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If you grew up in or around Detroit, as I did in the Eighties, attending the Detroit auto show was basically mandatory. It made no difference if you liked cars or not — I didn't — or if your family worked for one of the automakers. My father sharpened knives and sold restaurant equipment; still, we never owned foreign cars. No one in our neighborhood did. When I moved away and bought a used Corolla, my father, in his thick Italian accent, noted mockingly, "They must be good cars — all the smart people buy them."
My family came from Italy, our neighbor from Tennessee; my dad's friends were other immigrants from Poland, Lebanon, Mexico — all drawn to Detroit, if not explicitly for the auto industry, then because of what the auto industry had come to represent. The cars rolling off the assembly lines were a tangible manifestation of the American Dream, so it was only fitting that the people building those cars would also take on symbolic value. At my Catholic grade school, we made dutiful field trips to the Detroit Institute of Arts to admire Diego Rivera's famous "Detroit Industry" mural, which depicted a Marxist workers' paradise on the floor of a Ford plant. And it wasn't even pure myth. Henry Ford had famously paid his workers an unheard-of $5 a day, and historic benefits concessions wrung by the United Auto Workers had arguably created the modern American middle class.
For this reason, local support for the auto industry, which only seemed to intensify as the Detroit carmakers' fortunes continued to plunge, was more than just home-team loyalty. It was existential. No matter how badly they screwed up, the Big Three — Ford, Chrysler and General Motors — continued to exercise a psychological hold on residents, thanks to their place of importance in the city's history and a sense that, for all of their faults, they had made Detroit great, once, and might do it again.
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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.
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When I return to cover the auto show, Kilpatrick is serving a four-month jail sentence for obstruction of justice, having already resigned in disgrace following a sex scandal. The Book Cadillac looks gorgeous, but Detroit feels more desolate than ever. During my short walk to the Cobo Center, I am the only person on the street for several blocks.
I haven't been to an auto show since I was a teenager; my main memories center around the bikini-clad booth models and getting to see the car from Knight Rider. In keeping with the New Austerity, though, this year's show, according to advance buzz, will be decidedly toned down: a back-to-basics, "cars on carpets" approach, as one insider put it.
At the show, the traditional rituals are still taking place. If you've never been to an auto show, the main ritual involves adults climbing in and out of vehicles they will not be allowed to drive, which always seems deeply unsatisfying. (For related reasons, I've never liked strip clubs.) Inside a car you cannot drive, there's not much to do. Most people give the steering wheel a firm, ten-and-two grip and wiggle their spines against the unfamiliar seats; occasionally, they try the radio. Outside the vehicles, hardcore motorheads, almost all men, photograph the new models from various angles, occasionally popping a hood to snap a close-up of an engine. A new Mustang turned on its side attracts a throng of guys who stare at the underbody in awe, as if they're peeking up a skirt. Sometimes the new-car smell is so pungent, I wonder if they've figured out a way to make it artificially stronger at car shows, like they seem to do with the smell at Cinnabon.
Perhaps to signal an added level of seriousness, this year the booth girls are almost uniformly brunette and wear the same basic business attire (tight black pants, tops and blazers, stiletto-heeled black boots), a look I'd call "Naughty Vice President of Marketing." The crowds are relatively sparse, making the bright lights and forced cheer of the booth attendants feel creepy and desperate. In terms of square footage, the Big Three still dominate the main floor, but their displays have the least frills, with Chrysler making an especially depressing showing. In the past, Chrysler has been known for over-the-top stunts during the press preview: hiring cowboys to herd cattle down the streets of Detroit to promote the new Dodge Ram, or driving a Jeep off a stage and through a plate-glass window. But at this year's show, Chrysler doesn't even introduce any new models ready for market, and their cars are modestly arranged on a thin, gray carpet that is bunched in places. Older models, like the PT Cruiser, are given a wide berth by attendees, as if someone has spotted a dead body inside.
