NEW DAY IN DETROIT
City’s future zooms ahead with local farms, insightful art — and a real estate boom.
I’ve always found the best way to read a city’s mood is on a bicycle. You move at a speed that allows for a kind of mutual handshake with the urban topography.
This past summer I shook hands with Detroit. Specifically, I signed up for Slow Roll, a mass social bike ride. Slow Roll (pronounced “Sloow Roooooooooll!”) was founded seven years ago by Jason Hall and Mike MacKool as a small, motley group of cyclists who bonded while riding motorless in the Motor City, evading police and potholes and irate drivers. Over the years, Slow Roll has evolved and grown up alongside its hometown, and now the Detroit police escort as many as 4,000 Slow Rollers on a weekly ride meant to highlight one of the city’s many historic neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, the Slow Roll I was supposed to take part in was canceled just hours before its start because of a threatening thunderstorm. But, as the saying goes, 80 percent of life is showing up. So I showed up.
The Slow Roll gathering point, in front of the Masonic Temple, was a ghost town. There was me, a young African-American man named Woody who had been Slow Rolling since the beginning (“Since before the beginning”) and three middle-aged white women from the suburbs. This was their first Slow Roll and they hadn’t heard the ride had been canceled.
“Don’t worry,” Woody said. “They’re coming.”
The women looked doubtful beneath their bicycle helmets. Not too long ago suburbanites rarely came downtown. The national media participated in constructing this portrait of Detroit as the ultimate failed U.S. city, artfully feeding the public’s appetite for ruin porn with photos of decaying buildings, majestic theaters crumbling into dust, trees sprouting through walls.
Over the past five years, however, Detroit’s downtown corridor has seen a veritable explosion in real estate investment. Much of this growth was precipitated by Dan Gilbert’s decision to move the headquarters of his mortgage lending company, Quicken Loans, to a building overlooking Campus Martius Park in 2010. Today, downtown sidewalks are packed with millennials taking a break from beach volleyball to sip craft beer and nibble on artisanal pickles.
In Detroit, the future is still being written. Time and time again I felt giddy with possibilities, informed in large part by the innovators I was talking to. Yet many of these same innovators — community activists, artists, small-business owners — took issue with the trendy notion of a “new Detroit,” as this term largely ignored the fiercely independent and creative spirit that has existed in the city for decades.
Indeed, those who have been here for the long haul were skeptical that the redevelopment of downtown would translate to any kind of sustainable change in the surrounding neighborhoods, areas that largely bore the brunt of the Motor City’s long decline. How Detroit navigates the various dangers of regeneration and gentrification seems a particularly poignant question given that this year is the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit race riots that exposed the deep tensions ingrained within a city that remains one of the most segregated in the country.
Back at the Masonic Temple, the suburban women were growing restless. “Maybe we should leave,” one said. “Oh, they’re coming; I bet you,” Woody said. “If 100 people show up, you’re buying us all dinner.”
We waited. And they started to come. And come. Detroiters, it turns out, will not be discouraged. They have learned to ignore advice from officials and make do themselves. After all, it was only four years ago that their city declared bankruptcy, the largest U.S. metropolis to ever to do so. The city government had all but stopped providing essential services. Trash bins went uncollected. Forty percent of streetlights were out. In many parts of town, the police would not come if you called. Whole blocks were abandoned.
But throughout this time, Detroiters persisted, as they always had. Largely left behind by the public sector and a foundering automobile industry, people adapted, bartering for services, trading welding work for a DJ gig, founding their own recycling program, forming powerful local community organizations that fulfilled the role normally reserved for the government.
Over the years, artists like Dabls (“Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust”) and Tyree Guyton (“The Heidelberg Project”) claimed the city as their canvas, transforming neglected buildings into profound art pieces more affecting than anything found in a museum. Urban farmers converted vacant lots into founts of organic produce. The national narrative from this time was usually about how a once-great 20th-century city was dying before our eyes, but this was also the story of how the citizens of Detroit continued to thrive, redefining what a 21st-century city might look like.
Maybe a 21st-century city looks like a crowd of Slow Rollers. People from all walks of life. All colors. Some were riding beater bikes, some were on tricked-out skull and chrome low riders. Some people were in wigs. Many had elaborate boom box setups, as though music had been invented solely to play on a social bike ride.
We ended up with about 200 riders. The thunderstorm never came. Woody kindly did not point out that the skeptical suburbanites owed us dinner.
Since this wasn’t an authorized Slow Roll anymore, we lacked both an official leader and a police escort. We collectively chose a route and policed ourselves, just like the old days. We rolled slow, clanging our bells as we brought traffic to a standstill. To stop traffic in the Motor City using only the power of 400 bicycle wheels is a deliciously powerful feeling. We rolled down Cass Avenue, over Interstate 75 to the newly revamped waterfront, past children cartwheeling through geometric fountains and couples strolling for views.
