REPORT – Hard hit by the car manufacturing crisis, Michigan’s main city is both one of the most glaring symbols of America’s wounds and proof of its ingenuity to survive and reinvent itself.
Like a third of the houses in the city, this building is deteriorating in general indifference, in the heart of one of the most damaged districts around the factories. Photo credits: Eric Bouvet/Eric Bouvet
In an almost religious silence, the circle closed. Between the shed that houses the gardening tools and the truck that brought back the bulk of the vegetables harvested in the morning, the small dozen volunteers huddled around its leader. Regulars of the place or high school students officiating as part of their school curriculum, they all got up early and braved the first cold snap to come and pick the last green beans of the season, on the large hectare cultivated by Earthworks, one of Detroit’s major urban farms.
“What you did this morning is not anecdotal, advances Patrick Crouch, breaking the silence but not the contemplation of his troop. I don’t know how many kilos of vegetables we collected, but with the coming frost, they would probably have been lost. With the charisma of a spiritual leader, the director of Earthworks then tickles the activist fiber in his volunteers. “When they pick vegetables, I would like them to perceive our relationship with food, not only on a physical level but also mentally. It happens with our hands but also with our head and our heart”, explains this former sculptor, who abandoned his art without regret to settle in Detroit ten years ago. He could not have found a better place to flourish than Earthworks, whose main vocation is to provide the Capuchin Soup Kitchen, a Catholic soup kitchen that is never short of guests, in this disadvantaged neighborhood located a few kilometers to the east. downtown.
Founded in 1997, Earthworks is a pioneer in a movement of urban farms and community gardens accelerated by the crisis and of which Detroit is the national leader, with an estimate of 1,500 farms. All are part of a tradition that predates American independence. As early as the 18th century, the farms, called “ribbons” because of their elongated shape, stretched out from the river. “When the French arrived here, they found the land to be incredibly rich and they planted grapes the first year,” says Patrick Crouch. Before becoming Detroit, then Motortown – as it is called today – the city was called “Detroit” with an acute accent on the “e”, because it was a Gascon explorer, Antoine de Lamothe-Cadillac , who founded it in 1701. And if this representative of the Sun King gave his name and his coat of arms to a brand of luxury vehicles much later, it is indeed to the Gascon that we owe this sprawling city which covers 350 square kilometers. Henry Ford, like General Motors and Chrysler, the two other emblematic manufacturers, were content to ensure its prosperity two centuries later, until it became the fifth largest American city in the early 1950s.
But after the scars of the race riots at the end of the following decade, the invasion of Japanese vehicles in the 1980s shattered Detroit’s prosperity. Between 1950 – when it had nearly 1.9 million inhabitants – and 2010, the city lost half of its population. The 2008 financial crisis held the Detroiters hostage, between ruined local communities unable to meet the most basic needs and the historic bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler, saved by the Obama Administration’s plan in 2009 One of the subjects of controversy during the second debate of the presidential election, on October 16th.
If Detroit dreams of one day regaining its splendour, its face has been slashed. From the deserted center to the most upscale suburbs, it is impossible to escape the abandoned houses, degraded by time, squatters or flames#8230; Symbols of a city whose operation is now mainly based on individual initiatives, the ruins are sometimes demolished at the expense of neighbors, anxious to eradicate these warts to restore to their neighborhood a semblance of life and dignity. “We don’t have the means to restore it,” says Keltie, while the villa next to the one she lives in Cadillac Street with her husband, pastor Eric Nielsen, is being razed. A rare white couple in this African-American neighborhood, the Nielsens have tried to bring the neighborhood closer together around a community vegetable garden.
Night and day, the empty streets of Detroit accentuate the feeling of a post-apocalyptic atmosphere that sometimes goes as far as oppression. Photo credits: Eric Bouvet/Eric Bouvet
Supported by associations like Greening of Detroit – which sell the seeds for modest sums -, urban agriculture is at the heart of the daily survival of a city deserted by large retailers and which has three times fewer food shops than some of the neighboring towns. Yet even in 2010, in the ghost city’s darkest times, one of the few spots of color and prosperity was in the historic Eastern Market. An open place, on the shelves of which you can find, every Saturday, a wide and inexpensive choice of foodstuffs offered by producers in the area. In prosperity as in poverty, the Detroiters do not mess with the contents of their plate. And Phil Cooley understood it before anyone else.
