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Mrjoshua
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Username: Mrjoshua

Post Number: 930
Registered: 03-2005
Posted on Wednesday, October 18, 2006 - 5:29 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Although I found this article to be in many ways a gross misrepresentation of the current state of the CoD, it does make for interesting reading.

A morbid urban safari
By Daniel Pimlott
July 15 2006
The Financial Times

Blighted by violence and poverty, and home to a chronically ailing car industry, Detroit could be the most maligned place in the US. 'Detroit mayor to sell city for scrap,' ran a recent headline in satirical magazine The Onion, which sums up the attitude most have to this notorious city.

In fact, things have become so bad in the Motor City that some economists think it no longer has any reason to exist. With a population that has fallen by half since the 1950s and is declining faster than anywhere else in America, it may not be around much longer. Which makes it the perfect time to visit.

The kind of traveller who prefers to taste more esoteric delights, and avoid flaccid tourist-holes, will be thrilled by an urban safari in this midwestern town.

The city is defined by industry. After Henry Ford built the first car production line there in 1896, it became the centre of the global automobile industry. Cars, through Ford, General Motors, Chrysler and a host of other contenders now long defunct, made Detroit a wealthy and prestigious town. The evidence is still there in the form of numerous grand buildings. But in 1967 the town suffered a devastating race riot that came to shape its future. Scores were killed and thousands arrested. Afterwards, racial tensions and fear of crime sparked the "white flight", as thousands of white middle-class families fled the city centre for the suburbs.

Since that riot, Detroit has been in decline. The slow strangulation of US automobile manufacturing through competition with Asian companies such as Honda and Toyota killed off many of the jobs in the area, helping to make it the country's poorest big city.

Worse was to come. The 1980s and 1990s saw an explosion of gun crime and drug-related violence; and its bad reputation stuck.

Indeed, one of the first things I saw as I drove into Detroit was a burnt-out house, a relic of the local Halloween tradition of torching abandoned buildings. In the 1980s, up to 800 fires were lit every Halloween; that is now down to around 100. This hardly makes it ideal for a leisurely weekend away.

The most fascinating thing about Detroit is the bizarre feeling that it is the victim of a massive social and economic disaster. The carnage is most evident in the buildings.

Everywhere Victorian and early 20th-century towers bearing marble details and portraits of the city's great and good serve as a reminder that this was once a rich and flourishing town. But grand redbrick developments that would be prime real estate in New York lie derelict even near the most central concourses. Twenty-storey buildings spend their afterlives as huge squats.

In the downtown area, almost every other building is empty. Along Woodward Avenue, the main street, there is barely so much as a shop.

The Michigan Theatre building, built on the site where Henry Ford made his first car, is a fabulous example of the city's state of decay. Rap battle scenes from 8 Mile, Eminem's movie about his trailer park origins in Detroit, were filmed there and you can see why when you peek in. The massive theatre with a 100ft ceiling is now a private car park where SUVs sit incongruously beneath crumbling, ornate plasterwork.

Visiting Detroit you cannot but come away with a sense of awe and loss - I've never been anywhere like it. The contrast between wealth and poverty; success and failure; the former vitality and the current sickness of Detroit is as extreme as the one between its freezing winters and broiling summers.

It was as I sat in a car not far from the city centre, having a beer while waiting to go into a club, that the poignancy of the city hit me. On the other side of the road was the huge Masonic Temple of Detroit, an immodest Gothic curiosity with more than 1,000 rooms, built at the height of the city's powers in the late 1920s. Next to it was a plot of abandoned land the size of several football fields. It seemed so pathetic that a town that once had the wealth to throw up grandiose monsters such as the Mason's Temple is now reduced to a state where land is so useless that its residents leave it to grow wild.