The man next to me blasted “Purple Rain” from a giant speaker on his bike. Prince propelled us. From the waterfront, we headed up the Dequindre Cut Greenway, a new bike path that traces an abandoned rail line from the river to the hip Eastern Market district, home of a farmers’ market and annual public mural festival.
Like the High Line in Manhattan, the Dequindre Cut is an ingenious piece of industrial adaptation. Sheltered from the city through which it slices, the underpasses of the Cut are adorned with gorgeous graffiti murals that are a kind of public meditation on urban recovery. One piece by artist FEL3000ft reads: “A star is born through immense pressure and we have had our fair share. That beacon of light you see in the dark is our fair city rising from the night sky.”
There are plans to extend the greenway into a loop around the city. There is space to dream big in Detroit, to do things that would be impossible almost everywhere else, and this is part of the reason it feels like the most exciting city in America right now.
I met with motivated high school and college students who were working with Phil Cooley, co-founder of the businessincubator Ponyride, and Ben Wolf, a design/build fabricator, to construct the Dequindre Cut Freight Yard, a portable cafe, DJ booth and pavilion made out of modular shipping containers.
“It’s cool to actually be changing the place I live,” said Jose Vasquez, a senior at Western International High School.
As I was leaving, Wolf said, “Remind me to tell you about my next project.”
In Detroit, there is always a next project. Such ingenuity is rife across the city. The day after my bootlegged Slow Roll, I visited Recycle Here, which, on the surface, resembles your average recycle drop-off center — plastic goes here, newspaper there. Matthew Naimi, a stocky, bearded man with a barrel laugh and a healthy sense of the surreal, founded it in 2005. Back then, the city had no official recycling program. The Saturday drop-off days, like the Slow Roll, became community events. Everyone came out, traded old junk and started to build weird sculptures out of the refuse.
“And if you’re going to have a recycle center, then obviously you need band practice rooms,” Naimi said with a laugh. Obviously. This spirit of utilitarian-activistcreativism abounds at Recycle Here’s facility that includes the Lincoln Street Art Park, an egalitarian space of reuse and collaboration, and site of more than one legendary outdoor party. Recycle Here also runs an after-school and camp program that educates young people on environmental stewardship and sustainability.
I thought about sustainability while in Detroit. We tend to envision sustainable cities in terms of green architecture, renewable energy, an emphasis on innovative mass transit. By many of these metrics, Detroit continues to struggle, in part because its population is scattered across about 139 square miles, of which 40 stand vacant.
Public transport in the city is woeful. Detroit is the largest U.S. metropolis without a proper public transit authority, and much of the resistance to any cohesive transit plan can be traced to a long-standing mistrust between the affluent suburbs and the city’s low-income neighborhoods.
This could be changing. The city just opened its first operating streetcar in more than 60 years, the Q-Line, which was largely privately funded and runs from Campus Martius up and down Woodward Avenue for 3.3 miles. It has garnered some controversy as being primarily a show pony targeted to tourists that does not provide any real commuting benefit to most Detroiters.
Perhaps. But every revolution needs a show pony. This past summer I rode the Q-Line a couple of weeks after it opened, before a fare was being collected. The tram was packed with young and old, black and white. Everyone had an opinion about the streetcar; everyone was suddenly an expert on the intricacies of urban transportation. As we slid past buildings being erected at a lightning pace, I felt a bit as if I was on a Disney ride of the future U.S. city.
Part of the Q-Line’s uphill battle is that the U.S. city in question is still very much the Motor City. Again and again I marveled at the efficiency of an interstate system designed to penetrate deep into the urban grid. There is relatively little traffic on these highways. When I drove, I was early to every meeting. It was the American dream! Except it wasn’t: As I meandered down mostly empty four-lane freeways, I became acutely aware that, unlike on the Slow Roll or Q-Line, I wasn’t meeting anyone. The car is essentially the undoing of organic urban cohesion.
While in the past Ford and General Motors have been accused of ignoring the needs of their hometown, both car companies have begun to shift toward embracing the 21st-century Detroit citizen who either cannot afford to own a car or might choose not to. Ford in particular has rebranded itself as a “mobility” company, investing heavily in new ride-sharing technology.
I visited Ford’s sprawling campus in nearby Dearborn, Mich., and met with Jessica Robinson, director of City Solutions, in a towering white garage space surrounded by Ford Fusions that had been converted into autonomous vehicles, their trunks stuffed full of processors. “We can’t just think like a car company anymore,” Robinson said. “We have to become ethnographers. So we went into communities and asked how people were getting around to try and address solu-
tions from the ground up.”
Ford started a competition called Go Detroit Challenge, which funded six Detroit tech companies working on innovative transportation solutions including CART, a program that pairs customers, ride share companies and grocery stores to enable low-income populations greater access to healthy food.
