 
Tponetom
Member
Username: Tponetom
Post Number: 76
Registered: 06-2007
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 12:04 am: |    |
The pivotal period of the rise and demise of Detroit
The population of Detroit was nearing the two million mark.
The exuberance of the five post WW2 years was waning. The celebrating was over.
There was a numbing feeling of disbelief that another war was imminent. KOREA! Who the heck is Korea? It became a catchphrase. Didn’t we just finish the ‘second war’ to end all wars? The Selective Service Draft was in effect. More than a few WW2 veterans were dismayed when they were called back into the armed services.
Ted Williams was going to sacrifice a couple more years of his baseball career. He never complained. He was a class act.
Near the end of 1949, automobile production was catching up to the demand. A few auto workers were being laid off. The Korean war helped stimulate a lukewarm economy.
My generation did speak out against the Korean War, but in a very weak voice. We were trained to pay attention and listen and to speak only when we were spoken to. After all, we had to fight Communism. The enlightenment of Vietnam was twenty years in the future.
The phrase, ‘white flight” became popular after the exodus. It was, and is, a misnomer, because it is a false implication of why people were leaving Detroit. They were not running away from the black people. Rather, they were mesmerized by the dream of suburbia that promised fresh air, new brick homes with full basements, and best of all, SPACE. They were tired of four and eight family flats and 800 square foot single homes built on a 30 foot wide lot.
Let’s not forget the privacy issue or lack thereof. In those early days it was not uncommon, in the summer time, for mischievous young boys to sneak, in the darkness of night, under someone’s bedroom window and listen to the exotic huffing and puffing that we were never quite understanding of.
By 1954, automobile sales were stunted. So was Senator Joe McCarthy. There was some mention of Indochina in the news. We wondered why.
Desegregation, equal rights, and civil rights were just budding
Unemployment was rising. 1957 heralded the beginning of a mild recession. New 1957 Chevrolets were flooding the lots, unsold.
By 1970, 350,000 +/- people had left the city.
A non-sequitur: Hank Greenberg was my all-time hero, BUT! If you have never seen Ted Williams swing a bat,,,,well, it was more like an erotic uncoiling of his whole body and without the aid of steroids. A fifty cent seat in the centerfield bleachers of Briggs Stadium entitled us to watch that magic. |
Kathinozarks
Member
Username: Kathinozarks
Post Number: 759
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 12:44 am: | |
Yay! I found another of your stories!
Quote:.. "they were mesmerized by the dream of suburbia that promised fresh air, new brick homes with full basements, and best of all, SPACE. They were tired of four and eight family flats and 800 square foot single homes built on a 30 foot wide lot."
Thank you for making that point. That makes sense. In the late 60's/early 70's friends of our family moved to Shelby Township and it was the COUNTRY! They were very excited to be so far out in a peaceful area. I remember they felt like homesteaders or something. |
Fareastsider
Member
Username: Fareastsider
Post Number: 502
Registered: 08-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 1:34 am: | |
Good point about why people left I always assumed that was a big reason and still is today. Hence homes and lots continue to get bigger and everyone wants to live along a greenspace. I always imagined after years of close quarters the depression and the war that most people would not think otherwise to get an affordable new roomy house out in the open space of the suburbs. The subsidized development also helped..... |
Revaldullton
Member
Username: Revaldullton
Post Number: 577
Registered: 07-2007
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 1:36 am: | |
Tp, you have such a way with words.
the good rev |
Pamequus
Member
Username: Pamequus
Post Number: 129
Registered: 07-2005
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 9:28 am: | |
Ditto Kath.....always a good day when I find another of Tp's wonderful editorials. |
Lmr
Member
Username: Lmr
Post Number: 77
Registered: 03-2007
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 9:30 am: | |
Tp, my parents moved from SW Detroit near Woodmere Cemetery to Wyandotte in 1952 and I received some large disagreements when I stated on another forum that some of the main reasons that they and others chose to buy outside of the city were a lack of congestion and availability of new, affordable housing on low interest VA loans. Race was a secondary issue. I remember how packed Fort Street was before the construction of I75 South and I can't blame anybody for wanting to escape that. I think a lot of people don't know or have forgotten how traffic clogged the city was. |
Swiburn
Member
Username: Swiburn
Post Number: 194
Registered: 07-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 10:35 am: | |
People can wax poetically about the days when Detroit was a crowded, bustling city in the l950s (with downtown Hudson's!), but the East side on Field St. was dirty, crimeridden and already deteriorating from the closing of supplier factories.