The foreign manufacturers, not chastened by any recent congressional prostration, allow themselves a bit more flash. Volkswagen's display is multileveled, white and gleaming, with an Apple Store brightness that makes your eyes hurt. Another company's signage features a humanoid robot, which I assume is some sort of jokey mascot until one of the representatives explains that last year it conducted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army, one of the only companies still hiring in Detroit, has constructed a climbing wall in the food court, and camoclad recruiters pace the floor.
In a telling sign of the times, so many automakers have dropped out of the show — Nissan and Porsche among them — that BYD Auto, a Chinese car company traditionally stuck in a basement annex, is able to move up to the main floor. BYD entered the Chinese car market in 2005 and plans to begin selling in North America in 2011. The company started out manufacturing rechargeable cellphone batteries and makes extravagant claims for its electric cars — that their batteries run for 250 miles and can be recharged to half-power in 10 minutes — about which U.S. analysts sound skeptical.
The biggest change at this year's show, everyone agrees, is the admission, however belated, of the limits of the internal-combustion engine. It's impossible to overstate how huge a deal this has been for Detroit. I remember a childhood trip to AutoWorld, the ill-fated, automotive-history-themed "fun" park meant to save Flint, Michigan, and famously mocked in Roger & Me, the centerpiece of which was a three-story V-6 engine displayed in a rotunda like a giant statue of Buddha in a Bangkok temple.
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But this year, every major car company is stressing its new ecowarrior bona fides, setting aside prime real estate for their hybrids and concept electrics. An inordinate number of these vehicles are unsubtly painted some chlorophyll shade of green. At the auto show, animated ads in the Lincoln display show the cars growing out of a leafy vine, as if future trips to an auto dealership will be more like picking organic produce at a farmers' market. Toyota goes a step further, passing out little Prius-shaped flyers that actually have wildflower seeds embedded in the paper, so you can figuratively plant a Prius in your Earth Day victory garden. Toyota also passes out red paper RECYCLE THIS BAG swag bags. (Ford's plastic, flag-bedecked bags, by contrast, recommend shoppers BUY AMERICAN.)
In the basement, an entire artificial forest has been constructed, and people wait in line to be driven around a track in one of a fleet of hybrid vehicles. It's like the NPR version of Six Flags. I half-expect to see Terry Gross behind the wheel of my 2010 Ford Fusion hybrid, but it's a chirpy Ford salesperson. We slowly drive off, shaded by the fake trees and creeping past a little waterfall. All of this is surely meant to be soothing, but something about the unnatural lethargy and utter silence of the cars feels sinister, almost sharklike — a vision of a neutered, dystopian future where our robot cars won't let us drive too fast or tailgate or listen to loud hip-hop with lots of bass.
Like T. Boone Pickens slapping windmill arms on his oil derricks and suddenly claiming to be Al Gore, there's something inherently unconvincing about the automakers' showy new appeals to the Sierra Club demographic. In fact, probably not coincidentally, one of the most striking discrepancies at the auto show is the gap between green PR blitz and civilian interest. People mill near the hybrids with a detached curiosity, the same way you might check out the albino calf at a state fair but not necessarily write about it in your journal when you got home. Over at Ford, scrums of large men surround every F-150 pickup, testing out the tailgates with their feet and marveling at the new "smart" technology that will let you know if you've forgotten one of your tools at home. At Chrysler, the spokesmodel for an enormous four-door Dodge Ram is a dude with gelled, spiky hair, wearing jeans and an unbuttoned, untucked plaid shirt. He's talking up the special features when I wander by. "That's right, guys," he says, "satellite TV!"
Even if the automakers' hands are being forced, they deserve some credit: Certain of their concept hybrids — the Cadillac Converj, Chrysler's 200C EV, Lincoln's C — are truly impressive and far surpass the Prius in terms of gadgetry and design. The most hyped nonconcept car is the Chevy Volt, a hybrid in which the technology takes a great leap forward, in that the gas engine is never used to turn the wheels of the car — it merely keeps the battery going if the power begins to run out. Since the battery will last for 40 miles, though, the average commuter should not burn any gasoline, and everyone else will have a fuel efficiency of 100 miles per gallon.
