I just finished reading Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff. Great book. Not a happy book but an exceptionally good read. The last time I was in Detroit was in 2005 when my buddy Kevin and I ran The Detroit Free Press Marathon. We only did the half marathon but we had a great time for a couple of plodders.The night before the race we went to Hockeytown Cafe which is a real cool restaurant. During the race we got to run across the Ambassador Bridge into Canada and then come back into Detroit through the tunnel. They even gave us a time split for our under water mile time, ours was a blistering 11:11 by the way, and then we finished on the 50 yard line of Ford Field which was the site of the Super Bowl the following year. Big time fun - even more so for Kevin - I dropped him off on the way home so he could meet with another guy and see the White Sox play that evening in the World Series. So we had fun in Detroit but we don't live there.
I was also up there in Motor City a few years before that and I got a chance to look around and see a little more of the city - rough, to put it mildly. Lots of it looks like something you would see in the old news reels from WWII. Bombed out. In the book he mentions a gallon of gas costing around 4 bucks and a movie ticket going for eight so it's cheaper to buy a gallon of gas and set an abandoned house on fire and watch the firemen try to extinguish it while sipping a 40 than it is going to a movie. Helluva way to entertain yourself. And of course it's not just Detroit that's having problems. It's just the poster child for the decay of our cities. What causes things to get so bad? A combination of things but usually there's some corrupt or incompetent politician as part of the main story line, in this case it was mayor Kilpatrick. Michigan and Illinois politicians have been providing a lot of entertainment for us Hoosiers and it doesn't look like it's going to change much in the near future at least with Illinois.
Next week we've got a showdown at the national level. It will be interesting to see how that shakes out. The way things are going the whole U.S. of A is going to end up like Detroit unless the politicians decide to start remembering the Constitution and We the People. Probably not much chance of that happening but one can always hope. If they don't, read Detroit: An American Autopsy and you'll know how the story's going to end.
2 comments:
I watched "Detropia" a while back, and it is dismal what's happened in Detroit, with the dependency on the auto industry, and many other things that created a perfect economic storm.
I saw nearly the same thing happening in Akron and the rubber industry. One year out of high school and my choices were limited: Leave Akron, or get a job with a tire company where the pay was being cut almost weekly. This was in 1982. The city seems alive still, but I'm not sure how. Probably the support industries (machine shops, etc) that were once dedicated to the big four that had to learn how to diversify.
I did a bike ride on the Great Allegheny Passage a couple of years ago. We started in McKeesport, Pa., outside of Pittsburgh. Same story there as well. Steel industry went down and so did the town. Used to be 50,000 people, now down to less than 20,000. A lot more of those towns out there as well. You just don't hear much about them. Shame when your best option as a young man is to leave town. Even bigger shame when you're stuck there.
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