Thank you. I did not know that.
I supposed there will be a lot of passenger cars on this bridge too, if only to avoid the Ambassador Bridge and to say FU to the Moroun family,
There's a guy on YouTube named Chris Harden who has a lot of Rustbelt Ruin Porn videos. That's how I learned about Delray. He has an extensive series on Detroit neighborhoods, good and bad, that is very interesting.
Saw a video the other day on a different site about a hoarder house in the Boston-Edison neighborhood. Beautiful brick house, needed some work but they wanted $100k for it. Apparently the neighborhood comps are in the 600k range so the estimators thought it would still be a good deal, even at that price.
Such a weird and almost unique situation. In the span of three generations of my Detroit-born family, the city has gone from "the Paris of the Midwest" and three times a finalist for hosting an Olympics (1956, 1960 and 1964) to a hallowed-out shell of its former self with 90 percent of the population living there in increasingly dilapidated housing because they literally can't afford anything else.
I'm certain someone has or will write the definitive book or essay about the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit (there used to be a great website with that name) but to explain how Detroit went from mansions and business-packed boulevards to whatever you can call it now is hard for me to describe in terms of my own lifetime, let alone someone who only knows it as abandoned.
Packard has been sitting vacant since I was born. It was a massive facility in its day but if you look at a map, the property is dwarfed by GM's Hamtramck plant. It's a ugly wart in an ugly part of the city that just doesn't seem to have a resolution. In a way, the Packard plant is a monument to everything that's gone wrong in Detroit for the past 70 years.
My grandparents moved from Ontario farmland to the bright lights of Detroit in the 1910s because of the limitless possibilities and incredible opportunities. And my parents grew up in safe neighborhoods in the 1930s and 1940s with ample public transportion and an incredible number of glamorous movie theaters, dance halls, skating rinks, libraries and high-end shopping.
For my mother, Hudson's downtown was a two-mile round-trip ride on the Grand River streetcar. (In fact, she worked there during summers in high school.) Nardin Park Methodist Church, where my father met my mother when he came to play basketball in the church's basement, was close enough to where my grandmother could take meals to church potlucks. They got married there. I was baptised there.
Even after selling that house and moving to Grandmont/Rosedale Park in one of the last houses he built, my grandfather could send his 10-year-old grandson to the butcher shop or the drug store on the corner of Schoolcraft to buy the Free Press or the News or that night's dinner.
But white flight had already started well before the 1967 riots. Then expressways cut through neighborhoods (including the house my mother grew up in) and cut off the lifeblood that kept neighborhood businesses alive. Unlike other big midwestern cities that have undergone gentrification, Detroit's rich just kept going farther north and west because land was available and cheap, and they could commute to GM or Ford without having to live nearby.
Gwen and I went back in May -- for the first time in at least a decade -- and I was thankful that house and neighborhood looks great compared to much of the rest of the city. The butcher and drug stores are boarded up, and most of the rest of the businesses on Schoolcraft have disappeared. We had lunch at a Taco Bell with bulletproof glass surrounding the counter and work area. I was probably more concerned with getting food poisoning than being mugged, to be honest.
And that's the biggest Catch-22 for Detroit's long-term future. You've got all this empty land for construction but no infrastructure to support it. There are no Meijer's or Kroger's or Walmart or Target south of Eight Mile. Nobody's going to build houses without a grocery store but nobody's going to build a grocery store without houses.
There's a wonderul resurgence downtown. But I don't know how Detroit ever solves the issue of the emptiness between there and the suburbs. The bridge will bring more cars and trucks but they will whiz right through town on their way to somewhere else.
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