I visit the Volt's chief engineer, Andrew Farah, at the GM Technical Center in Warren, the fading Detroit suburb now most famous for being the place where Eminem grew up. The tech campus is huge, and in winter, with its vista of gray skies, snow-covered fields and blocky, grimly functional buildings, the place feels like an industrial park in suburban Moscow. Farah has thin wire-rimmed glasses, salt-and-pepper hair and a pen sticking out of his shirt pocket. We slip on plastic safety goggles, and he takes me into the battery lab, where batteries are tested at a variety of temperatures inside thermal chambers that look like meat lockers.
In the world of hybrids, the quest for the perfect battery is everything and remains an incredibly daunting technological challenge. Engineers have to maximize driving distance and overall lifespan — the batteries must be able to survive a Detroit winter just as easily as an Arizona summer — all while keeping costs reasonable. At the moment, the lithium-ion battery has emerged as the most efficient. At the Volt lab, the batteries are T-shaped, about the right size for crucifying an eight-year-old messiah, and covered in black composite shells. There are more than 220 cells inside each battery. Farah removes one to show me: It has roughly the dimensions of a very thin paperback.
In the Nineties, Farah worked on GM's ill-fated EV1, the purely electric car produced in limited quantities for three years before its controversial removal from the market. The EV1 inspired the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, which implies a deliberate self-sabotage by GM. When I bring up the film, Farah jokes nervously about not being able to reveal the identity of the killer but then essentially admits that, on a purely practical level, the EV1 sucked: It was tiny and expensive, with a short range and no backup once the battery ran out, and therefore had an inherently limited appeal. It was basically a dune buggy for rich people.
Farah insists all of these problems are being addressed with the Volt. "The EV1 was more of an ultra-efficiency vehicle," he continues. "All you had to do was look at it, and you'd see. It had a lower coefficiency of drag than a fighter jet! But if you want to really drive a change in the population, you have to do it without making people feel like we're asking them to run around without a shirt. The change can't be that big. It has to be something they can deal with. The idea that we were shortsighted because people wanted to buy big trucks and we built them? I think that's shortsighted. We were answering what the market wanted. You can't change the company. You have to change the people."
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"The change can't be that big" might seem like a surprising thing to say in the midst of our so-called "change era." But Farah is right, of course. The sheer scale of what needs to be done can make your head hurt, especially when you're talking about something as fundamental to our lives and economy as vehicular transportation; after a while, it starts to feel easier to just accept the fact that the end is near and begin stockpiling raccoon meat. This is why savvier environmentalists, and now the car companies, mostly talk in terms of incrementalism. Jim Kliesch, a clean-vehicles expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, calls for a broad portfolio of new action, but he notes that the "unsung hero" of the current technological developments might be improvements in regular old gas-burning engines — such as Ford's new EcoBoost technology — which are expected to offer a 20 percent improvement in fuel economy.
The automakers insist customers wanted big cars and trucks, and that it's the responsibility of the government to raise fuel prices if it wants to change market demand. (It's the Milton Friedman 101 version of "Stop me before I kill again!") The missing detail in this pity party, of course, is the fact that, for years, the carmakers opposed any environmental legislation that might impact their industry, with the help of lobbyists and friendly legislators such as Michigan congressman John Dingell (and complicity from the UAW). Just last year, GM vice chairman Bob Lutz called global warming "a total crock of shit." As Kliesch points out, "The average fuel economy of vehicles produced today is roughly the same as vehicles produced in 1987. The automakers have demonstrated they would rather apply other technologies that improve amenities — you know, putting DVD systems in the backs of chairs and whatnot — because they can get a higher profit margin out of that."
None of which lets our government off the hook for its ludicrous energy policy. If gas prices were not allowed to drop below a certain level, consumers would purchase more energy-efficient vehicles. (See: Europe.) Jim Farley, Ford's vice president of marketing, said he watched gas prices rise last summer and noted $3.75 a gallon as the moment "it changed — people stopped buying. I don't understand. It didn't stop at $3.25." Indeed, now that gas prices have plummeted again, consumers have begun shifting back in the direction of larger vehicles. "We put another shift on Dearborn [Truck Plant]," Farley noted, "and lucky we did."