The veterans were grateful for the low or no downpayment mortgages and they used them to get the house out of the city with a nice yard that they dreamed about during WWII. (Read old magazine ads and you'll see that.) |
Danny
Member
Username: Danny
Post Number: 6304
Registered: 02-2004
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 11:30 am: | |
My cousin just recently move to Inkster for wide open space. My cousin claims that living in Detroit with her own sons is hazardous to their health. Another of my relatives left Detroit for good. |
Jiminnm
Member
Username: Jiminnm
Post Number: 1356
Registered: 02-2005
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 11:35 am: | |
Tp, I grew up in a 750 sq ft house on a 40 foot lot. You are exactly correct on why I later moved to where I could get a bigger house on a bigger lot. |
Paulmcall
Member
Username: Paulmcall
Post Number: 301
Registered: 05-2004
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 2:02 pm: | |
In the 60's and 70's, block busting encouraged such dreams even if you didn't have them. |
Lmr
Member
Username: Lmr
Post Number: 78
Registered: 03-2007
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 2:11 pm: | |
I think that in the postwar years of the late 1940's and 1950's the draw "to" the suburbs was more powerful for a generation raised in old multi-family flats often in very crowded conditions than the push "away" from the city. I think that's true pretty much in all major American cities and not just Detroit.
Now here I'm being a little bit flexible with the word "suburbs" because there are pockets of 1950's housing that in fact are within the city of Detroit that really were more part of the push out of the central city in the 1950's than part of the older central city.
When my parents bought their house in Wyandotte it was like a palace to them. $10,000, with a $2,000 down payment that came from some inheritance money my mother had gotten (today would be her 89th birthday...happy birthday mom). The house was everything they could ask for...new, clean, bug free, quiet, low traffic, with a yard they could fence off and plant in. Their previous housing had been an upstairs apartment on 25th St. where my dad woke up one afternoon (he worked nights) to find the neighbor woman in their living room using their phone to call her relatives in Kentucky. |
Andylinn
Member
Username: Andylinn
Post Number: 479
Registered: 04-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 2:19 pm: | |
i think what is funny is this:
in 1950s and 60s young budding families (there doesn't seem to have been such a thing as a young professional class - people got married earlier)
longed for space - wide open space, just as you say... it was the ideal. everyone who had the means wanted it...
but now the gen xers that grew up in that want out... they want to live in a bustling, packed, action filled city... and, as many of them don't think they can find it in michigan, they leave for chicago, new york, _______ (fill in name of packed bustling city here) and the remaining people fill the high priced lofts in midtown and downtown... is this just a case of "the grass is greener on the other side" or what?
what is the solution here? you really can't have BOTH... however you can have a bustling city with bountiful and beautiful parks... Lowell's tour of claark park is a great example. I never knew it was so nice....
(Message edited by andylinn on July 31, 2007) |
Lmr
Member
Username: Lmr
Post Number: 79
Registered: 03-2007
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 2:46 pm: | |
Andylinn
Indeed there was a young professional class in the 1950's. They certainly were fewer than today but some members of that WW II generation did get degrees, either before the war or after it with the GI bill. They moved out of the central city also, sometimes to fancier homes than the working class. But I find that even many of those in their 70's and 80's now who did have college degrees lived quite modestly.
Generation X is an entirely different group. There are a lot of them here in Minneapolis/St.Paul, I think they outnumber the baby boomers (like myself) here. Yes, I agree that they like hip, bustling, action packed places...until they get married and have children. Then they become some of the most conservative parents and they want the utmost child safety and security. |
Masterblaster
Member
Username: Masterblaster
Post Number: 66
Registered: 03-2005
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 7:29 pm: | |
I DISAGREE
I disagree with Tponetom about race not being that much of a factor for the decline of the city. If race wasn't a factor, how come blacks didn't move with the whites to the suburbs in the 1950's, 60's, and '70's.
