Originally Posted by
Marsha Music
It might be hard to imagine how dense retail was on ALL of the major streets of Detroit [[unless, of course it was a street that had industrial plants). I forget, sometimes, that the younger generation knows no Detroit but the present one. My own sons grew up in the time of suburban malls, and remember little of Detroit back in the day, especially downtown.
There are NO streets that today approximate the look or feel of the most concentrated retail blocks in the city. Only Eastern Market on a crowded day maintains the pedestrian density of old retail Detroit. Jos Campau in Hamtramck still has retail, and I'm always glad about that, but it is a limited example of how retail was. One could not visit all the stores in the handful of blocks downtown in a one-day shopping trip. There were stores not only on main retail streets, but stores in the neighborhoods too - not just liquor stores either, but shops, grocers.
I was in San Francisco visiting my son and his fiancé for the first time a couple of years ago; we walked to the downtown from his house. As we turned the corner onto Market street, I was absolutely, completely, astonished at the commercial blocks that loomed before me. They were eerily like Woodward Ave., back in the day. I felt that I had walked into a time machine, or the Twilight Zone - where the Hudson's block, et al, had been preserved, and where all the mall stores were on the outside, on the streets.
That retail district of SFO is, to me, significantly, uncannily more like old Detroit than many other downtowns in the US that I have visited. Perhaps it is the age of the buildings, a similar street grid and building stock. What with all of my study and writing on Detroit, it was still unsettling and very distressing to see a version of Detroit that once was.
At one point, I was so stricken by it all, I literally burst into tears. I was overwhelmed at the sight of the tiny old Asian women - probably in their 80's - cavalierly boarding and exiting the buses and streetcars, shopping bags in hand. When I tried to explain my blathering to my son, I was thinking of my own mother who had passed two years before - it occurred to me, at that moment, that she might still be alive had she had the freedom to continue her beloved city shopping, that had ended many years before. Even though we moved her to a suburban one-story, she was never the same. For sure, I cried for my mother, but for my city as well.
[I noted, during that SFO trip, the street cars - some of which, I understand - were literally delivered to SFO from Detroit, once we abandoned that form of public transportation.]
I went this weekend to the Somerset CityLoft block, where there were only a few actual stores open, but surprisingly many lights, a Christmas ambiance, and a few folks walking around [[other than panhandlers). There were even carolers, bless their hearts. Even so, it was a shadow of what was, yet a sign of possibilities to come; there is a sign posted in the windows, "Detroit Never Gives Up".