The real hand-wringing about all of these facts takes place a few blocks from Cobo at the Renaissance Center, a cluster of glass skyscrapers overlooking the river. Automotive News, the trade publication, is holding its annual World Congress — a four-day conference for auto insiders — at the RenCen Marriott. All of the numbers look bad for Detroit. The dealership chain AutoNation announced in mid-January it would be cutting its new-car orders (by half), as too many cars (an estimated 3.2 million) were sitting unsold on lots across the country. Sales for the Big Three plummeted last year (by a stunning 24 percent); SUV sales, long a mainstay for Detroit, fell especially hard (by 40 percent). Contrary to anti-union propaganda, the pay rates of the UAW are no longer significantly higher than Detroit's foreign competitors. But the Big Three still have too many retirees (800,000) whose insurance and pension costs must be covered (the estimated health care costs for current and retired workers is $100 billion). Foreign competitors, meanwhile, have not been operating for very long in the U.S., so they have fewer retirees (somewhere in the low thousands), and health care in their home countries is largely paid for by the government.
To get to the conference, I ride the People Mover, an elevated tram that runs through downtown Detroit in a three-mile one-way loop. The city used to have an extensive trolley system, but it was purchased by National City Lines, a front company formed by GM, Firestone, Standard Oil and other corporations with automobile interests, after which the trolley tracks were ripped up and replaced with buses. The People Mover began running in 1987 and seems, in its utter uselessness, as if it might have been built by another secret auto-industry cabal as a way of mocking the very idea of public transportation. The monorail cars are automated and driverless, like trams at the airport or an amusement park; occasionally, walking along a barren downtown block, you glance up and notice a pair of empty cars passing above your head at a haunted crawl. In the People Mover, I ride by the Joe Louis Arena, where I saw my first concert (Springsteen, Tunnel of Love tour), and Greektown, where I was robbed at gunpoint in college, and the Joe Louis Fist, one of my favorite public sculptures in any city: a 24-foot bronze statue of a fist that hangs like a swing on Detroit's waterfront, pointing directly at Canada. Louis grew up in Detroit and worked briefly at Ford, pushing truck bodies onto the assembly line, a job that quickly persuaded him to return to the boxing ring. "I figured," he said, "if I'm going to hurt that much for $25 a week, I might as well go back and try fighting again."
In the Marriott ballroom, speaker after speaker approaches the podium, which is silver and gleams like a hood ornament, and soberly addresses the challenges of the current market. The crowd could not be friendlier. After a while, it begins to feel like a support group, with the grimness of the times resulting in a chummy survivor's bonhomie, even among rivals.
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UAW president Ron Gettelfinger apologizes for his annual salary of $145,000 in a folksy Ross Perot twang. GM president Fritz Henderson makes no such claim about his own $1.8 million salary. The 50-year-old Detroit native likes to evoke his days as a pitcher on the University of Michigan's baseball team, despite his terrible record (an earned-run average of 5.91), and in his speech, he tries hard to put a slightly jaunty spin on the sort of bland paternalism required of stolid Midwestern captains of industry. But during a Q&A, he crosses his arms tightly, and notes of testy defensiveness begin to creep into his voice. He admits that GM will run out of cash well before March 31st if the second round of bailout money doesn't come through, then he lapses into a parody of aphoristic CEO doublespeak, intoning the odd mission statement "Our job is not only to build vehicles that people want to buy but to communicate that people want to buy our vehicles."
Frank Klegon, Chrysler's executive vice president of product development, has one of the tougher speaking gigs — the day before his panel, it was announced that Chrysler is seeking to partner with Fiat. (Fiat! The Chrysler of Europe, the car company my cousin likes to say stands for "Fix It Again, Tony!") Such a partnership is not a confidence booster, nor is Klegon himself, another shambling middle-aged speaker who exudes such barely concealed desperation that you get the impression he might personally try to sell you a car. Even his PowerPoint presentation feels half-baked. One page has only the word INNOVATION! over a photograph of a minivan. Then anonymous testimonials from "early buyers" begin to appear on the screen, e.g. ON A SCALE OF 1-10, IT'S A 12. NO KIDDING!! (This is like citing your mom's five-star Amazon review of your novel as evidence that you're Henry James.)
