The Queen of Corktown: The fight against 1950s Urban Renewal

[Hermod]

Who builds pothole dormers or cornices these days? No, what was lost was lost irretrievably.

Not really. You can buy yourself a few contiguous lots out by Gratiot and Seven Mile and a builder will gladly build this for you for a handsome fee.

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[Ray1936]

No one has touched on a mood that existed in the late forties, early fifties. Well, I was there, and this and a bit to do with 'urban renewal' of the time.

As 1950 approached, the future not only seemed bright, the future seemed like the only thing. After emerging from a horrible depression and an even more horrible war, the past was a thing to put behind. All thinking was on what technology lied ahead. Pick up any magazine on Google that was printed on, say, December, 1949, and you're guaranteed to find an article on "what the world will be like in 2000". It was an amazing mind set that doesn't exist today. Flying cars, color television, radar-guided automobiles, etc. was common talk then. Much of it didn't come to pass, but things that did weren't even thought of.

Anyway, the mindset extended to urban settings. All that was old had to be replaced with Frank Lloyd Wright style buildings; that's all there was to it. The Corktown industrial plan was to remove homes and replace them with small businesses, particularly small industrial facilities. Alas, much was torn down, and not all that much was re-built.

As a youngster in 1950, I'd take the streetcar down Grand River to Trumbull, then walk from there to the ball park. I used to love looking at the old Victorian homes on Trumbull. I wondered what stories they could tell [[I still do!). But the mind-set of the day was not on the past, so much was lost. I still love an old Victorian home -- although they must be monsters to paint, with all the gingerbread!

Anyway, that's my theory. I'm grateful for those who are still preserving what is left of the area. But I'll still never forget my January, 1950, issue of Popular Mechanics magazine that talked of men going to the moon.

[Detroitnerd]

A few other things about the 1950s.

In some ways, the design of cars replaced the design of architecture. A lot of architecture merely became a frame for holding cars.

Buildings were increasingly built by corporations, which were and are money-making machines employing legions of bean-counters to produce the buildings that were the most profitable. So they preferred Modernism. As Lewis Mumford once joked, "Ever see a beaux-arts factory?"

Also, whether you like the Bauhaus school or not, they opposed Hitler. And how are you going to oppose the architecture that opposed Hitler?

As James Howard Kunstler has pointed out, there were several tasteful styles developed in the first half of the 1900s that were informed by the past, and a number of styles contending for the forms of the future. And yet, in the middle of the century, you see this incredible break in continuity, as if an arrogant nation had decided to say to its past, "We don't need you anymore."

Some other friends who lived in the 1960s pointed out that most people didn't like "obsolete" buildings. Hitchcock, for instance, with "Psycho" made Second Empire almost synonymous with evil and murder, similar to the Munsters. It was the hippies who liked the Victorians, the painted ladies, and sought out older neighborhoods to live in. I think I see some of that in older Crumb cartoons too.

[EastsideAl]

In looking at the posts by Marsha Music, Detroitnerd, and Huggy Bear, I am reminded of a book I once saw in a used bookstore back when I lived in San Francisco in the 1990s. The book was from the early '60s and was titled something like "a proposal for rebuilding of San Francisco" or some such urban renewal era foolishness.

2 things about it made me laugh out loud, one was that Detroit was cited as a model for what should be done in city planning, and the other was that pictures of Victorian homes were used as the illustration of everything that wrong with 'unmodernized' San Francisco. The message of the book was essentially, 'this could be a very nice city once we get rid of all those ugly outmoded old Victorian houses... maybe it could even be as nice and modern as Detroit!'

Of course I was standing there reading the book as an exile from Detroit, where my grandmother could hardly sell her post-war east side house at any price, and had arrived in a San Francisco where many of those same 'hideous' Victorians were selling for upwards of half a million dollars [[and sell for much more than that now).

Here in Detroit we chose to destroy so much of what made this city a city, and replaced it with, yes, Lafayette Park, but much more often with huge freeways in blocks-wide trenches, grotesque housing projects, ugly dark little townhouses built around a parking lot, hulking cheaply-built cast concrete 'seniors' apartments, industrial 'parks,' barren plazas, and just plain old weed choked empty land, like the area around the Eastern Market. Or we just let beautiful neighborhoods with irreplaceable housing stock sit and die a mouldering death like Brush Park, while we alternately ignored them or dickered and dithered about what to 'do' with them.

Despite all of Huggy Bear's arguments, one thing that seems undeniable to me is that the cities and parts of cities that are doing best today are those that held on to much of their older housing stock, kept their older walkable commercial districts, and preserved their 'urbanness' and their urban fabric. And this is true from the brownstones of Brooklyn to the Victorians of San Francisco, and many other places in-between. There were a very few people like Jane Jacobs, and Ethel Claes, who fought a lonely fight against huge odds to try to save some of these places and hold on to the very things that made our cities interesting and special. I think history has pretty conclusively proven them right.