Pictures of Old Detroit & Homes

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Thanks for posting that Laundress. Being from Detroit I always have a soft spot for pictures of a time gone by. My family has a long history in the Detroit area, having come over from Canada illegally in 1890 when the Detroit river was frozen. My great grandparents settled 'downriver" in River Rouge, simply known as "the rouge" and worked at all the various mills and car plants, including the Ford plant. My grand father was the Fire Chief in Ecorse for many many years. That picture of the shoppers waiting for the street car could have been my grandmother and mom as they loved going downtown to shop at Hudsons. It still amazes me how little some parts of that town has changed. You can go a block or two (if you dare) off of Fort street and still see the mansions and old buildings, sadly, most are falling apart or burned out.
 
Longish reply.....

Great photos of a once great city...it's a shame what has happened to Detroit. When I attended Wayne State University, I enjoyed the Detroit Institute of Arts and Detroit Library. My parents often said how beautiful Highland Park was - it was the upscale city to live in , once. By the time I was in college in the late 60's, Highland Park was a place you wanted to avoid. Thanks for posting. Here's a couple my friend sent me, coincidentally tonight too (seems like Detroit is the subject today)- broke my heart to see a Detroit Library Branch..but the photos you posted are great reminders....

ovrphil++12-4-2013-20-57-25.jpg
 
I have lots of fond memories of BobLo Island as a kid. It was disheartening to hear that it closed down. From what I read it's gone condo now or something. The island is actually in Canada and there were Boblo ferries from Detroit and Windsor packed all summer. The old Hudsons store was fun too, gigantic store must have been 15 floors or more of elevators and escalators to play on and they had the best toyland at Christmas.
There's really not much left downtown anymore other than office towers and casinos.Pretty much all the stores have gone.

Back then I94 didn't go as far as Port Huron and Gratiot Rd was the 2 lane highway. It becomes Gratiot Ave when it gets to the northern burbs into downtown. I took a drive along it this past summer from Marysville for old times sake I guess. It's still pretty country 2 lanes mostly until you hit 23 mi road and the endless shopping centers begin
 
A couple of nights ago PBS Detroit was running a pledge drive showing all the old Detroit TV shows from the 50's and early 60's.. All the ones I grew up with since they were the only stations we got. Johnny Ginger, Sagebrush Shorty, Soupy Sales, Poopdeck Paul, Jungle-la with Bwana Don and his chimp Bongo Bailey and maybe my favorite Milkys Party Time.
 
Laundress, thanks for the cool link. We lived in Fenton and my Dad worked in Flint at Chevrolet for many years. Both of these cities were thriving pleasant communities. It is a sad thing to see when Major employers pick up and leave a community.
alr
 
I lived in Trenton, MI from 1982-1991. My mother worked in the city, but we rarely went there. I always wanted to go see places, but was ignored. I did manage to go to a few movies at the Fox, shortly after the renovation.

The problem with Detroit is the same problem with nearly every midwestern city. The cities were built for manufacturing and to support the workers doing so. The manufacturing is gone, so the workers are gone also.

I can point to the same type pictures for St. Louis. It's sad and pisses me off every time I leave the house.
 
Always good to hear what Detroit is like from people viewing from the interwebs.

Auto manufacturing is still alive and well... in Southeastern Michigan. It left Detroit decades ago when corrupt government officials couldn't even provide basic services. The difference between city and even NEIGHBORING suburbs is incredible. You can literally throw a rock from scary areas of burned-out homes into beautiful suburban neighborhoods. Most manufacturing is in Warren, Sterling Heights, Auburn Hills and other suburbs.

Here's how bright the city elders were/are... If you live in Detroit proper, you pay a 3% income tax (in addition to property taxes) and receive horrible services. What a great way to encourage working people to leave (regardless of the bogus race arguments). In the burbs, you pay nothing. This left the city with residents who either didn't have jobs, or didn't have legal jobs. Then the schools went to hell as kids were bussed across town from decent neighborhoods to ghetto education prisons. More families left, leaving fewer stable neighborhoods. In 2001, the state supreme court ruled that cities (Detroit) could no longer force employees (cops/firemen) to live within the city. That cleared out the last few patches of decent neighborhoods, (often called "copper canyons") just in time for a new corrupt mayor.

