Detroit

I had been meaning to go there for years, probably a decade and change, ever since the stories of the city's emptying and then repopulation by homesteading artists and the like began to circulate. Yesterday we went, with Mary's friend Kate and her husband Kim, who grew up in the area. Unfortunately it was so hot that we were a little constrained in our ability, frankly, to just think and meander.

Nonetheless we saw a lot, a lot of nothing. It's hard to imagine the sheer scale of the emptiness in a place that so clearly once was so much more. So many green fields punctuated by individual houses or churches or maybe stores, themselves just hanging on by a thread.

We saw hints of life and rebirth, to be sure. We had a deliciious lunch at a Yemeni restaurant in the town of Hamtramck, a once Polish but now Muslim-majority city surrounded on all sides by metro Detroit, which rises, if I may be permitted a seemingly stretched but truly apt comparison, like an oasis of intact homes and businesses out of a great emptiness created by an abandoned old Chrysler (now Stellantis) plant. As we left the restaurant, we heard a muezzin chanting the call to prayer drifting down the block. The promise of America made real. 

Kate and Kim's boy Oliver lives in an area where most of the homes are still intact and a lot of them are being rehabbed, but there's still a ton of work to be done. It's right near a promenade down to Bell Isle, a once city but now state park on an island in the Detroit River, which was hopping on a day of record-setting heat. There was no place to park near the small beach.

There were areas of significant redevelopment that we didn't see, to be sure. But the overall impression was of a large ghost town, hanging on by the skin of its teeth. It was the most abject illustration of the failure of America's long-term incumbent regime that I've seen, the biggest endorsement of a vote for radical change, however sketchy its promises.