“Writers like to write about Detroit’s demise. Photographers love to photograph it. The city’s failings have been so thoroughly and sensationally documented, journalism critics have even given the genre a name: ruin porn. And while the tale of Detroit certainly includes its decay—Rebecca Solnit’s 2007 article for Harper’s is the definitive piece on the subject—these five stories hit the full arc of the Motor City: its rise, its heyday, its fall, and its future.”
Detroit, NewMexiKen’s place of birth and home until I was 10, and again during a few summers in the 1960s. It has about 40% as many residents as it did 60 years ago.
So far I’ve read just one of the five articles listed if you follow the link, the last. It was first-rate.
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The Ford and Motown articles are among some of the best on cultural history I’ve read lately.
The Mitch Albom essay is for the Detroiters and Michiganders among you.
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I had to laugh at this from the Detroit Free Press:
MACKINAC ISLAND — “I’m tired of being ashamed of where I live,” Mark Reuss, president of General Motors North America, declared Friday.
Strong statement, that, but not an isolated concern among the 1,500 business and political leaders who gathered on Mackinac Island this week for the Detroit Regional Chamber’s annual policy conference.
So the Detroit chamber gathers to commiserate about Detroit — at a resort 250 miles away.
By “Detroit” does Mark Reuss, president of General Motors North America mean Bloomfield Township, a posh area nearby where he lives just off the Oakland Country Club North Course? From there, Devil’s Night is just another distant glow over the horizon and unemployment is something that only happens to lazy people not something that could ever happen to the guy that developed the Pontiac Aztek. One more sign that American business is as much a matter of heredity as American politics. We should just get a King, let him appoint Counts, Dukes and Earls to run everything and admit that the upper rungs of the economy are out of bounds for the rest of us.