He took the midnight train going anywhere
Up high and looking southward across Detroit, the city looks blue. Rather than being full of grey clouds, the bluish clouds descend low enough to paint the skyscrapers with their colors. It’s not a fog, exactly, yet everything looks dark. The tallest nearby structures (huge lamps above the freeway) have yet to burst, though all the cars have their lights on.
My eyes follow the red lights down woodward rather naturally, past the still baseball-shaped ferris wheel in front of Comerica Park and up to the Fox Theatre sign and the rotating hockey puck above a local sports bar. As I watch the impossibly tall cranes lift into place I-beams longer than my apartment, the thought that occurs to me is tha this city is being shaped into a mecca for sports and gambling. That’s the mission being followed to the letter in order to Bring Detroit About, and … it just doesn’t interest me.
Don’t get me wrong, I have my own distractions that I enjoy. But I wonder why there aren’t any grocery stores in the city, why are parks sparse and equipment rusted?
I watched a video tonight about about a power station in Anaheim that was built underground, with a beautiful 2-acre public park overhead. It’s 70% smaller than conventional models with the same output. Why don’t we have more of these types of things here?
I enjoy Detroit, but it is ugly. There are beautiful parts, and there are places that resonate in my heart as home, but it is an ugly industrial city. Just look at the I-75 overpass just south of the city, the industrial wasteland that usually smells rotton. It’s reputation is uglier – my friend’s mom hasn’t gone down to Detroit in 20 years. Listening to suburban folk talk about it almost sounds worse than those out of state. The good that remains in the city is drowned out in the confusion of misguided officials who hide our homeless during the superbowl, who create income with enterprises that take from their consituents with the lowest income.
I think the city’s moving in the wrong direction to inspire residents to return here. It will regain city funding through the new entertainment complexes, and thus will survive, but without deep structural changes, without making the place a more beautiful home for young families, the general population will just continue to come in for a game, grab a drink at the bar, and go back to their pretty homes You know, those quiet little things with yards and a feeling of security.
I don’t know, I’ve read that Detroit is seeing an influx of young suburban couples moving into town, while the people already living there are starting to move out.
Like it or not I think Detroit is going to ultimately end up going rather painfully from an industrial city to a more commercially based one like Chicago. Of course, I also expect this’ll take a couple decades, but it seems like the way the wind is blowing.
The only people that can take it back, that can make those deep structural changes, are the people of Detroit.
Whether that’s those who move in, or those who are already there, it must change from the inside.