 Mon Sep 10, 2007 21:44 pm Jamie's lost thread. |
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The thread 'Downtown (answer to Ralf)' created by Jamie has completely disappeared. There was an interesting topic discussed that is worth reading by the forum users to have a better idea of Downtown Detroit.
Here it is:
| Jamie(K) wrote: | | Ralf wrote: | What does the city centre look like these days?
To specify my question, when I was visiting Detroit people told me that the city centre was being reconstructed. What once used to be an area for shopping and socialising has probably turned into a zone for offices, public administration or some other field of new business. Am I right in thinking so? |
Well, the whole thing is complicated. The city center of Detroit has been in this process of "reconstruction" for at least 40 years. This explanation is used as an excuse for why it looks so dismal.
Downtown Detroit suffers from the same problems that the centers of many other big American cities do, and from some unique problems of its own. People tell me that downtown Los Angeles is even worse than downtown Detroit, but I haven't seen it myself, so I don't know. For a long time, Cleveland had the nickname "The Mistake by the Lake", but its city center has been restored and people don't call it that anymore.
After World War II, there was a housing shortage in American cities, and residential development moved farther and farther out into the suburbs. At the same time, the whole idea of shopping malls was hatched, the malls were built in the suburbs, and that removed the need to go shopping downtown for things that were hard to find. Because downtown life tends to be a little hectic, and more crime ridden, life in the suburbs appealed to people, and after some time, almost nobody lived in these downtown areas. This is why many American city centers are almost completely empty of people after 5:00 p.m. and on weekends. Eventually, companies started relocating their offices in the suburbs, and this removed the need for most people ever to go downtown at all. In the suburbs of many large American cities, you can meet many people now who have never been downtown and are proud of the fact. They brag about it. My generation still has memories of downtown being a fun, lively interesting place, so we always wanted to see it restored and got a lot of our recreation down there. A generation has grown up by now, though, that has no memory of anything being good downtown, and they have no desire to go there, and they don't care if the place ever improves or not. If you tell them about nice things that are or used to be downtown, many of them don't believe you.
Detroit's downtown had some special problems of its own. One is that there had been racial problems for a long time, not only due to racism on the part of white people, but also due to racism on the part of black people, and due to the fact that there tend to be unacceptable amounts of crime in US urban black communities. The history of Detroit since at least the 1940s, then, is one of white families moving farther and farther away in order to stay away from black people. They do this partly (but less and less) out of racism, but mostly out of a desire to "stay safe". The tensions were bad enough in the 1950s and 1960s, but in 1967 there was a race riot that made a lot of white people decide they'd had enough of the city, and they moved out. Strangely enough, this "race riot" wasn't really a fight between blacks and whites, but mostly consisted of blacks destroying and burning down their own neighborhoods, much like in the riots that happened in Los Angeles around 1990.
Around 1972, both blacks and whites in Detroit decided that a black mayor would "bring change to the city", so they elected Detroit's first black mayor, Coleman A. Young. This should have been good, but they happened to have elected the wrong candidate. Young derived most of his political power from fomenting race hatred and making sure that Detroit was "a black city". People from the suburbs who tried to come back in and restore neighborhoods -- as happened beautifully in many other cities -- ran into a lot of discouraging obstacles and mostly gave up. Coleman Young remained the mayor for 20 years. In later elections, all the candidates who ran against him were black, but Young's administration painted them up as "white" or else allies of "the whites in the suburbs". It was really horrible. I worked with people who claimed that Young was ruining the city but who still voted for him because "he's our representative". What did that mean? They couldn't tell you exactly.
Nonetheless, there was quite a bit of restoration and reconstruction going on downtown and things had come back to life a bit. However, in 1991, when the city center was full of people for the July fireworks display, there was a small gang of black girls who were attacking white women on the street, knocking them over, stealing their jewelry and brutally kicking them. The police arrested them, but before they could, someone had taken a video of it, and the video played over and over again on the TV news. Such a thing almost never happens downtown (the city center is actually pretty safe), but these videos convinced a lot of people from the suburbs that it was too dangerous to go downtown. Overnight the number of visitors downtown decreased drastically, and many businesses had to close for lack of patronage.
Coleman Young has been out of the mayor's office for more than a decade, and he has been replaced by relatively good mayors, first Dennis Archer, and now Kwami Kilpatrick, who have no racial hostility. They have gone through with a plan to revitalize downtown. There are two new sports stadiums there, another corporate headquarters or two, a lot of buildings are being restored, there are (unfortunately) big casinos down there, and what has amazed me recently is how many apartments and condominiums are being built, either in new or restored buildings. (The understanding is that you can't have a viable downtown if nobody lives down there.) The place is still kind of empty after 5:00 p.m. and on weekends, but there is more activity again, and you can see that things are starting to happen.
But when you were there, the city center wasn't bad because it was being reconstructed, it was being reconstructed because it was bad. |
| Ralf wrote: | Hi Jamie,
Thank you very much for this elaborate and detailed answer. I've been to the states 3 times so far, and I probably spent a total of some 8 weeks travelling around some 30 states. What I could never quite fathom was how people got together for socialising. In some bigger places like New York, Chicago, or Detroit (north of the river) I could see areas that could be called “going-out districts”, but in other cities such as Portland, Kansas City, Demoines or even Los Angeles those areas were either very small or not present at all. I always thought this was a little bit strange, because in Dublin and other European cities life usually revolves around the inner city area. But maybe that's due to the fact that the American idea of mobility holds no need for centralised socialising.
Have you ever been to Dublin? For 20 years, the old town has been subject to constant change. Since most houses in the city centre have seen 150-200 years already, the general idea is to knock those buildings down and replace them by pompous glass domes. No skyscrapers, just vain, Romanesque looking glass buildings. The docklands in the east are undergoing a change similar to that of East End London in the 1990s. Here you can see new office blocks burgeoning.
As for socialising, you can find the so called Temple Bar district not far off the main shopping mile. This is where most people, Dubliners and tourists alike go out for a pint of the black stuff or to consume battered cod with fried potato strips.
Property prices experience a growth rate of more than 10% every year. That's absolutely crazy. The city has doubled its size in 40 years. There once was a village by the name of Tallaght which was gobbled up by Dublin sometime in the late 1960s. Today it's the biggest suburb with almost 250,000 people living there. Not the most pleasant of areas, but at least still quite close to the city centre.
Fortunately, the crime rate has fallen dramatically. In the 1980s and 1990s my mother would warn me not to go north of the river Liffey for fear that I could be stabbed for a pound. This has changed. Police and politicians are less corrupt, and an unemployment rate of just below 4% may be seen as beneficial factors. Also, the housing estate area where Ireland's highest crime rate used to be endemic was simply knocked down. It's inhabitants were than scattered to other places, and they probably started to make ends meat somehow. This isn't a recipe I would recommend to the rest of the world, but here it worked. |
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