Near the home in the metro Detroit area where we used to live is a major intersection. A man sits there at the street corner in his wheelchair, day after day. There he rocks, to and fro, muttering to himself an incomprehensible litany of gibberish. He arrives some time in the morning. Back and forth he rocks until dusk.
The intersection lies along Detroit’s Woodward Avenue, the broad boulevard that shoots north from the river and divides the city into its east and west sides. Competing drugs stores perch like waiting vultures on the corners of the big intersections. It’s at one of these chain pharmacies that the man in the wheelchair spends his days. Summer, winter, good weather, bad. He’s such a permanent fixture there that to most locals he’s merely a landmark on their route somewhere else. Like any landmark along a familiar road, he’s important only for the few seconds it takes to approach him. Once past, a driver’s mind moves forward to the next point in the journey. The man becomes invisible once more. Unremarkable.
When first we moved into the neighborhood, the man’s chair would rest in a distinct basin of dirt his chair had carved into the grassy hummock between the sidewalk and the drug store’s parking lot. Soon after, the store got a renovation. The exterior became brighter and more modern; the parking lot got repaved. Day after day the man in the wheelchair sat there, seeming unaware of the construction as he rocked and stammered to himself.
Then the contractors started to build a wall—a four-foot high wall of red brick that started at the driveway along Woodward and curved gently around the corner onto the mile road intersecting it. With alarm we watched over the course of a couple of weeks the wall’s construction as it approached the man’s spot, unable to imagine what they planned to do.
The next time we drove past, the wall was finished. The drug store had lengthened it all the way to their other driveway; they’d simply left a gap at the spot the man’s wheels had worn their deep and barren grooves. Where before there’d been a man sitting in a wheelchair beside the road was now a long wall of shiny brick that appeared to be propped up in the middle, Atlas-like, by the shoulders of a muttering man in a wheelchair.
Perhaps building a wall with a gap to accommodate a raving man in a wheelchair isn’t the most obvious solution. Then again, in Detroit, my experience is that perhaps it is.
Back in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, the city’s most popular slogan was Say nice things about Detroit! The implication being, of course, that nice things were usually the absolute last thing out of anyone’s mouth when it came to Michigan’s most beleaguered city. When I moved there in the mid-eighties, the bad rap was justified. Detroit then had the highest murder rate in the country. Its neighborhoods were unpatrolled and, when it came to city services, underserved. Despite the fact that where I first lived had a large population of students and long-term residents, that area and other large sections of the city were what we now call food deserts. The crime—my God, the crime. Muggings, arsons, carjackings, the reduction of entire residential neighborhoods to crack house after crack house. None of that lay far from my doorstep.
Every new assault against humanity seemed to originate from Detroit and was duly reported in the national news. I grew to expect the worried calls from family after every fresh offense. The city had a rough-and-tumble charm to it, though. When I moved there, it was politically much more liberal than the stodgy South. I carved out a spot for myself and made it my home for twenty-five years, determined for a long time to see the good behind the disheveled exterior, and to say nice things.
I returned to Detroit for a few days this last summer—my first visit since I left Michigan in 2011 for the East Coast. It took a lot of convincing to get me to return. We visited in the days before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. The state had made a U-turn in its politics during my years there—one of the primary reasons we wanted to get the hell out. More recently, Michigan was one of the states most determined to dig in its heels against the inevitable and make its gay citizens as miserable as possible in the process. I’d known people who’d had to postpone wedding plans more than once simply because the state wouldn’t quit its vindictive and petty retributions against its gay population.
I was reluctant to take another bath, for however brief a stay, in the state’s bottomless pool of crazy. Shedding myself of its political stink after leaving had taken long enough. When Virginia is a progressive state in comparison, you know you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.
But to Detroit for a visit I went. The suburbs where we stayed seemed fairly unchanged, close to where we’d lived during our last dozen years there. The wheelchair man, to our astonishment, still rocked and muttered from between his narrow brick enclosure. Some new storefronts had popped up. Others had closed. Some landmarks had been erased from my memories. Enough remained for me to navigate—both through the city’s streets and through my own memories as I calculated the changes around me.
On our first full day back, we went to visit the first house we bought as a couple. We’d originally chosen a tidy little colonial in what used to be a pleasant and green neighborhood just within the city of Detroit’s borders. At the time, it was heavily populated with police and fire fighters who lived there to fulfill city residence requirement. By Detroit standards, it was as safe as it gets—far enough from the city’s core that then the neighborhood seemed immune to the decay spreading through the downtown area.
We lived in that house for only five or six years. During that short time, the fire fighters and police moved away in search of greener pastures. The neatly-trimmed lawns became a little unkempt. Our neighbors grew a little older, got a little poorer. Then, almost overnight, the zip code south of us went toxic; we too moved farther out, but not before our home had been broken into and ransacked several times.