It looks like the only places that blacks moved to during those decades were Inkster and Ecorse!!
If race wasn't a factor, then suburbs that were all white until a decade ago, like Livonia, Warren, Southgate (the list is nearly endless) would have been 10-15% black from the beginning.
NOT ALL BLACKS WERE POOR. THEY HAD THE MONEY TO MOVE TO THE 'BURBS, BUT THEY WEREN'T ALLOWED IN!!
ALSO...
although folks wanted more space back in the post WWII era, there are plenty of inner-ring suburbs that have many, many, many neighborhoods of houses built on 40-foot wide lots that are completely occupied to this day. They include Ferndale, Royal Oak, Oak Park, Hazel Park, the SW section of Southfield, Redford, Harper Woods, Saint Clair Shores, Wayne, Wyandotte, Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Garden City, Lincoln Park, River Rouge, Melvindale, Allen Park, parts of Taylor and parts of the Gross Pointes. There might be other suburbs like Clawson or Madison Heights that I am not familiar with that have large sections of houses built on small lots. Yet these places were not abandone (initially)!!! |
Kaptansolo
Member
Username: Kaptansolo
Post Number: 3
Registered: 07-2007
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 9:01 pm: | |
Well Masterblaster
Let me say this about that.
I agree with TP and I agree with you. I agree with you when you say BLACKS were not invited to the suburbs.
I agree that most WHITES who left probably did want more space and "better" living. Look at the magazines that the G.I.'s were thumbing through during the war...the advertisements were ridiculous.
Let us remember that white people who grew up in Detroit know about rats and roaches and waterbugs..their children did not. I know because we moved to the suburbs in the mid-70's and I continued to go to school in Detroit. Living in an "all" white suburb and going to an "all" black school. Small percentages of each race sprinkled in both places...it was educational if nothing else.
Just my opinion... |
Caldogven
Member
Username: Caldogven
Post Number: 92
Registered: 05-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 9:42 pm: | |
Kaptansolo
What magazines and what advertisements are you referring to? Where did you see them? |
Barnesfoto
Member
Username: Barnesfoto
Post Number: 3877
Registered: 10-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 - 10:24 pm: | |
Wasn't housing and land cheaper in the suburbs?
A friend tells the story of how his newlywed parents cried when they could not afford to live in tony Northwest Detroit in 1958.
They bought a lot on what had been farmland in Livonia and built their tract house there. |
Dalangdon
Member
Username: Dalangdon
Post Number: 142
Registered: 03-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 01, 2007 - 1:49 am: | |
I think that while the some of the policies that drove the development of the suburbs were racist, that doesn't mean the average suburbanite was racist. It was simply that there was a lot of home available for a reasonable amount of money, thanks largely to programs like the GI bill (which also catapulted a lot of the nation into true middle-class, as it generated a huge percentage of college graduates)
Unfortunately, the unique opportunities available to WWII vets was not spread equally among the races. VHA and FHA programs actively participated in redlining - probably because the developers were afraid of not being able to sell their plats if they integrated.
It's almost the reverse now, at least in Seattle: I work for the city, and live in the city, yet I'm in the minority - most city employees can't afford to, or choose not to, live here because of how expensive homes are. I'm talking about people like Policemen, Firemen, Utility Linemen, Construction workers, Tradesmen, Teachers: The people that make the city function day in and day out. |
Andylinn
Member
Username: Andylinn
Post Number: 481
Registered: 04-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 01, 2007 - 3:36 am: | |
dalangdon, you nailed it. redlining is a key to what we have now...
it's also important to note that suburban construction was heavily subsidized by federal and state entities... |
Craig
Member
Username: Craig
Post Number: 204
Registered: 02-2007
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 01, 2007 - 7:59 am: | |
Re: blacks not moving w/ up & coming and middle class whites to the suburbs...
WSU had an ethnic mapping project which charted the location of the various tribes in the 70s and again in the late 80s. Finding: ethnic groups migrated together out of the City, e.g. east side Italians moved north & concentrated in parts of Warren & Sterling Heights...
Personally, I'm convinced that race is often a factor in the decisions made by whites AS WELL AS blacks, but I believe that WSU's evidence demonstrates that where people choose to locate is better explained by ethnicity than by race. |
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