Of course the income tax isn't the only way Detroit committed suicide, but it's an example. The '67 riots put the move out of the city into high gear. Detroit is almost all private homes, few apartments. That means that even as a "city" it's very spread out and that's the real reason public transport doesn't work... No conspiracies needed. It also makes it hard to do any large scale redevelopment because there is usually one occupied house on any given burned out block.

True, Chrysler and GM have a few modern factories within the city proper, (Ford never was in the city) but almost none of the workers live in the city. No one wants any part of it, except for a few hipsters in downtown lofts. Detroit's government officials were by then nothing more than race-pimps who thought they could convince "their people" to stay in the city by calling them "traitors" for leaving. By 2010, they'd left too leaving behind almost no one who is a productive member of society.

Now there is a bankruptcy which will have the very unfortunate side effect of ruining the retirements of people (mostly cops/firemen) who served the city in the darkest days of the 70s-90s. The only upside is that the city politicians are now powerless, and the state will effectively run the city for several years going forward.
 
Dave,

GM's Hamtramck Plant (Hamtramck is a city entirely surrounded by Detroit, as is Highland Park) is what I had in mind when I mentioned them as having some Detroit operations along with Chrysler. The GM Hamtramck plant was built on the grounds of Chrysler's old Dodge Main factory (and a few Hamtramck neighborhoods) in 1981. It began producing GM's downsized 80s Cadillacs that were never very popular, but eventually moved onto the better received Seville/STS platforms. It now builds the Volt hybrid, and some overflow production of the Malibu I believe.

The 94-year-old GM/Chevrolet axle plant in Hamtramck was sold to a new company called American Axle. The owner Richard "dick" Dauch bought the plant in 1994, and made quite a fortune, allowing him to build a new plant in Michigan, then Mexico. The Hamtramck workers took a roughly 40% pay cut in 2008, then Dauch demanded cuts from $18 to $11 per hour. That was the end, and the plant closed. It's scheduled to be demolished. Dauch is dead now, and most people like it that way.

Chrysler left Highland Park as its engineering headquarters beginning in 1991 and completed the move to Auburn Hills (30 miles north on I-75) by 1994. One of the reasons was that the surrounding HP neighborhood was so unsafe it was becoming impossible to recruit engineering talent. This was the same reason Chrysler's Jeep/Truck engineering left Detroit around 2007.

One of the things that always astounds me as both a student & participant in Detroit & Automotive history (as well as an elected suburban politician!) is that as much as you might expect Detroit (and Hamtramck/Highland Park) city government to kiss the asses of its MAJOR automotive tax payers; it's almost the exact opposite. These big manufacturing/engineering centers are hugely capital intensive, so moves aren't done lightly. As a local government, you have to screw-up for a very long time, in very bad ways to convince them to move... It's not like leaving your 1000 sq. foot bungalow.

The remaining auto plants are like mini cities within the city, with their own powerhouses, water treatment plants, security, etc. On three shifts they might employ 5,000 people who make (and spend) a great deal of money. Rather than marshalling resources around them... Police presence, code enforcement, new development, etc. the leaders of the city of Detroit (one Mayor, from '74-'94) instead pursued get-rich-quick schemes for casinos and mass-transit boondoggles downtown and along the riverfront throughout the 80s and 2000s. I suppose new development in these areas offered the best opportunities for graft; as opposed to simply protecting what already existed.

I work at a very small facility which is "technically" within the city of Detroit, but is literally a few hundred feet from a suburban border. We moved our operations from another Detroit facility. Our former plant was completely rebuilt at a cost of several hundred million dollars, and re-purposed into an engine plant. GM & Chrysler have moved many things from Detroit, but they have also re-invested many times over. When we moved in 1996, our surrounding neighborhood was one of the aforementioned "copper canyons" of Detroit police/fire/DPW workers. As a result, the neighborhood was still quite attractive, safe and readily mortgagable. Since I didn't need the schools as a single man back then, it would have been reasonable for me to even consider buying a 1950s-brick home nearby, but a 3% additional income tax for then-marginal city services was not encouraging.

