Motor City Breakdown

It was harder to find that kind of optimism at this year's auto show. The current recession was old news in Michigan, where the unemployment rate, at 10.6 percent, remains the highest in the country. And Detroit itself, with its dwindling population, almost entirely African-American after the white flight of the Sixties and Seventies, had come more and more to resemble a prophecy of end times. Certain neighborhoods have grown so barren, they threaten to return to nature. The week of the auto show, the great Website Detroitblog posted a story about a former blues singer now doing a steady business selling raccoon meat out of his house; a few days later, a homeless man was discovered frozen in a pool of water in an abandoned warehouse, only his feet jutting from the ice. And, of course, the show was opening in the wake of December's humiliating congressional auto-bailout hearings, during which the heads of the Big Three were forced to publicly beg for a financial lifeline.

For the auto companies, then, their biggest annual party had to be radically transformed. This year's auto show would not only be about introducing the latest model of the Silverado — it would be the opening salvo of a very public, extraordinarily high-stakes publicity campaign. The automakers had to convince Washington, the media and the American consumer that they could adapt to the 21st century, make themselves nimbler and greener, and finally build cars people would want to buy. In other words, they would be selling their own relevance, after years of disappointing even their most ardent supporters. The usual futuristic prototypes would be on display, but the main thing being showcased would be purely conceptual: the idea of a future with Detroit in it.

This would be a difficult task at any moment in history, but now, in the midst of a recession, with the shortcomings of steroid capitalism becoming more and more evident, the Big Three also have to contend with another problem: the fact that the average consumer despises them. It's not a problem unique to Detroit, of course. Few people are shedding any tears over the sufferings of major record labels, corporate newspapers or Wall Street; minus the human cost of workers losing their jobs, many of us would actively root for these businesses to fail. In the case of the auto industry, where to begin? The outsourcing of jobs that accelerated in the Eighties? The pathological shortsightedness of a business model based on gas-guzzling SUVs and eternally low fuel prices? The preposterously overpaid executives, with their maddening, sclerotic passivity in the face of their own industry's demise? And these are strictly macro-level concerns; we haven't even mentioned the Pontiac Aztek.

Peter De Lorenzo is a 22-year auto-industry veteran who started the popular Website Autoextremist and whose father was the second person to hold the title of director of public relations at General Motors. "How they overcome this huge, negative perception out there is probably one of the toughest tasks not in automotive history but in marketing history," he says. "It's a staggering proposition."

While attending the auto show, I stay at the Book Cadillac, a downtown hotel built in 1924, when Detroit was only five years away from being described as "the most modern city in the world, the city of tomorrow," in the New York weekly Outlook. Back then, the Book Cadillac was the tallest hotel in the world, with 33 floors, attracting guests like Errol Flynn and Babe Ruth. Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. met for the first time in the lobby.

The hotel closed in 1984 and fell into disrepair, like many of the once-grand art-deco buildings lining the surrounding blocks. But in 2006, then-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick spearheaded a $200 million renovation. My last work trip to Detroit had been to interview Kilpatrick in 2002, at the height of his popularity, when people still fondly called him "the hip-hop mayor." At the time, Chris Rock was making the movie Head of State, in which he played the first black president, and he said he'd modeled his character not after Barack Obama — back then, still a little-known state senator — but Kilpatrick, who wore a stud earring and, true to his nickname, loved hip-hop. (Biz Markie had spun at his inauguration, and his press secretary told me the unofficial campaign song had been Lil Jon's "Bia' Bia'," with the chorus "Stop actin' like a bitch! You scared! You scared!") When we talked, Kilpatrick, a massive, charismatic ex-football player, brimmed with confidence, and I left feeling more hopeful about Detroit's prospects than at any other time in my adult life.