We’d looked in on the old home several times after escaping to the suburbs. The neighborhood always seemed a little shabbier every year. My god, though. This visit. We drove from Woodward across Eight Mile Road, while I looked at the window at the never-ending expanse of ugly just on the other side of the glass. Block after block and mile after mile of pawn shops, of strip clubs, hubcap dealers, shuttered businesses, empty lots, barbed wire fence, of concrete and asphalt and rust. There was greenery—though most of that was either weeds pushing up between cracks turned canyons in the long-neglected sidewalks, or spilling from the gutters of ruined and overgrown buildings. Mostly, though, I was seeing unending dilapidation of a sort I hadn’t witnessed since my departure east. Only worse.
Eventually we turned from Eight Mile down a commercial strip that had housed cute eateries and trusted family businesses when we lived in the area. Now it was mostly shuttered doors, broken windows, and curled, chipped paint for block after block. One bakery was trying to hold on. From the iron security bars covering its plate glass and its doorway, I suspected it wouldn’t be making the attempt for much longer.
Finally, we drove slowly down the broad avenue that had connected our residential street with the place my husband had been working at the time. This was the section that once had been among the safest in the city, where the neighborhood watch had been the active hobby of many a retiree and off-duty cop, where residents had taken pride in their abundant gardens and in the lawns trimmed and edged to a neat finish. Looking down the first street, I could see maybe ten or twelve houses on both sides of the street as we passed. Two were burnt-out shells, blackened and hollow remains of brick and timber, bad teeth in a sickly grin. A couple more of the lots were simply overgrown with waist-high weeds. Houses had been there not long before, but had been burned or demolished. A couple more of the houses had been boarded up and left vacant.
The next two streets proved that the first hadn’t been an anomaly. Visible from our car were more burnt-out homes, more abandoned homesteads, more wild growth, more neglect. The houses that hadn’t succumbed to the rot huddled to themselves on their narrow plots; they seemed drawn-in, cautious, afraid and embarrassed to acknowledge what was happening around them. The houses left whole were the aberrations. Their shabbiness made the ruins seem even more obscene to the eye. As we drove, I kept my hands pressed against the windows. “Good God,” I kept saying, numb at what I was seeing. “It’s a war zone. Good God.”
The street where we had lived during our earliest years as a couple hadn’t been hit quite as hard as the others. There were ruined buildings, and garages that had caught fire and never been replaced. There were broken windows, and abandoned homes, and several where nature had gone feral, but there were also multiple stretches of whole homes in a row. Ours was one of them. The old house had no summer flowers, no plantings, no decorations at all. The iron security bars over the window and doors hadn’t been there during our occupancy. The grass was overgrown, the paint battered and worn and probably untouched since we’d touched it up two decades ago. The house appeared to be hunched up and trying desperately not to attract notice. But it was hanging on.
I was shaken as we drove away in search of less depressing ways to spend our vacation time. All throughout that trip, when we’d encounter old friends I’d attempt to articulate how extensive was the devastation we’d witnessed. I tried to ask what, beyond the obvious ills of economic downturn and of a poverty that spread like cancer, had caused such rapid and near-complete ruin. They didn’t know, of course. They lived in areas far out from the crumbling wreckage—just as we’d thought we lived far enough away to avoid it, in those first years.
I don’t know the history of the man in the wheelchair. I don’t know what, if anything, area social workers and mental health professionals have tried to do for him. Another city faced with his problem would have solved it by building the wall anyway, consequences be damned, even if (maybe even preferably if) it drove the poor guy away from a place he’d called home. A small price to pay for a pretty new drug store, right? Still another might forcibly have put him into an institution. When I think of the man in his wheelchair, and of the gapped brick wall the drug store built around him, it occurs to me that the solution the arrived at here is very much the Detroit solution to things.
It seems kind, to let him have his space. It seems nice. But it doesn’t solve the problem at all. The man still sits there without supervision or proper care in all kinds of weather. And the drug store has a weird-looking wall with a huge gap in an odd place by night, and a sick man scaring away customers during the day. It’s a compromise that benefits no one. A side-stepping of responsibility that allows everything to continue, without helping anybody to progress.
Detroiters tend to get upset when outsiders concentrate so much on its images of ruin. A lot of Detroiters want those outsiders to avert their eyes, to focus upon the city’s nice parts—the new stadiums, the lights on the Fox Theater, the handful of acclaimed downtown restaurants, the very narrow section of downtown that isn’t falling apart at the seams. They want their own to say nice things about the city, so that the rest of the world has nice things to say as well. Nice words, though, don’t solve the very real problems the city has in the vast crumbling expanses that nobody wants to talk about.
There’s a reason outsiders are fascinated by those many images of Detroit’s ruined buildings: such disintegration doesn’t happen elsewhere in this country. Certainly in any city there are dilapidated structures, even run-down neighborhoods. None of that, though, compares to what has happened in Detroit in the last several decades. Nothing. Not in the epidemic size of it. Not in the severity. The fact that a number residents of the metro Detroit area assume the cancer has gotten just as bad everywhere else only confirms how willfully blind they are to the decay spiraling around them.
Many of my friends in Detroit know the issues their city faces. Many of them fight the good fight and work daily to combat them. But there’s a significant population whose automatic response is to limit themselves to nice places, limit their talk to nice things. They build a wall that solves no one’s problems, they side-step a little further away. And the deterioration continues.