When city workers were allowed to reside elsewhere in 2001, changes in the neighborhood which had been slow, began to accelerate like someone added gasoline to a fire (pardon the pun). Suddenly you began to see stolen cars dumped on the streets. At first they would be towed away within a day. Then they began to sit for weeks. Eventually they'd sit until they were set on fire for "fun" by the newest residents in the neighborhoods. Services went from marginal to non-existent. Trash used to be seen only on the day before pick up. Now it was "socially acceptable" to throw your old couch out in front a week before pickup. When Detroit cut its large item trash collection from weekly to monthly (to save $$), couches and other garbage began to sit on lawns for a month. Many of the newest homeowners came from government housing projects and had no experience with strange ideas like cutting the grass or fixing a downed piece of siding. With so much overgrown grass and garbage (and rats under the piles) people stopped using sidewalks and walked en mass in the streets; defying cars to go around them. Laws about business signage we ignored. First it was mild violations like covering the windows with liquor and cigarette ads, then it was painting the entire building neon-pink to attract attention. When that provided inadequate, the business was burned for the insurance money.

Now this neighborhood which would have been might have been seen as "a little quirky, but safe" for me to move into circa 1996 looks like zombie-land in 2013. I drive in with high-beams on because none of the street lights work. For some reason, there are more people walking in the streets at 4:30 AM than 6 AM (my start time is flexible). Some of the houses have been burned, probably to squeeze out those last few dollars of insurance money. The burned houses become even larger dumping grounds for old tires, (appliances!) furniture, etc.

This could have been stopped cold in 1996 had Detroit leadership had the brains to say "Hey, there's a Chrysler facility with 150 well-paid workers in the area of Van Dyke/Outer Drive; let's tighten up on code enforcement, forfeiture, and police patrols. Let's ticket people who dump couches on their lawns and don't cut the grass. If they don't pay their tax bills, we take the damn house. Let's run police cars up and down Conner Avenue so often nobody would dare dump a stolen car. Make sure the DPW keeps the street lights on, etc. etc." After all, by 1996 older, wider swaths of the city had already fallen into ruin. Most of the area I work in was built in the 50s/early 60s, just like the surrounding and stable suburbs.

Now my facility has the same attractive mid-century-modern (built 1966) facade and trimmed green lawn & trees it did in 1996; but it's surrounded by a 6' wrought iron fence because they were tired of replacing computers from broken office windows and having cars stolen from the lot. How much longer do we put up with this?

Detroit's mayor and council attitude towards their major employers was the same one they gave their middle-class African-American constituents... "Hehe, they'll never leave!" Well I'd say the joke was on them; except the worst political offenders are either dead by now, or in jail.

This is a viewpoint you're not likely to hear in the mainstream media because speaking poorly of Detroit's post-'67 riot politicians is not considered "politically correct". Ironically, it IS politically correct to blame manufacturing; who although they have moved in some cases, the remaining factories are generally islands of cut green lawns and maintenance in a land of jungle-like grasslands and burned structures. Of course, nice buildings aren't as interesting to look at as long-abandoned car factories, so there is a perception that there is "nothing" left in Detroit. The truth is it is very bad, but there are salvageable areas. I'm no fan of our current state government, but with the collapse of the utterly criminal Detroit political structure's power, I am hopeful that some (besides the largest industrial companies) will be willing to again consider investment in Detroit.
 
From What One Has Gathered

By watching and reading all the "Detroit problems" programming and articles recently one huge issue is how the city is laid out. In places like NYC you have areas zoned for manufacturing, residential, commercial, etc.. which makes it easier on so many levels including providing services unique to each community. Detroit expanded and is laid out in such a way to be one hot mess.