The headlining speaker on the final night of the conference is Ralph Gilles, Chrysler's 39-year-old design chief, widely considered one of the most talented car designers working today. He designed the elegant, and much-loved, 2005 300C sedan. Tonight, he's clearly the hippest guy in a roomful of blue suits. He's also one of the only black faces in the house — Gilles is of Haitian descent, born in New York but raised in Montreal — and you can't help thinking that his keynote slot, coming just one day after Obama's inauguration, was meant, on some level, to give the conference a subliminal dose of audacious hope. His speech is frank and funny. Referring to the congressional hearings, Gilles admits, "I've never drank so much in my life. I remember my dad drinking Haitian whiskey on the couch when I was a kid. I never got it. Now I get it."
One afternoon, I visit Gilles in Auburn Hills, one of Detroit's tonier suburbs, considered the sticks when I was a kid but since turned densely residential as more and more people fled farther from the city proper. It's also the home of Chrysler's world headquarters, a gigantic complex the size of a shopping mall. (My PR escort tells me it's the second-largest office building in the country, after the Pentagon.) Gilles has a shaved head and is wearing a dark, smartly cut suit with a purple shirt and no tie. He says he's loved drawing cars since he was a kid. After dropping out of college and working at a hardware store, he applied, on a whim, to the College for Creative Studies, an art-and-design school in Detroit. His decision to apply was so last-minute and half-considered, he had only a week to get a portfolio together and was surprised when the school accepted him. After graduation, he received offers from a number of car companies but chose Chrysler because, he says, "I'm an underdog person. Also, at the time, they were doing K cars, so I thought, 'Man, they're gonna need a lot of help.'"
Ironically, it's Gilles, working for the most beleaguered of the automakers, who nonetheless gives me the most reason to believe that Detroit might find a way forward. He's a reminder that Detroit, after all, was built by visionary entrepreneurs — it was the rough equivalent of NASA in the Sixties or Silicon Valley today. Before I meet Gilles, I wander through the nearby Walter P. Chrysler Museum, three floors of classic models, from the early Streamline Moderne Chrysler Airflow to muscle cars like the amazingly named Plymouth Fury. Here, you realize why so many early rock & roll songs were about cars — back then, there was a good chance your car would be much sexier than your high school girlfriend. Because people identify with their cars to a degree that's different from almost any other material possession, Detroit once knew, better than anyone, how to infuse a high-gloss, mass-produced consumer product with lust and danger.
Even today, there aren't many hipper applications for an engineering or industrial-design degree than building a car; the Chrysler design studio has the creative energy, and edgy talent pool, of a video-game lab. Gilles is certainly a company man, putting the best possible spin on Chrysler's troubles, and during his speech at the Marriott, when he says, "It's not bad to care for the environment," he sort of puts "bad" in quotes, as if he's not quite sure about this radical idea yet. Still, the disembodied car interiors he shows me at the design studio hint at some of the sex appeal of the museum pieces next door, and he says all the right things about wanting his cars to be "ecologically responsible."
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"I'm an X, but my kids are millennials," Gilles says, "and the good news about millennials is they're not brand-loyal. They'll skip around as long as the product is good. Boomers may have had an American car in the late Eighties or early Nineties, and they'll probably never buy another one again. But there's a whole new group of people coming, so it's our chance to address that. I know where the perception's at. We have to create products so delicious, people forget all that stuff and say, 'I have to have this.' People have short memories. It wasn't too long ago that Apple was a write-off. Then the right product comes along."