Obviously, not all the buildings in the city are wrecks. By the Detroit River, which separates the city from Canada, skyscrapers cluster around the Hart Plaza. There, a concrete auditorium for public concerts is surrounded by some rare patches of grass and a few trees, all overlooked by the bulbous and overbearing General Motors headquarters. Fittingly for a city that has tied its fate to its car industry, the gleaming global HQ of the troubled car giant is the most prominent building in town. It was built, along with the Plaza, a few years after the riot, as an attempt to revitalise the centre.

Nearby is the American Concrete Institute, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the designer of the World Trade Centre, which bears the distinctive, slatted 1970s exterior that the Twin Towers once displayed. There is even a shiny new Ernst and Young building, which a friend who has lived there all his life told me was the first new downtown development he could remember in years.

A rather different kind of architecture, yet another macabre attraction, can be found in the great industrial fields where the automobile factories hover on the edge of town. A night-time drive over the Fisher Freeway reveals a beautiful, alien landscape of pipes, tubes and chimneys topped by flames, and illuminated by a constellation of lights. Some of these same factories were designed by Albert Kahn, Henry Ford's longtime architect.

Morbid curiosity is an excellent reason to go to Detroit but it isn't the only one.

The city's suburbs are still among the wealthiest enclaves in America, including Ann Arbor, home to the prestigious University of Michigan. The motor industry left it one of America's biggest art galleries. A visit to the Detroit Institute of Arts is worthwhile just to see a huge Diego Rivera fresco attacking Detroit's industrialists and the assembly line life they created.

Car wealth has also allowed the exclusive gem of Cranbrook to develop. This secluded private school and university decked in cutting-edge architecture and set amid a lush, green landscape, is a boarding school-cum-art college for the super rich. Its modern take on the classical pillars and fountains that mark out more traditional schools and universities helps to recreate a similarly intense, cloistered feel.

And then of course there is the music. Known as the home of Motown and a good deal of rock, music is the cultural highlight of the Detroit experience.

A more recent but lesser known part of its heritage is techno. I went to Detroit partly for the its electronic music festival, which takes place every May in the Hart Plaza. It draws the biggest names in techno from across the country and beyond.

The weekend of music is a mecca for tweenies enjoying their first concerts and aging ravers revisiting the birthplace of house music, this time with small children in tow. The after-parties, which take place across the city, including in the Masonic Temple, are not to be missed.

But in spite of the strength of its culture, what stayed with me about the city was not its music, art or the wealth of its suburbs. It was the excitement of exploring a completely new landscape.

Detroit left me thinking of films that depict the world after a nuclear holocaust or alien invasion. In those movies, imperious skylines dense with skyscrapers are left teetering and gutted after the apocalypse. One enjoys it for that - just as one might gawk at a car crash.

But thrill-seeking tourists now visit Chernobyl and don flak jackets to tour the war-torn back streets of East Jerusalem. They even go on bus tours to see the wrecked remains of New Orleans. For now, Detroit is in far better shape.

DETROIT TOURS

¡Go to www.detroityes.com for a virtual tour of Detroitfs empty spaces.


¡The Guardian Building, built in 1929, is designed in an exotic fusion of art deco and Aztec styles. Tours between 10am-12pm, just ask at the front desk of the building on Griswold Street.


¡The Masonic Temple of Detroit, just off the Fisher Freeway, is the worldfs largest. This gigantic Gothic structure makes you wonder what the Masons get up to inside. Arrange a tour and ask to see the unfinished swimming pool on the 8th floor, started in the 1920s but never completed thanks to the Great Depression. (tel: +1 313-832 7100)


¡Ann Arbor, about a 40 minute drive away, houses one of Americafs biggest public colleges, with more than 60,000 students. One of the most liberal towns in America, it boasts an excellent restaurant-deli in Zingermannfs.


¡John King Books, on West Lafayette Boulevard, is the largest bookstore in Michigan and has more than 1m volumes.


¡The Fox Theater, with its extravagant gold interior, is the cityfs most spectacular music venue.


