eight Mile Road, and the Delray neighborhood. They all trot out the ruined beaux-arts grandeur of the Michigan Central Station. They round things out with facile comments about returning blocks upon blocks of former neighborhoods to urban farmland, and then top off the article with a shot of a house in ruins (and there are many) in silhouette against the silvery, Emerald City-like GM world headquarters in the background. Carpetbaggers, I think of them.

Most descend upon the city like birds on carrion, feast on its misery, then quickly fly home to their comfortable homes in cities that aren’t Detroit. There they dole out delicious morsels of schadenfreude to an audience that also isn’t in Detroit. And those readers have the luxury of comforting themselves from afar, no matter what their circumstances, with the notion that at least they aren’t wallowing in a blue-collar hellhole. I find such reporting a cheap and easy form of misery porn, a swift way to cash in on the hardship of others while thwacking heartstrings of faux-sincerity and solemn melancholy that just might, in the journalist’s imagination, attract the notice of a Pulitzer committee.

Not, mind you, that Detroit’s population sometimes acquits itself much better. The city’s residents can be obdurate in their insistence that nothing’s wrong, even as they avert their gazes from chunks of the urban landscape falling to pieces around them. Residents of the extensive southeastern Michigan suburbs also turn blind eyes to the woes of the city’s core, either making vague noises of renaissance as they occasionally visit the city’s sports stadiums, or carrying out lives that never require them to tiptoe an inch south of Eight Mile.

I lived in Michigan for twenty-one years. For more than half that, I lived within the city limits. I chose Detroit as a young man. I relocated feeling excited at the notion of living in a large, diverse, and gritty urban area. I was anxious to contribute, in my own small way, at a time when the city was desperate to shed its image as the country’s crime and murder capital; I wanted to be one of its many advocates of all races and stripes who lived and shopped and labored within its limits. I went to school there. I worked and taught there. I bought my first house within the city boundaries.

And over the years, little by little by little, Detroit broke my heart.

People have a hard time believing some of my Detroit stories. When I relate the tale of my first Devil’s Night in the city, back in the dark days of the nineteen-eighties when it was popular sport for vandals to commit arson on abandoned structures, I speak of looking out from my fourteenth-story apartment across a black landscape where flames roared unchecked in every direction. Everywhere I looked seemed like a city on fire. It’s an image more appropriate for a post-apocalyptic movie than for anyone living in downtown areas that aren’t Detroit.

When I talk about how on the Fourth of July and New Year’s, for over a decade, we cowered sleepless on the floor after midnight while Detroit residents—our neighbors—shot endless rounds of ammunition from their guns into the air for hour after long hour, it sounds to outsiders like the stuff of fiction. But it happened. Not once. Not two unconnected times. It happened every year, as did the resulting damage and injuries and even deaths from the falling bullets.

Residents of the city itself considered these things commonplace. Some assume that every city is a maelstrom of raining lead and hellfire on national holidays. They would be wrong.

Detroit broke my heart. I moved into the city as an enthusiastic kid who pretended not to be unnerved when, within mere hours of arriving in my new home, I watched a squadron of police shake a rain of shoplifted knives and illegal guns from the coat of an adjacent shopper in a local market. I lived there as a young adult who accepted everyday vandalism and even sexual assault as part of the norm; I talked to friends and family about the importance of supporting local businesses though as I found them increasingly scarce, or was persuaded to abandon those left because of crime in their parking lots. I carried in my head a mental map of the most recent car-jacking spots so I could avoid them; I knew exactly which homes in the university district were crack houses, or likely to become so in the near future.

As a home owner in one of the nicer neighborhoods within Detroit’s borders—so called because city cops and firemen lived there in abundance—I watched as week after week, month after month, more homes barricaded themselves behind grilles of iron bars over the ground floor windows and doors. The cops and firemen moved out. I saw bungalows around mine start out painted and cheerful, and how over the course of a handful of years they became shabby and peeling from neglect. I saw their windows broken; I watched them become abandoned.

