By Stuart Nulman
Montreal may be riddled with allegations of corruption within its administration, is caught in the middle of yet another bitter, divisive language battle, its streets pockmarked with potholes and its infrastructure literally crumbling; however, we can practically say to ourselves that it could be worse.
We could be living in Detroit.
For the past 40 years, Detroit has been dying a slow death. The city that gave birth to the automobile industry in America and helped spawn Ford, General Motors and Chrysler over a century ago, began to lose its dominance once Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai invaded the American market. And it got even worse once the financial crisis of 2008 happened. Many of Detroit’s residents who could afford to, fled to its numerous affluent suburbs, which led to a dramatic decrease in the city’s core population (which now counts at about 700,000); countless houses and factories were left abandoned and became easy targets for arsonists and homeless people; its many municipal services fell to neglect and indifference (what can you say about a fire department in which its firefighters wear boots with holes in them, a county morgue that has 250 unclaimed bodies, and ambulances that have an average emergency response time of 12 minutes?); and to top it all off, the ultra corrupt city administration of former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick pleaded poverty, while he and many of its councilors lived lavishly off taxpayers’ money (it sort of puts the findings of our Charbonneau Commission to shame).
So, basically, thanks to greed, neglect, indifference and a volatile economy, Detroit has transformed itself from a proud major American industrial city to a virtual ghost town.
Journalist — and Detroit native — Charlie LeDuff left his position as a staff writer for the New York Times (after a dispute with his editor over a profile he wrote about a Green Party candidate for Governor of Vermont) and returned home to work as a reporter for the less than prestigious Detroit News (where half the lights in the newsroom were turned off as a means of saving money on their electricity bill). He then made the ills of Detroit, and its tragic road to urban decline, his beat from every angle possible. The shocking end result made it to the pages of the Detroit News, and the best of that material transcended into his book “Detroit: An American Autopsy”, which is probably one of the best accounts about what caused the slow, agonizing death of a major American city.
LeDuff travelled the vast wasteland that is now downtown Detroit to get the story of the city’s sad decline not only from the political and civic point of view, but also from the people who tried their best to keep what’s left of Detroit alive, but also those who can’t afford to leave for the suburbs and have become Detroit’s forgotten victims. The stories are at times enraging, at times bizarre, but are always tragic in tone.
For example, you get to read about the meteoric rise and fall of thoroughly corrupt mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who disgustingly defines what excess is all about, and has his career come crashing down when he is on trial for the murder of a prostitute named Tamara Green (aka “Strawberry”); Johnny Lewis Redding, a relative of the late 1960s blues singer Otis Redding, whose frozen body was found in the elevator shaft of an abandoned school book and supply repository and after a lot of diligent digging through files, LeDuff found out that he was a well liked, generous man in his neighborhood; Walt Harris, a well respected Detroit fireman who tragically lost his life fighting a house fire that was deliberately set by an arsonist (sadly, many residents believe that watching a house being set on fire was a type of entertainment that was “cheaper than a movie”); and Martha Barnett, who kept the ashes of her granddaughter in the linen closet of her west side home, because she didn’t have the money to pay for her burial.
As well, LeDuff explores his family’s history as citizens of Detroit, which ends up being just as tragic as the people he chronicles in this book. This is especially so when he comes to terms with the untimely death of his sister Nicole, who was killed in an accident after a night of drinking in the Brightmoor section of the city, and goes to visit the scene of the accident for the first time in years.
And for non-residents, LeDuff gives a concise, yet highly readable account into the history of Detroit, and how it rose from its fur trade roots to its heyday as the Motor City (in which its automotive factories and assembly lines employed over 300,000 people by 1925), to the fateful day in July 1967, when officers from the Detroit police department raided an after-hours party in a Black neighborhood, and sparked one of the worst race riots in American history that forever scarred the future of Detroit.
“Detroit: An American Autopsy” is a searing, angry indictment on how the worst degree of incompetence and mismanagement can – over the course of 40 short years — forever damage a major metropolis and the solid reputation its has built over the course of 200 years. And what’s worse, how the ordinary citizen can be eternally lost in that shuffle. If Charlie LeDuff is the coroner, then his book is the damning inquest and coroner’s report wrapped into one, and his findings are not very encouraging, but painfully realistic.
This book should be required reading for any citizen or administrator of a city that’s experiencing some type of difficulty. If any major concerns that affect a city’s well being are ignored or shrugged off, they can end up being the vast wasteland that Detroit is right now … and there would be no looking back.
This review originally appeared in the March 30, 2013 edition of the West End Times.