Also had no idea the "heyday" of Detroit was rather very short. The place grew up around manufacturing around WWI, increased during and after WWII then began to decline in the 1960's and feel off a cliff by the 1980's or so.

Shocking thing is that just across the water in Canada is a city that went through a bad patch but turned itself around and is very nice for work and living.
 
There was a documentary on PBS not to long ago called "What Happened To Detroit And How It Got That Way". It pretty much parallels what you are saying Carmine. I have to say that since DTW was a hub of ours, I never spent any time at all in Detroit, only in the hotels in Romulus.
 
I suppose what happened was pretty much what happens to any city when you pull its life-blood manufacturing industry out of it.

Detroit's just a more dramatic example than most as there wasn't really any alternative to replace it, unlike many other cities of similar scale because the motor industry was just such a huge employer and there wasn't really a lot else going on that wasn't directly connected to it.

There were similar situations (although not nearly as dramatic) in some of the cities in the North of England in particular when they lost key manufacturing jobs (especially motor industry and steel etc) although, I think they've recovered a lot more effectively than Detroit has due to heavy intervention to incentivise companies to come in.

That can be quite difficult without major pools of workers who can fill jobs in the kinds of sectors that create them these days like IT and finance.

It's a shame that Detroit ended up in such a mess though as it really was one of the US' grand old cities of the first half of the 20th century and it has such a deep cultural history around Motown music.

It still has a lot of the classic architecture and layout that should mean that it could be transformed into somewhere really great again, but it's going to take a long time I think as at the moment its reputation for crime and violence is really not a good selling point and it's really gone beyond the tipping point at which you see cities starting to get into a vicious cycle where job losses cause poverty and reduce opportunities for the next generation. Crime etc goes up and you frighten off inward investment.
It happens in Europe too, but I think sometimes we are able to lash more state investment in through things like access to university education and stuff like that which can bring places out of the abyss a bit more effectively (although it doesn't always work).

I suppose, it's a case study in why cities need to have a diverse base of industries and not end up being a 'one trick pony' as if your major industry fails or deserts you, you're in BIG trouble.

I wonder though, as barriers to trade are removed will we see most car manufacturing disappearing out of North America, Europe and even Japan entirely?
I could see a lot of car makers seeing places like China as much more cost-effective to build cars in just like electronics and appliance makers have gone already.

From what I can see the main thing keeping car makers in place in Europe is political intervention.[this post was last edited: 12/8/2013-10:02]
 
I've had a slightly different experience than Carmine (are you at the Connor facility)? I work for GM at the Renaissance Center (headquarters), and was recruited to move up here from Atlanta where I worked for Cingular Wireless in 2005. I joined GM right as things were starting to slide downhill (the day before I was asked to switch from contract to direct-hire they announced layoff of 40,000 people). That said, it's great working in the city downtown. I wish the Renaissance Center were more centrally located (it's on the edge of downtown at the riverfront, so that it's about a 10 minute walk to the heart of downtown for lunch etc), but it's a nice facility. The progress on the riverfront has been amazing (originally there was no entry from the Ren Cen to the riverfront--it was set up as a bunker). I have been commuting downtown daily since, and have had no crime or other bad things happen (I did have a smash and grab a couple miles north of our house in a parking garage--I'd left a gift bag on the car seat--oops, that was stupid). Anyway, we live just beyond the city limits in Pleasant Ridge (10th gayest city in the country--according to the Census Bureau) which would be classified as an inner-ring suburb. I could easily take the bus to work every day (3 express buses an hour each direction during rush hours between downtown and 16 mile road), but don't because we have free parking (the big 3's car-friendly policies do distort commuting patterns severely). Yes, the city is bad, but there is definite improvement (there are 10s of thousands more jobs in downtown than there were before; although there has been a pull of many of these jobs from the suburbs by Blue Cross-Blue Shield and Quicken Loans).