I learned I couldn’t put out Halloween pumpkins or Christmas decorations. I’d wake up to find the former smashed in the streets, and the latter stolen. If I planted perennials for the spring, I’d walk out into the front yard and find not just the flowers plucked, but the entire bulb uprooted and taken. Annuals would disappear, nothing left behind save for empty depressions. No one would take the weeds.

Anything not locked in my house or in the garage was likely to vanish, even those things I’d though safe behind the metal fence surrounding my back yard. I got to the point at which I was more irritated by, than chilled to the bone from, strange footprints in the freshly-fallen snow that marked a trail of someone poking around of my back yard and looking through my rear windows. I learned how to steel myself, upon coming home from work, to the sight of screens and storm panels removed and tossed into the yard so that a would-be intruder could test my windows. My home was broken into multiple times—once while I was sleeping, by a gang of a half-dozen.

Detroit broke my heart because it made me confront my constant failures. It made me feel weak when I thought I couldn’t endure for another year the thefts, the bullets, the unending crime. It made me feel ungrateful when I looked at the landscape and found little but ruin and decay and ugliness. I had to watch as the administration of the university in which I’d poured my enthusiasm became overrun with career carpetbaggers of a suburban sort—mostly white men and women who would orate hollow support of a city for which they didn’t care and in which they never tarried as they hurried back to their Grosse Pointes and Bloomfields and their Novis—while its minorities and city-dwellers were passed over for long-deserved promotions. And that made me feel I’d wasted years of effort.

The city made me feel like a battered spouse for defending it to outsiders—which I would, for a long time, before I realized that its only response to my so-called loyalty was to smack me hard in the face yet again, as soon as anyone’s head was turned. When I was bowed and beaten by too many home invasions and exited to the suburbs, it reproached me both for my former youthful idealism, for abandoning it. When I left Michigan altogether, and felt my head clear of all kinds of ugliness I’d taken for granted over the decades, I felt as if I’d made a poor investment of twenty-one years of my life.

That’s how Detroit broke my heart.

My experience is my own. It doesn’t generalize to anyone else.

There’s enough Detroiter in me still that when I see these news stories online capitalizing upon the city’s woes, I automatically click. I feel compelled to tsk at both the assumptions and shortcuts the carpetbagger journalists take and at the dreadful realities the stories still expose. There’s enough Detroiter in me still that I become angry at the ignorant and judgmental conclusions to which outsiders leap when they’re confronted by the city’s conundrums. Three days of Detroit might make fodder for some blogger’s earnest condescension or for some photographer’s Flickr account. But to me it’s mere catastrophe tourism—a roller-coaster tour of decay on automatic tracks. Those insights aren’t merited. Just experienced at their most shallow level.

Not that my insights are much better, I grant you. But I earned ‘em. I’m still trying to grapple with the lessons of my Detroit decades. It’s a place where I came into my own, even as the city and its economics and the ignorance of those within and without the city limits all attempted to thwart me at every turn. It proved my strengths and endurance even as it exposed my naiveté and weakness. I find I resent Detroit while still remembering a young man’s love for it.

Speedy journalistic fly-bys intended to increase page visits will never capture the quixotic essence of issues that have been decades in the making. Covering Detroit as a disaster zone panders to the quick haunted house chill, the flash of reassurance we feel upon glimpsing a poverty and desperation we hope never to experience.

It’s easy to toss up an image of Detroit’s most abject ruin against a shiny skyscraper meant to embody hope. It’s an obvious contrast. However, these cookie-cutter photographs capture neither the hopes and dreams of the people who live and work within these buildings, nor the contradictory stubbornness that makes Detroit’s population reluctant to change. They ignore the many harsher juxtapositions that Detroiters endure and take for granted day by day and year by year, as they dwell surrounded by a past in shambles and look forward to a future that’s at best uncertain.