Detroit, Michigan

Over labor day weekend I visited Detroit. My friend Gustav implored me to check it out with him for a few hours. I'm glad he did. 

We had lunch at a shawarma place near downtown. It is across from the largest post office I've ever seen, a multistory behemoth. A facade of faded yellow brick and 1950s-style font reading "UNITED STATES POST OFFICE" overlooks the Detroit River. Only a plastered notice on the front door listing revised hours of operation indicated that it was open. I wonder how much mail this location processes compared to when it was built.

The downtown skyscrapers rise from wide empty boulevards. It was a Sunday during COVID, which may explain the lack of human presence, but when compared to Chicago (visited later that evening), I figure this emptiness has deeper roots. The central business hub is clean and shiny and imposing and lush in a manmade way, features encapsulated in the General Motors HQ, a black (or blue?) complex of towers with digital colored bands ringing the top, changing color every few minutes, dwarfing anything across the river in Windsor, Canada. Yet everything is eerily quiet. As if the grand structures live solitary, high in the sky like the tallest of the redwoods. 

Outside the central hub lies the infamous Detroit. Down Woodward Avenue, a broad artery lined with new apartments and old museums touting the industrial progress of civilization, we turned off into a neighborhood. There are blocks of this city that are now grassy field and dense thicket. Many houses are barely upright, roofs caved in and windows boarded up. There is no demand for this land. In the distance loom abandoned factories, the connection between here and there unmissable. I wonder how the city provides services to still-inhabited addresses. Is anyone keeping track? 

Despite intense depopulation and deindustrialization, Detroit is not dead. I saw cool local businesses serving diverse people. Michigan Central Station, ornate and decrepit, is under renovation. The city is just overbuilt. It once housed many more people, and now that underutilized infrastructure exudes a ghostly vibe. Investment has been concentrated downtown to make a statement instead of focusing on solutions to unused space and economic blight. The mismanagement is grimly apparent. 

I left Detroit with hope. I don't think it can ever become what it once was, but there is no need to aim for that. There is a great history and a resilient population still there. Revitalization is happening. I think over time the city can adjust to its reality instead of persistently reaching for the past. That process is one people should see if the chance presents itself.