That's the best-case scenario for what might happen in Detroit: Someone hires a Steve Jobs-like visionary and creates the iPod of hybrid electrics. Others are less sanguine. "I don't see a future for the Big Three," bluntly states Gary Chaison, a labor professor at Clark University. "There's not much chance Chrysler makes it through the end of the year — parts of it will be split up and sold off, and it will be a shadow of its former self. Ford will be able to work its way through, and I suspect GM, but in a greatly reduced size. What they're calling 'restructuring' really translates into job losses — reducing models, closing plants. It won't be the auto industry of yesterday. It will be a global industry, where a large share of the operations and profits will take place overseas."
Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's secretary of labor, initially offers more hope, noting that, with changes in demographics and increasing environmental concerns, there's an opportunity for the Big Three "to be revolutionaries, because of the need for something fundamentally different from the automobile of the last hundred years. They would have to reorganize radically and really move to the front tier, not only of fuel efficiency but public transportation and other, new means of moving people from point A to point B. And then there might be a very rosy future for them."
When pressed, though, Reich acknowledges, "The Big Three may, sadly, be the last organizations on Earth to come up with these innovations. The problem with any organization is success in the past inhibits fundamental change in the future. Many in Detroit are still living in the glory days of the Fifties and Sixties and early Seventies, when the Big Three reigned supreme, when mass production of basically the same model with slightly different bells and whistles produced large revenues. The younger executives were shocked into reality by Japanese competition, and in fairness, they did make some substantial changes in the direction of better quality. They played a game of catching up. But the future is not about catching up. It's about out-of-the-box innovation. And I don't see any evidence that Detroit gets it at all."
For a more vivid look at what happens when a city undergoes what economists clinically refer to as "deindustrialization," I spend an afternoon with "Detroitblogger John," the pseudonymous proprietor of Detroitblog. John is an urban explorer who often illegally sneaks into abandoned buildings, hence the anonymity. When we meet, he's wearing a knit cap and a hooded jacket and carrying a large camera with a flash. John's mother works at GM; she was recently laid off, then rehired. John drives an old Japanese car with 230,000 miles and a cassette deck — he says anything nicer would be ripped off in the neighborhoods he trolls. He says his mom's GM cars always start having problems around 100,000 miles.
We drive into Highland Park, a tiny city almost completely surrounded by Detroit proper. Highland Park is best known as the site of Henry Ford's first assembly line and, more recently, as the setting of the Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino. Thousands of people moved to the area in the Teens and Twenties to build Model T's, but those working-class families are mostly gone now, and in recent years, entire residential blocks, once tightly packed with houses, have been razed by arsonists and demolition. We turn onto a side street and drive past a large, empty field covered in snow, with impossibly tall patches of yellow grass poking up like a wheat field. "I wish you were here in summer," John says. "It looks like a jungle in Bolivia. You'll see these vast grasslands with one home in four blocks. There are no city services. These people are alone on the frontier. Someone saw a coyote downtown last year."
We keep driving, turning near a lot where the Motown headquarters once stood. John says he snuck inside before it was demolished and discovered Marvin Gaye's old desk, with love notes to his wife still inside. We drive past GM's gargantuan Fisher Body plant, in the Milwaukee Junction neighborhood — a railroad junction where a number of car manufacturers sprung up in the early days of the industry. Built in 1919, the plant initially turned out Cadillac and Buick bodies, eventually shifting to fighter jets during World War II; in the Depression, the space was used as a homeless shelter and soup kitchen. Now, the factory, closed since 1984, sits empty, its six floors of broken windows — hundreds of them, entire blocks of them — giving the place an odd beauty, like a dried-out beehive. On a wall nearby, someone has spray-painted "Fiends Will Have Their Poison."
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It's January, and the roads are slick around Detroit, especially in the city, where plows are in short supply. John drives the little car aggressively, occasionally sliding on the ice, but seeming wholly unconcerned, which kind of makes sense, since we rarely pass another car on these back streets. Red lights are treated more like stop signs. It's an unofficial driving-in-Detroit rule that's been around at least since I was a teenager, partly stemming from carjacking-related paranoia but even more because why-the-fuck-not? It's Detroit.