¡Oslo on Woodward has the best sushi Ifve had in the US (tel: +1 313-963 0300). Or if you feel like a quick trip to Canada, the aptly named Ethiopian restaurant, Marathon (tel: +1 519-253 2215), is just one of many good restaurants in Windsor that are a short drive away over the Detroit River.



Daniel Pimlott is a reporter in the FT's New York office

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
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Mrjoshua
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Username: Mrjoshua

Post Number: 931
Registered: 03-2005
Posted on Wednesday, October 18, 2006 - 5:32 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

And a fine rebuttal from Mr Rothwell...

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Billions invested in the Detroit downtown
By: By Doug Rothwell, Financial Times
Published: Jul 29, 2006

From Mr Doug Rothwell.

Sir, Daniel Pimlott's article "A morbid urban safari" (FT Weekend, July 15/16) did a disservice to Detroit and to your newspaper, relying seemingly on anecdotal research and recycled decades-old news.

Mr Pimlott painted a picture of a dying city. Nothing could be further from the truth. He relied on a "friend" to state as fact that downtown Detroit had not experienced new investment in years. As president of Detroit Renaissance, a non-profit civic organisation composed of south-east Michigan's business leaders, I would like to set the record straight - billions of dollars have been invested in just the past decade alone with new private investment, public-private partnerships and a spirit that is immeasurable.

New corporate headquarters, thousands of new residential lofts, hundreds of new hotel rooms, countless new bars and restaurants, a vibrant entertainment district featuring two new stadiums, and a restored river walk are transforming downtown Detroit. Media reports widely touted Detroit's rebirth when it played host to the 2006 Super Bowl.

The metro Detroit region has been among the nation's leaders in attracting new business over the past decade. And today, the city of Detroit has more new housing starts than anywhere else in south-east Michigan.

Does Detroit have problems? Sure. So do most big cities. London has ethnic strife, Shanghai had economic inequality and Los Angeles has a decaying downtown to name a few. There are many places where one could experience the "urban safari" your reporter envisioned. Visitors to Detroit will see the essence of the US - a place where hard-working people are successfully integrating the best of the manufacturing and knowledge economies.

Doug Rothwell,

President,
Detroit Renaissance,
Detroit, MI 48243, US
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Mackinaw
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Username: Mackinaw

Post Number: 2173
Registered: 02-2005
Posted on Wednesday, October 18, 2006 - 6:03 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Quite the story. The rebuttal does indeed point out that the writer makes generalizations and relies on anecdotes.

If I were to visit Detroit as an outsider, I think I would be completely floored in seeing what the average neighborhoods look like, and the extent to which the city's already thin urban fabric has been torn to shreds. I've become so accustomed to Detroit, and so optimistic about its future, that sometimes I forget just how far off the mark we are. When I drove from downtown to Indian Village via Lafayette the other day, the only neighborhood that really resembled a codified urban space was the stretch from just east of Grand Boulevard, past Van Dyke, and into West Village and Indian Village. Everything else is empty or modern renditions of mid-density housing which can hardly be associated with traditional urban housing.

But any reasonable person must avoid generalizations. To say that Detroit has lost all of its urban flavor or that it is devoid of everything that makes a city a city is way off. The fact that we do still have West Village/Indian Village, and Palmer Park, and the University District, and the fact that we are now redeveloping a downtown and other central neighborhoods like Brush Park which had fallen from grace (but not completely)... I believe these facts rescue us from the worst critics, and make a lot of reviews of Detroit unfair.
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Detroitstar
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Username: Detroitstar

Post Number: 240
Registered: 01-2006
Posted on Wednesday, October 18, 2006 - 6:09 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Since when does UM have 60,000 students?
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Lowell
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Username: Lowell

Post Number: 3134
Registered: 10-2003
Posted on Wednesday, October 18, 2006 - 6:58 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I can't believe this 'journalist' really visited the D, let alone do any in depth research. In fact I suspect he took about half of the 1996-7 classic tour of this site and started writing.

