Second spin for run down Motown
Steve Turner tours Detroit and finds signs of a revival in the former US car capital
Detroit has a glorious past, a perilous present and an uncertain future, all of which make it one of the edgiest destinations in America today. The Motor City – once renowned for producing cars by Ford and General Motors, and for its Motown hits – is now best known for inner-city decay, a shrinking population and crime.
But a renaissance is under way. Buyers are snapping up inner-city properties at rock-bottom prices, and artists – usually the first to sniff an upward swing in fortune – are establishing studios.
But there can be no hiding the city’s recent miseries. As the motor industry declined and the workers moved out, thousands of homes, businesses, hotels, schools and theatres were abandoned. Detroit slipped from being the country’s fourth-biggest city to its 18th.
There are so many dilapidated buildings that, ironically, they have become a tourist draw. People come to snoop around decaying factories and ghost hotels. The trend has been dubbed ‘ruin porn’, and visions of rusting girders and collapsed ceilings have become the stuff of coffee-table books.
To get the best (and safest) view, I took a tour with Jesse Welter, a photographer who specialises in exploring the ruins. In a smart van, I was driven to two car plants, a theatre, a church and a school. What they had in common was that they’d been deserted and vandalised and were slowly being ruined by the elements.
For four-and-a-half hours, our group sauntered through vast vacant factory spaces, stepping over broken glass and scaling teetering staircases. The only people entering these sites now appear to be tourists, photographers, graffiti artists and, in the case of the 40-acre Packard Plant, a few security guards, although anything worth stealing has long been stolen.
I understand the appeal of this contemporary wasteland. Blown plaster, peeling paint and twisted metal have their own beauty. There is something moving about an empty, dusty classroom containing nothing but a teacher’s desk with an open book.
Within 30 minutes of completing the tour I was at the Wheelhouse on Detroit’s riverfront being kitted out for a two-and-a-half-hour bike ride led by Jason Hall. It was like going from a war zone to Bel-Air. Every Monday evening from April to October, Hall organises a Detroit Slow Roll – a huge bike ride taken at a gentle pace that attracts up to 3,000 cyclists. We started by the river and headed to Indian Village, the most upmarket area of central Detroit with streets lined by stately homes. There’s no decay on these streets.
One of the city’s earlier entrepreneurs was Motown founder Berry Gordy. He made the city a place of renown for every music-loving teenager of the 1960s. A tour of the Motown Museum concluded in the studio itself where hits such as
Uptight and Reach Out I’ll Be There were recorded. It’s small and photos on the wall show Gordy looking adoringly at Diana Ross on the spot where we were standing.
On my last day I took a cruise down the Detroit River past some of the grander sights – the GM Renaissance Center, the Joe Louis Arena and Hart Plaza. On the opposite bank was Windsor, Ontario. We disembarked near Grosse Pointe, Detroit’s most glamorous suburb, where the mansions rival those found in Beverly Hills.
Historian Thomas Sugrue said the boundaries of the American dream and the American nightmare are ‘powerfully and painfully visible’ here. It’s not always comfortable viewing, but never boring.