That said, there is an energy around here which is palpable. The hope is that it can move from downtown/midtown (where Carmine speaks of the hipsters, it's that plus more--people wanting a less-sprawling lifestyle at all stages of their lives). The residential/settlement patterns of the city are decidedly low-density and resolutely middle-class (single family homes, not terribly well constructed) which exacerbates the blight (and is an interesting harbinger to what is going to happen in the sunbelt cities which sprawled in the 1980s/1990s with their acres of vinyl siding and HardiPlank). The depopulation of Detroit was starting 15 years before the 1967 riots (there is some excellent scholarship on that topic available).

Detroit is a really interesting case of America and capitalism, warts and all. I never fail to impress people new to the area just driving them on my commute and deviating by 1/4 mile to see the contrasts (Carmine--I drive Woodward to McNichols to I-75...imagine tooling through Palmer Woods and Highland Park).
 
Yeah, it's certainly an interesting city from a historical point of view. I actually have some direct connections to the place myself.

One of my ancestors started their life in Detroit, built their career there and then moved to New York when the city started to decline where she married an Irish guy and ended up spending the rest of her days in Ireland (well they were over and back between NYC and Dublin for years).

So, I guess I've a little bit of Motown in my genes!

Hopefully Detroit eventually finds its feet again. I think part of the problem now is that it's self-perpetuating because when it really fell dramatically off a cliff in the 1980s it also caused a 'brain drain' where a lot of people who had the qualifications or skills to create new businesses or work in businesses that might move in to the area have gone elsewhere.

I think though it does very much underline why you need a mixed economy with lots of different industries. If you're a one trick pony, your town can go from boom to bust incredibly quickly.

These days, people, businesses and capital are even more mobile than ever before, so I think it's going to be a case of 'boxing clever'. The places that are retaining some degree of success are the places that are able to move with the ebb and flow of business. If you're stuck with a big blue collar industry like the car manufacturing industries Detroit was built on, there's always a risk the rug can be pulled straight out from under you.

It's just the sad reality of how the modern world works. European countries tend to cushion it a bit with social welfare systems and abilities to up skill and retrain people when it does happen, but I think we're all going to have to move much more towards that model because as Detroit shows, a job for life's an unusual thing these days.

To me Detroit stands there as a rather tragic lesson in how not to do economics and governance.

--

It worries me that you're seeing other cities doing the same thing with other sectors for example, London and New York are entirely built around the Financial Services Sector. If something were to change that whipped that particular business model out from under them like a major disruptive technology that bypassed the banks and trading houses or some kind of a move away from big financial centres, those kinds of places could be New Detroit!

Although, the more likely New Detroits are going to be in China as the manufacturing industries move on to even cheaper destinations as Chinese incomes are now climbing rapidly.
 
Perhaps I didn't communicate this effectively... There is a perception (and I think some people want it that way) of "Oh well, manufacturing is dead. Detroit is F'ed because all they do is cars."

Au contraire mon frere, Michigan's recovery since 2008 has been called the second best in the nation BECAUSE of the auto industry...

http://www.businessweek.com/news/20...48-states-shows-autos-drive-u-s-recovery.html

I've seen several other studies that rank us consistently in the top 5. The point of my earlier post was to show that Michigan is not Detroit; Detroit is not the auto industry. Detroit's "civic leaders" throughout the 70s-90s famously thought that the suburbs couldn't survive without the city's core. Not only were they completely wrong, but the suburbs are now paying the bills that keep many Detroit-City municipal and cultural institutions alive. The water department serves 130 suburban communities. The Detroit Institute of the Arts, The Zoo, and now Belle Isle state park are funded with out-of-city dollars. On the private side, Fox theater, baseball/football/hockey stadiums and COBO hall would all be failures without suburban dollars.

In fact, GM's purchase of the Renaissance Center in 1996 was a huge gift to the city of Detroit, because the 5-towers consistently low-occupancy rates meant it was a huge failure. Ironically, the 77-story Renaissance Center was constructed/financed by Ford Motor Co. Construction, (another gift, because no one else would invest in the city) which began in 1971, was supposed to symbolize a "renaissance" of the city proper after the 1967 riots.