In 2005, this former model left the parades in Paris, Milan or Tokyo to return home to Detroit, where his first job was to clean the toilets of the bar PJ’s Lager House. Borrowing the $40,000 that was enough for him to own an abandoned warehouse, he revamped it to launch an “ultra-hype” restaurant in Corktown, one of the city’s most deserted neighborhoods. “When he opened Slows, says PJ Ryder, current owner of PJ’s Lager House, everyone thought: but who is going to come to this neighborhood?” “He didn’t do any advertising, adds his wife Donna Terek, but it went full speed, simply thanks to word of mouth.” Around Slows, other establishments have sprung up. “I don’t think I would have bought a bar here if it wasn’t for Slows,” PJ admits
Detroit’s emblem of decay
Corktown comes back to life, but there remains the district where its majesty of darkness is enthroned: the famous Michigan Central Station, disused since 1988 and slowly rotting. With its hall covered in graffiti and eighteen imposing floors now protected from curious eyes by rolls of barbed wire, the building has become the emblem of Detroit’s decline. Its restoration is a key issue, but its owner, Matty Moroun, an octogenarian billionaire, clings to it because of the railway line to Canada that is attached to it. Owner of the toll bridge that leads to Ontario, he does not want to see it compete with the return to rail service. Along with a few other speculators clinging to decaying land and buildings, waiting for prices to rise, Matty Moroun forms a sinister cast of scorched-earth lords. “When you restore a building, you instantly find tenants,” says Phil Cooley, who has become the symbol of Detroit’s renaissance. Also in Corktown, this son of real estate agents recently opened Ponyride, in a former printing works which he has refurbished with his crazy decorator’s eye: around the bare walls and an atmosphere of urban legends, intertwine humanitarian projects like that of Veronica Scott, which pays single mothers to sew sleeping bags for the homeless. There is also a local jeans manufacturer, a recording studio, cabinet makers and a traditional printing press. The set is reminiscent of a medieval village.
Amid the rubble of the Packard Automotive Plant, one of the few industrial ruins still accessible to the public, the group Pegasus Warning is shooting a clip. Photo credits: Eric Bouvet/Eric Bouvet
Now famous, Phil Cooley is only the tip of the iceberg. In Detroit, artist-entrepreneurs seem to spring from the ashes of burnt-out homes. Co-founder of Omnicorp – a collaborative workshop for hackers – Bethany Shorb, a graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, has lived in Detroit for thirteen years. Her online store of printed ties has been thriving since she left a stable job to devote herself to it. A risk that would be insane elsewhere: “Some artists who, in New York, would be forced to combine jobs, can here be satisfied with a part-time job and devote their energy to their art, she explains. Here, life is not very expensive.” An asset for the city and for a youth teeming with ideas and desires. “I saw Detroit in decomposition, says Keenan Nielbock. But she comes back to life. The younger generation is artistic, does not worry about the car crisis and takes care of itself. Like Keenan. He learned the art of wrought iron and was inspired by the creative genius of his father Carl – child of the war, born of a GI and a German -, who deceived the expectation of orders, during the dark years , by making wind turbines with local materials and car parts recovered from landfills.
Son of a GI and a German, Carl Nielbock lives with his son Keenan to whom he teaches the art of wrought iron, while innovating. Photo credits: Eric Bouvet/Eric Bouvet
Between green energies, hacker artists and web cracks, start-ups are proliferating. Through its association with Dan Gilbert and his company Quicken Loans – which revamps derelict downtown skyscrapers and attracts business there – Detroit Venture Partners has moved into the famous Madison Building, with a space whose eccentricity recalls a search engine with planetary radiation. DVP and its creator, Josh Linkner, have been the incubator of thirteen start-ups since 2010. Between Sarah Brithinee, attractive young woman who edits your wedding video for a pittance, and Ryan Landau, who decided to return the supplies glamorous office, emerges a certain Sawyer Altman: while he does not yet have the right to vote for Mitt Romney, whom he nevertheless supports, and even less that of ordering a whiskey in one of the few bars in the center -ville, this 17-year-old high school student is the co-founder of 313 Energy, an energy drink that wanted to be resolutely local, by borrowing the telephone code of the city. “There are two ways of looking at things in Detroit, asserts Sawyer. Either we say to ourselves that we have had it in our heads and we give up, or we decide to see that there is an opportunity to be seized in this context.
In a recent poll in The Detroit News, 40% of Motortown residents plan to leave within five years. Others think like Sawyer Altman. Whether they grew up here or elsewhere, whether they came from well-off or beaten up suburbs, this wounded pride and this desire to put their city back on the map of success are bubbling in the oral, written or graphic expression of the Detroiters. Because to the suffering was added the shame of having become the symbol of the decline of the American Empire. This is why Brendan Blumentritt and Joseph O’Grady market T-shirts on which we can read: “Detroit works harder”, and which are displayed by the thousands on local chests. “When one of us succeeds in something, the whole town wins,” insists Sawyer, who donates 10 cents to the municipality for each can of 313 Energy sold. Teenagers are supposed to be selfish. But those of Detroit have grown at an accelerated rate, while their city – thought in XXL – has shrunk in the economic spin-off.