Back downtown, a few blocks from Cobo, we park in front of the Metropolitan Building, a 15-story, neo-Gothic office building, opened in 1925. It's a weekday afternoon, but the street is completely deserted. The Metropolitan, once the center of the jewelry trade in Detroit, has been empty since 1977. Someone has painted a garish football mural on the ground floor, and a filthy brown teddy bear has been tied to a street sign. "Memorial," John says. "Someone was shot here." Walking quickly to one of the building's doors, John turns the knob and is surprised to find it unlocked. We slip inside, and he switches on his flashlight.
The room has been completely gutted; there's nothing left. Broken plaster and glass cover the floor, and an icy draft blows through the broken windows. We begin climbing the stairs. It's dark, and the wires dangling from the ceiling on each floor look eerie and weblike. On one of the doors, someone has scrawled, "If You Want 2 Die?" I pause and try to make out the rest of the sentence, but it's illegible. John stops on the flight above me and hisses, "You hear someone?"
Eventually we make it to the top floor. A couple of rusty radiators have been dragged to the center of the room and abandoned. "Crackheads always try to take them for scrap but then realize they're too heavy," John says. He leads me out to the snow-covered roof, where we study the building's beautiful stone facade: a knight, a coat of arms, ornate fleur-de-lis carvings atop the windows. We move over to the parapet, crenelated like the top of some fortress, and gaze out at the city skyline. "That building is empty," John says, pointing to the nearest skyscraper. He shifts his finger to the left. "So is that one." Then, sounding surprised — and it's this hitch in his voice that reminds me he's not a tour guide, that he doesn't do this every day — he points to the next building over and says, "And that one, too."
There are plenty of other American cities that, in large part, we've decided to toss aside, leave to the ghosts. Buffalo. Dayton. Scranton. Flint. Baltimore. New Orleans. Detroit — until the Fifties, the fourth-largest city in the U.S., a capitalist dream town of great innovation and greater rewards — remains our country's most epic urban failure, having fallen the longest and been sold out the most ruthlessly.
And yet, standing in calf-deep snow on an abandoned roof, my hands thrust deep in my coat pockets, staring out at this wintry scene of ruin, I have to admit: I don't really feel sadness or rage or much of anything. Depressingly, perhaps, it all just feels normal. For people my age and younger, growing up in the Detroit area meant growing up with a constant reminder that the best ended a long time ago. We have no other concept of Detroit but as a ravaged shell of its former self. Our parents could mourn what it used to be and tell us stories about the wonderful downtown department stores and the heyday of Motown and muscle cars. But for us, those stories exist as pure fable. It's like being told about an uncle who died before you were born, what a terrific guy he'd been, if only you'd met, see how handsome he looks in these old pictures....
At this late date, it's no longer clear what "saving" the city of Detroit would even mean anymore. Ideally, a massive, New Deal-type infusion of money and attention could help the remaining residents deal with the same problems (crime, unemployment, poor schools) facing many urban centers. But, as Professor Chaison notes, "Detroit was tremendously significant because the workers at the auto plants were the aristocrats of labor. Just creating new jobs isn't enough. Creating jobs that move people firmly into the middle class should be the goal. And I'm not seeing it happen."
Standing on this rooftop, in this city, as the worst financial crisis in living memory shows no signs of abating, it's easy to start thinking melodramatic thoughts. You want to believe everything will turn out OK. But the Big Three clearly had no concept of what they were up against until it was too late. And now, after years of having our trust abused with shoddy cars and patently deranged business models, we're being asked to take a huge leap of faith and believe in their ability to learn from their mistakes, to turn everything around. On an infinitely vaster scale, of course, the United States government is doing the same thing: begging the rest of the world to trust us, to continue to buy our Treasury bonds and fund our bailouts and stimulus packages because we're too big to fail. And we're hoping the world won't ask us the most pointed question Congress asked the carmakers: Why don't you try selling something people want to buy?
It's hard not to wonder fleetingly if Detroit, in the end, might reclaim its old title after all — not the Motor City but the City of Tomorrow. John says we should go. I squint out over the ledge one last time. The icy wind is almost harsh enough to make you cry, and Detroit, from up here, looks like it goes on forever.
[From Issue 1073 — March 5, 2009]
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