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I was in Detroit in 1990 — not my first
time — poking around to get a deeper feel for the place so I could
write a chapter about it in The Geography of Nowhere. At mid-day, I
was driving on one of the great avenues that radiates out of the old Beaux
Arts fan of streets that emanates from the Grand Circus at the heart of
downtown — Woodward or Cass or Gratiot, I forget. It was a six or eight
laner, and everything along both sides was either
some kind of social service installation or vacant. There was no traffic, by
which I mean not merely a smooth flow of cars, but no other cars whatsoever.
For at least a mile, my rent-a-car was the only vehicle on the street.
Finally I saw another car up ahead, in my lane, coming straight at me. It
continued bearing down on me, until the last 100 feet or so when it veered
around me with an indignant blare of the horn. It was only about then that I
noticed a sign indicating that I was on a one-way street. Downtown Detroit
was so empty that I could drive a good mile the wrong way without knowing it.
Detroit’s
decline and fall was long and gruesome. Back then, just outside the downtown
of 1920s skyscrapers, there were whole neighborhoods of formerly magnificent
old mansions in the most amazing states of dilapidation, with sagging
porches, chimneys tilting at impossible angles, and whole exterior walls
missing to reveal eerie dollhouse-like vignettes of rooms painted different
colors, formerly lived in. These were built by the wealthy magnates of the
Great Lakes frontier — the timber and copper kings, manufacturers of
paint, coal stoves, etc
— before the car industry was even a gleam in Henry Ford’s
flinty eye. Over the 1990s they were all torched in the annual Halloween
ritual called Devil’s Night. The next time I came back to Detroit,
there were wildflower meadows where those ruined mansions had been. In a mere
century, all that grandeur had arisen and been erased.
The grandest ruin of
Detroit is the much-photographed main train station, with its attached office
tower. The old neo-classical hulk had been neglected for so many decades that
mature ailanthus trees were growing out of the parapets. I was back in
downtown Detroit, around Cadillac Square, in
the1990s shooting some “walk-and-talk” for a documentary at rush hour
on a weekday evening and it was like the night of the living dead there. The
old Hudson’s department store was dark and empty and the Statler Hotel had plywood sheets over every window. (It
was demolished in 2005.) We were the only humans in the vicinity at 5:30 pm.
It’s fitting that
Detroit is the first great American city to officially bite the dust, because
it produced the means of America’s suicidal destruction: the
automobile. Of course you could argue that the motorcar was an inevitable
product of the industrial era — and I would not bother to enlist a mob
of post-doc philosophy professors to debate that — but the choices we
made about what to do with the automobile is another matter. What we chose
was to let our great cities go to hell and move outside them in a
car-dependent utopia tricked out as a simulacrum of “country
living.” The entire experiment of suburbia can, of course, be construed
as historically inevitable, too, but is also destined to be abandoned —
and sooner than most Americans realize.
Finally, what we’ll
be left with is a tremendous continental-sized vista of waste and desolation,
the end product of this technological thrill ride called Modernity.
It’s hard to find redemption in this story, unless it’s a world
made by hand, with all its implications for a return to human-ness.
What happened to Detroit
will come to all the other great American metroplexes
in time, but perhaps not in the same way. So-called urban experts like Ed Glaeser at Harvard (The Triumph of the City), and
other exalted idiots just don’t get it. These cities attained a scale
of operation that just can’t be sustained beyond the twilight of cheap
fossil fuels. They will all contract massively — some of them, such as
Phoenix and Las Vegas will disappear altogether. The lucky ones will
reconstitute themselves at much smaller scale around their old harbors or
riverfronts. The ones burdened with too many grandiose mega-structures (New
York, Chicago) will choke to death on the liabilities they represent. The
reason for this can be found in the basic equations around the cost and
supply of energy resources and the consequent impairments of capital
formation. In short, neither the affordable energy nor the money will be
there to run things as we’re used to running them. The voodoo
economists of the ivy League, the White House, the Federal Reserve, and The
New York Times are utterly clueless about how this works.
Other idiots want to
dedicate the ruins of Detroit, and places like it, to “urban
farming.” This represents yet another layer of misunderstanding of how
the world works. Detroit and most other cities occupy important geographical
sites (in this case a river between two Great lakes). Some kind of urban
human settlement will continue to occupy that site in the future. It
will just be smaller, less complex, and almost certainly less hideous than
the disgraceful tangle of freeways, casinos, 7-Eleven shops, and rotting
bungalows that remains on-the-ground there now. Farming is what happens
outside the urban settlement (though gardening is another matter).
There’s plenty of room in the rest of Michigan for farming.
By the way, the vast donut of prosperous suburbs around the ruins of Detroit are
not long for this world either. Their wealth will prove to be just as
transitory as the wealth embodied by those bygone inner mansion neighborhoods
of the pre-1900 Detroit, and the detritus will be harder to clean up there
because it is spread so far and wide. That particular lesson remains to be
learned all over the rest of the USA, but with crude oil at $108-a-barrel
this morning, a smack upside America’s thick-boned head is probably not
far from landing.
How the legal aspects of
Detroit’s bankruptcy get worked out will just be a sideshow outside the
main tent of greater industrial era collapse and the practical demographic
alterations of everyday life we can look forward to.
My new book will make you laugh. Git one! Click.
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