"..the huge Masonic Temple of Detroit, an immodest Gothic curiosity with more than 1,000 rooms, built at the height of the city's powers in the late 1920s. Next to it was a plot of abandoned land the size of several football fields." What is he talking about? Cass Park? Parking lots? You tell me: http://atlas.freshlogicstudios .com/?cp=42.341082403760055~-8 3.06008579294936&style=o&scene =42.341082403760055

"Indeed, one of the first things I saw as I drove into Detroit was a burnt-out house, a relic of the local Halloween..." I would love to hear how he knew that particular house was burned in a devil's night fire from the 80's.

This is pretty pathetic. Shame on the editors of that distinguished magazine for letting this slide through.

Are you sure you didn't get this from the Onion? This has to be a joke.
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Mrjoshua
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Username: Mrjoshua

Post Number: 932
Registered: 03-2005
Posted on Wednesday, October 18, 2006 - 7:08 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Lowell,
I remember reading part of the article while working in Romania but couldn't find it online to post. The Financial Times is an excellent newspaper and their cultural commentary is normally quite good. This article brought a chuckle, that's for sure. Perhaps this reporter had a premonition that we would kick the Yankees ass.
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Barnesfoto
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Username: Barnesfoto

Post Number: 2614
Registered: 10-2003
Posted on Wednesday, October 18, 2006 - 7:33 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Comparing Detroit to New York is always a bad start, but this guy seems to have rewritten the standard bad national article about detroit from the early 90s. The formula is something like this:
1. Drive down the freeways and notice burned out buildings.
2. Drive through Brush Park
3.Take note of empty skyscrapers downtown
4. Gather police stats
5. Have photographer take shot of crumbling Brush Park Mansion with downtown skyline in background.
6. Write morbid headline: i.e. DETROIT, THE CITY THAT EATS ITS YOUNG!!!
It sounds like this guy's editors made him go back and write some good copy. But did he actually get out of his car?
To be fair, he probably had a hot date that weekend, and hey, he was probably thinking "those people in Detroit can't read & write anyway, so it's not like anyone will respond to the article"
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Chitaku
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Username: Chitaku

Post Number: 831
Registered: 03-2006
Posted on Wednesday, October 18, 2006 - 8:12 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I'd better enjoy all Ican before Detroit disapeers!
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220hendrie1910
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Username: 220hendrie1910

Post Number: 44
Registered: 02-2006
Posted on Thursday, October 19, 2006 - 5:01 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Daniel Pimlott writes:


quote:

It was as I sat in a car not far from the city centre, having a beer while waiting to go into a club, that the poignancy of the city hit me.



Yes, it is a rare city where a visiting writer can quaff a brewski in his rental car without raising any eyebrows!

Chuckling in Ottawa.
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Goat
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Username: Goat

Post Number: 8912
Registered: 10-2003
Posted on Thursday, October 19, 2006 - 5:30 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

For us that live in this area Mr. Pimlott's article is wrong (in some degrees he is correct) but we are used to the city being in much worse shape than it curently is.
Now take a person who lives elsewhere in the world and they will see exactly what he did; Burned out buildings and cars, vast tracts of land that are heaping with garbage, derelict skyscrapers...We can either pretend it doesn't exist or show these people the changes that have occurred and try and change the mindset of others. But as long as the majority of the neglect stands the perception will never die.
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Mackinaw
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Username: Mackinaw

Post Number: 2175
Registered: 02-2005
Posted on Thursday, October 19, 2006 - 5:39 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

That was exactly my point, Goat.

If a reporter came here in 2000 and then 2006, I'm sure they would sense the improvement.
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Bibs
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Username: Bibs

Post Number: 593
Registered: 10-2003
Posted on Thursday, October 19, 2006 - 8:11 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Send him the article about the weathervane going for 5.84 million. There's gold in that Urban Safari! Beverly Hills Billies theme song on the back ground.

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