This year Ford and GM have doubled down on the potent combo of electric vehicles and driverless technology. It’s exciting to see U.S. car companies once again on the forefront of innovation. Maybe one day Detroit’s interstates will turn into rivers of individuated, autonomous mass transit. People can read novels while they get whisked around in driverless Lyft vehicles. It sounds utopic — and sterile. Such algorithmic efficiency is the opposite of Slow Roll’s messy, collaborative, communalism.
I found myself discussing cars and community (and novels!) with Susan Murphy, the owner of Pages Bookshop in the Grandmont-Rosedale neighborhood. It’s a diverse enclave far from the bustle of downtown but still within Detroit’s city limits. In many ways, however, places like Grandmont-Rosedale are the heart of Detroit. The neighborhood has managed to resist the wide-scale blight that affected many of the surrounding areas in part because of an active community organization, the Grandmont Rosedale Development Corp., which helps organize a local farmers’ market, repairs dilapidated housing and provides assistance and retail space to small businesses like Pages.
Murphy’s shop is cozy and curated; it’s one of those magical places where you want to linger for hours. Pip, the resident blackand-white feline, prowled the new-fiction section as Murphy described the challenges of running an independent bookshop perched on the edge of Grand River Avenue, one of Detroit’s many corridors that cars often use as their own private Grand Prix.
“It’s difficult to get people to stop,” Murphy said. “We have to get creative with our programming. But the community here has been so supportive.” She hopes that Detroit Vegan Soul, opening next door, will create a critical mass of foot traffic, the beginning of a movement: BBQ tofu and Elena Ferrante. The development corporation is also in conversation with the city about small but powerful infrastructural changes like traffic-calming curb extensions that will encourage people to slow down and perhaps even buy a book.
Such structural re-imagining seems important to making Detroit more people and environmentally friendly. A 21st-century city now incorporates rainwater catchment gardens and solar parks and car-charging stations into its designs. But I repeatedly came up against this idea that true urban sustainability cannot be about infrastructure alone. It is dependent upon people.
The good news is that Detroiters are perhaps Detroit’s greatest asset. They have never stopped innovating and caring, and nowhere is this more evident than in the vast proliferation of urban gardens and farms that dot the city’s landscape.
In many ways, Detroit seems ideal for such an urban agricultural revolution: What better way to activate those 40 square miles of vacant lots than to turn them into farmland? If you visit the vast Eastern Market on weekends you will find a cornucopia of produce from some of the city’s 1,400 gardens and farms.
For Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, urban agriculture cannot simply be about profits; it must be an act of social justice. Yakini founded D-Town Farm, a 7-acre farm near Grandmont-Rosedale, as an education center to teach children about self-empowerment, food production and environmental stewardship, with a particular emphasis on African traditions of planting and harvest.
I visited D-Town Farm on a humid day in July. While waiting for Yakini to finish mowing the fields, I joined a volunteer and a farmer as they thinned tiny corn sprouts. There is something instantly gratifying about plunging your hands into soil still cool from the night. With a simple touch I had made contact with the food chain.
“It’s about food sovereignty,” Yakini said when he finished mowing. “Many people in this city don’t have access to fresh food. They aren’t in control of the food-delivery systems. We’re trying to hand that back to people.” As part of this hand back, DTown has plans of opening the Detroit Food Commons, which will include a co-op grocery store, a community incubator kitchen and a lecture hall. These are the future palaces of the food sovereign.
RecoveryPark, on the city’s east side, provides another model of urban farming. The farm is in an area that was particularly hard hit by Detroit’s downturn. There are more vacant lots than houses.
“We found that in order to be profitable you really need at least 10 acres,” said Gary Wozniak, RecoveryPark’s founder. “You need to go large scale.” To this end, RecoveryPark has bought or acquired about 60 acres. A key component of RecoveryPark’s mission is to offer jobs and training to addicts and those in recovery programs who would otherwise struggle to find work.
“We’re in this for the long term,” Wozniak said. “In Detroit, you have to be.”
On paper, RecoveryPark’s business plan is a thing of beauty. But looking over the vast expansion plans of commercial greenhouses, hoop houses and indoor tilapia farms, I found myself wondering: Can we still call this an urban neighborhood? It’s like a Zen koan: If you plop a 60-acre farm in the middle of a city, is it still a city? Where are the sidewalks? Where are the places for casual contact?
On my last visit to Detroit in July, I stayed at the Ark. It’s a solar-powered shipping container shack in an urban farm called Food Field. The farm, run by Noah Link, stands on the site of an abandoned convent. There’s an orchard of fruit trees, and emus perambulate right out your back door. Food Field has an on-site farm stand and sells to a range of Detroit institutions including the chic Selden Standard restaurant and the Detroit Zen Center.
At the Ark, everything is off-grid. The solar panels feed a limited bank of batteries, and so I became quite aware of my electrical usage.
The Ark, for all of its lumps, strikes me as a wonderfully adaptive place, a beautiful introduction to the survivalist spirit of Detroit. Like the city itself, the Ark is not always comfortable, but it is an experience you will never forget.