GM spent $500 million renovating the space. Had they wish to "go suburban", they easily could have, as they owned all the land from 12-13 mile roads on the west side of Mound Road. This in fact was the original 1955 plan... GM's tech center would be east, and a new HQ would be built to the west, thus taking them out of Detroit almost entirely. But they didn't leave, and they GAVE their historic Albert Kahn-designed HQ for $1. It now houses 2000 state workers (my mother among them until her retirement).

Granted, their have been tax-breaks (I've voted to grant them in my own city) but off the top of my head, I can think of 5 MAJOR (as in multiple hundreds of million dollar) investments that GM/Chrysler have made withing the city since 1980 at times when no other private investor would build so much as a supermarket within the city proper. (There have been only two major supermarkets added to the city in the past 3-years. Prior to that, I can only think of one built in the previous 30-years, which failed... Astounding when you consider the size of the city.)

Detroit's leadership failed DESPITE having a number of generous taxpaying manufacturers. They did zero to retain or earn new investment. City's like Warren, Sterling Heights, Auburn Hills, and older communities like Dearborn are FAR MORE dependent on the auto industry than Detroit which has Wayne State Unversity, several teaching hospitals, Compuware, Rock Financial, etc. Yet these suburban communities remain safe and desirable.

The pockets of new growth downtown are coming from those who knew were betting city would soon be run by an emergency manager (as it is now) and that bankruptcy would leave their council and mayor powerless, (as it is now).

If people in the mold of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick,

http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/201...c-corruption-inside-the-kwame-kilpatrick-case

Councilwoman Monica Conyers,

http://www.examiner.com/article/det...nica-conyers-blunders-are-great-entertainment

Councilman Charles Pugh,

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2013/09/disappearing_ex-detroit_counci.html

...still had any power within the city, there would be no chance for a rebirth.

They failed their constituents. They failed Detroit. An entire generation of post '67 riot politicians started the failure/corruption-ball rolling before some of them were born.
 
New York City & Financial Sector

While yes, it is true "Wall Street" still does play a major role in both NYS and NYC finances, the City at least has been working under the Bloomberg administration and even before to diversify and bring other good to high paying sources of employment.

NYC for instance has an aggressive film/media industry program.

Bloomberg (not surprising) has also been pushing the past few years to make New York City the "Silicon Valley" on the Hudson. Google and other major tech companies have major offices here and there is a push to expand. Cornell or some large college is building a tech campus on an East River island. Indeed according to latest numbers the tech sector in NYC is just behind Wall Street in terms of importance to the City's economy.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/30/4...mmit-study-says-new-york-city-tech-is-booming

Financial services in NYC have been shrinking since the meltdown several years ago when Lehman Bros and others bit the dust. Yes, there are still high paying jobs to be had but the sector is shrinking and will continue to do so as Wall Street adjusts to the Dodd-Frank Act and other parts of the new reality of the US banking/credit system.

Wall Street today is more and more a residential district than anything else. Office buildings one remembers from one's brokerage assistant days are now condos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_in_New_York_City
 
Jamiel,

Yes, I do work at Conner. Have been a few other places in my career at Chrysler inluding a few years in Arizona!
 
@laundress

The UK's financial services sector's probably a little oversized to put it mildly in terms of its importance to the British economy.

The financial service sector now accounts for about 9.6% of UK GDP directly vs about 7.9% of US GDP for the US sector.

Ours is pretty high here in Ireland too with about 7.2% of GDP coming from the IFSC (International Financial Service Centre) .. a single cluster of companies in Dublin!
 
I was showing these pictures to my dad and he started to talk about visiting his cousin, Betty, in Detroit in 1958.
He remembered the address and I Googled it. You can take a virtual tour both inside and outside.
The house sold in 2006 for $54,000. It was sold again in 2010 for $67,149. It was sold again in 2012 for $3,101. Yikes! Can you imagine being retired and your life savings were poured into your house? Betty, moved probably 10 years ago
The address is 5300 Radnor Detroit, Michigan.

rpms++12-9-2013-14-32-25.jpg
 

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