Discuss Detroit » Archives - July 2008 » Fires, Riots, & Hate, The Immediate Aftermath? « Previous Next »
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Sean_of_detroit
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Username: Sean_of_detroit

Post Number: 1828
Registered: 03-2008
Posted on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - 1:11 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I was watching a crummy reality TV show today, and a family took a driving tour through the 9th Ward of New Orleans. They drove and drove, then got out to walk with their kids, through some houses. Very heart braking stuff. It was only a year after.

This is kind of a weird question. I'm not trying to stir anyone up. It's about the aftermath of the riots, all of them... and the other problems, and the fires and such.

What was it like in Detroit through the years? I mean, did this sort of stuff go on? Is that part of where our bad reputation came from? Tourists... honesty? It triggered a line from that recently released Detroit Memoir, and I vaguely remember the author mentioning many cars driving through his street on Devil's Night. Is that what he meant?

I really don't mean to cause any quarrels with this post.

Odd but warranted Personal PS: I sure wish I could ask my elder family members about this kind of stuff, and get an answer... Family... if you happen to be out there, I'd love an answer, you can even be anonymous (sorry, my family is huge... the numbers/odds say some of them at least lurk hear, I would think).
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Gannon
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Username: Gannon

Post Number: 14067
Registered: 12-2003
Posted on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - 1:14 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

At the peak, news crews were coming in from Japan to document the insanity...it might be cool to check out their reports and make a documentary on it if worthy. It'd be a curious history lesson, caught from another culture.


Lotsa people cruised that night every year if they wanted to see stuff burn...it was pretty sick. I've largely forgotten it all on purpose...don't really want to dredge up those personal memories.



Out of the ashes...
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Sean_of_detroit
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Username: Sean_of_detroit

Post Number: 1830
Registered: 03-2008
Posted on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - 3:22 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Like I just said in another post, it's all about the stories (Django, thanks for getting me thinking on that one). Not to sound preachy, but I think if you love life, someday you'll even love the hard times, in hindsight, and nostalgia... thinking in terms of someone who knows they are about to die (the rest of us try to ignore it).

Gannon, the Packard fire was honestly the first fire I had witnessed (real burning of a structure). I really know nothing about this, and if you don't want to dig things up (as I said to you in the past, simply don't. I understand that, I definitely do).

Be proud of it. I mean, be proud that it will rise from those ashes in spite of that (along with all of us... in a way). Everyone that was lost, was not lost without reason, so long as it's a mid chapter, and not the end. Detroit was young, and mistakes were made. It's not failure because we didn't stop, and won't stop. It's all part of a process. The mistakes have to be made, corrected (sometimes made again, as there are many options to try).

It's the story... it's our story.
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Gannon
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Username: Gannon

Post Number: 14069
Registered: 12-2003
Posted on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - 4:51 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Don't get me wrong, Sean, MOST things in my memory I cherish, including the bad stuff...since so many of life's lessons arrive that way.


But you cannot imagine the weird feeling evoked by smoldering fires and smoke from seemingly everywhere in the city...coupled to the anxiety of overworked fire and police forces, the tensions that percolated...coupled with the fucking pyromaniacs who felt compelled to drive around reveling in the melee.


More than twenty years worth. I can feel the tension mounting in my neck as I type these words...it was an annual party of destruction, and it sucked. You could see clearly the glee in some suburbanite's eyes when the town fired up...those that hated the city LOVED to see it burn.



But good HAS come out of it...the abandoned houses that were being used as drug dens and worse are gone, replaced with urban prairie that can be used by the population to grow food for themselves. We are the only city in North America ready to sustain itself in the high-priced petrol days...
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Sean_of_detroit
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Username: Sean_of_detroit

Post Number: 1844
Registered: 03-2008
Posted on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - 5:15 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

All to true.

I am now under the impression that this happened while it was happening, and not in the aftermath, like it is in New Orleans (used to explain by parents about what atrocities had happened... hopefully planting the seeds of empathy and understanding.

That was what I meant.

You really expanded my view a little with that Gannon. Sorry...
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Kennyd
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Username: Kennyd

Post Number: 50
Registered: 04-2008
Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 12:50 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

In the late 80s till 90s I used to go out on Devil's Night with my brother-in-law and his buddies who are all firemen in the northern 'burbs. I worked quite a bit in the city and I was their "navigator". I got the impression that they didn't see many house fires that were "fully involved" and they'd get pretty excited sometimes. They used to videotape too. I haven't seen the tapes since we made them.
When the neighborhoods got more involved, with the citizen patrols it really slammed the brakes on all that nonsense.
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Urbanoutdoors
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Username: Urbanoutdoors

Post Number: 1070
Registered: 11-2005
Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 1:09 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

My family owned two liquor stores during the riots. one on 14th and lothrop and one on linwood and lamothe. During that day in July my father and grandfather were in the store on 14th and lothrop and were warned by some local patrons and locked up just as the riots were just blocks north. The patrons formed a circle around my grandfather and dad and escorted them to their car, wrote soul brother on the building and it escaped with just minor looting. The linwood store was hit much harder and my grandfather closed that store and it soon after became the blackstar co-op. My family still lives in the neighborhood to this day even though the demographics have fliped completely since they bought thier houses in the 1940's.
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Sean_of_detroit
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Username: Sean_of_detroit

Post Number: 1854
Registered: 03-2008
Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 3:17 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Aftermath though?

Like... some people drove through N.O. and decided was a lost cause, as a result of its elevation.

Did this happen in Detroit? If so, what was the reason? Why did they give up on something that could more easily change (More hurricane's will happen, but riots/crime can be easily prevented).
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Sean_of_detroit
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Username: Sean_of_detroit

Post Number: 1855
Registered: 03-2008
Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 3:18 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Were those events considered riots?
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Reddog289
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Username: Reddog289

Post Number: 602
Registered: 08-2007
Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 4:29 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Back when "devils night" was big, it disrupted my work. The pressman lived in Detroit he,d leave at 3pm so he could get the hoses ,buckets ETC out. The BOSS [his brother in law] would bitch.Later on i sat on my girlfriends balcony at her flat on Lafaytte,watched as the oldest equipment the city had patrol the streets, What a site.

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