The Detroit Spectator/Forget the Motor City
Irvine, William
THE DETROIT SPECTATOR FORGET THE MOTOR CITY A t lunch with a Michigander of no small erudition, I heard about the antics of the Princess Mdivani in Hong Kong in the 1950s. We sat under a canvas...
...And talk about access...
...Mayor Young is a master of racist rhetoric and he makes no bones about his contempt for the white suburbs, whose residents he considers traitors to Detroit...
...The venerable Hudson's department store, a holdout, closed in the early 1980s...
...It gives one pause to think about Mayor Young's interest in bringing casino gambling here (he has twice been defeated...
...But nothing has created a bigger stir than an amateur videotape—played with Rodney Kinglike regularity on the local news—of a gang of black women attacking some white suburban ladies in a downtown parking lot as a group of spectators looked on...
...The Detroit Institute of Arts is perhaps the last diamond in the city's pawned necklace, a superb museum in a city with an evaporated base of private philanthropy...
...Officers have been indicted for escorting drugs and cash around town in Detroit police cars...
...There is the famous recording studio (untouched), and a rag-tag collection of Motown artists' album covers tacked to the walls, and a collection of archival photographs that includes a fetching shot of Ted and Joan Kennedy with the Temptations...
...The Detroit police evinced little interest in the case...
...It is certainly not surprising that, outside the precincts of the Terminatoresque Renaissance Center and the office buildings of the Big Three (connected by glass-enclosed walkways so you never have to go outside), the downtown renaissance is considered an oxymoron...
...Ican c state with unqualified conviction that of all the American mayors with illegitimate six-year-old children, Coleman Young leads the field...
...The grid plan in parts of downtown is now merely a formality, as acres of land have reverted to garbage-strewn pasture, dotted occasionally with a hulking Second Empire-style corpse...
...In an effort to beat future arsonists to the punch, the city has been razing hundreds of buildings a year...
...While Michael Jackson donated $125,000 to the place, I'll be damned if I can guess what it was spent on...
...The bile runs both ways, of course...
...Only half the galleries are open at any given time and the exhibition schedule is now uncertain at best...
...In fact, one officer allegedly told one of the victims to "get out of my face...
...When the by William Irvine chief of police invited the ladies back for a visit to the city as his guests of honor, he was informed that they did not plan to make a visit anytime soon...
...It was the source of some mysterious odors, which were evidently detectable only to out-of-towners: "I guess I've just gotten used to it," sighed my host...
...Comparisons with Nashville are cruel, but apt...
...I, alas, was in Detroit...
...half a million titles...
...How curious that a place of such significance in the history of American music is not more revered (and funded) in its own city...
...Drunks, toothless courtesans (some with rather rakish hats), and crack aficionados of all shapes and sizes lallygag the day away in beat-up upholstered chairs dragged out onto the sidewalks...
...Most legitimate businesses are owned by the enterprising Chaldean who, like the Korean grocers of Bedford-Stuyvesant, are the object of much resentment in the inner city...
...It would appear that few of Motown's beneficiaries have taken this to heart, which is a shame...
...The chestnut-paneled London Chop House, a city monument that often saw the likes of Henry Ford 2d and Aretha Franklin, died this June...
...This unique example of civic/private cooperation has been a smashing success: a mere stone's throw from the GM Building are the mansions of nineteenth-century grandees, stripped and abandoned...
...The Youngdictatorship enters its fifth term plagued by scandal...
...plan to spend the day...
...One upstairs room features Michael's glittering glove in a floor-to-ceiling glass case...
...Fellini would have been in heaven...
...It has my idea of what used-bookstore heaven must be in the form of John King & Co...
...In the Motor City, locals boast about how long it has been since they were downtown, and the excuses have gotten easier to make since 1967...
...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991...
...Yet we were looking out not at the Pacific but at an abandoned ten-story factory, its guts hanging out and stripped of plumbing, nested in waist-high rubble...
...If I had to categorize the kind of felWilliam Irvine is author of the forthcoming If I Had a Hi-Fi (Dell/Laurel...
...This sort of behavior is far from unusual...
...Detroit has some wonderful Greek food...
...As starchy waiters scurried back and forth, peppering the Caesar salads of the puffy, soigne couples surrounding us, I felt for a fleeting moment what it must be like to take a poolside meeting in Bel-Air...
...We sat under a canvas umbrella on a manicured lawn fronting the turbid Detroit River...
...But that, aside from the shag carpeting, is it...
...But on a chilly, windswept Saturday, as you watch Detroit's $200 million People Mover snake its way through the deserted streets, it's hard not to think of it as a monorail to nowhere...
...The Michigan Historic Marker in front of Hitsville, U.S.A., the modest birthplace of Motown records, observes that the company "provided opportunity for Detroit's inner-city youth to reach their full potential and become super stars...
...William Hart, the chief of police, is indicted for stealing $2.6 million...
...Young was incensed when the gang leader was sentenced to a prison term of less than a year, calling it unnecessarily harsh...
...Cruising down Woodward Avenue, once the grandest of downtown streets, a boulevard that would make Baron Haussmann gasp, the casualties of past Devil's Nights—the annual Halloween eve arson festivals during which inner city gangs set fire to slum dwellings—display their battle scars...
...The state, which pays more than half of the museum budget of $26 million, has frozen all payments in the wake of its $1 billion deficit...
...Society's detritus tumble like bruised apples through the city streets...
...The mayor's niece, Cathy VolsanCurry, recently arranged police protection for undercover FBI agents posing as cocaine dealers...
...low who lives downtown, based on the local businesses which appear to flourish, I'd say he likes to drink (a lot), enjoys taking in some topless dancing, and eats only Coney Island dogs...
Vol. 24 • December 1991 • No. 12
