WSU's Jerry Herron Detroit Essay

Go here for a very interesting essay [[Part 1) by Dean Herron:
http://places.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=13778

"It was a city once, that’s clear, or at least Detroit seems to have been a city, given the physical evidence left behind in maybe the most moved-out-of metropolis ever settled and then evacuated by Americans — houses and factories, theaters and schools, streets and whole neighborhoods now walked away from on so spectacular a scale that you can’t fault other people when they register amazement. “It is a remarkable city,” Rebeca Solnit wrote in Harper’s, “one in which the clock seems to be running backward as its buildings disappear and its population and economy decline.” Her wonderment is precisely rendered, if not precisely news"

This is a great read. Very well written.

Very well written...worth downloading and/or fowarding to others who might be interested.

Thanks for sharing this. I've reposted it and saved it for future reference. What an amazing essay. Dr. Herron was in the English department when I was a master's student; now, I believe he's over in the Honors College. It's too bad this can't be published in a national or international magazine like Harper's or The Atlantic Monthly -- he puts a spin on it that no helicoptering-in reporter from the outside could. One needs historical and sociological knowledge to explain the Detroit conundrum.

A really good piece of writing and of course he is right about the mindset of consumption and entertainment that creates this. I like that he mentions the pride of toughness that is worn like a badge.

I just read this bit by Karen Dybis in Time's Detroit Blog;

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Sad, but true. My husband and I were thinking of renovating our home; now, we're looking at maybe moving instead. Our home is worth little, but those big, previously unattainable homes are suddenly within our price range. Time will tell what will happen.

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Read more: http://detroit.blogs.time.com/2010/0...#ixzz0tIz5cPKD

So I have to disagree with you English that one needs to be from Detroit in order to posit an opinion on how things are in the city. The author quotes some pretty astute observations by De Tocqueville as a starting point and elaborates. In contrast, Karen Dybis didnt just descend on Detroit, but her need to move to something bigger and leave her worthless house behind is a deliberate attempt to
extend the myopia...

I think Detroit needs all the help it can get. The good doctor may be in the next town over.

Here is another pearl in Time's Detroitblog by Karen Dybis. It is oddly refreshing how she relates the need to care for Detroit proper. It is as if she were looking at the Titanic's bow lift to sink and realizing an hour and a half into it, holding the rail at the stern; that she might perish.

This is what a lot of people warn about on this forum. The inability to conjugate efforts on a regional basis is dragging the ship to new lows. The time for action is now. Never mind the sports pages...

http://detroit.blogs.time.com/2010/0...ncial-figures/

I like this excerpt:

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The interesting thing about this demographic rocket ride, with an ascent and descent perhaps more rapid than that of any other U.S. city, is that it suggests a kind of one-off urbanism inherent to this place, certainly, and perhaps to American city-making generally. The city — this city — was never meant to be like other cities, especially European cities, with a population achieving a certain size and density and then remaining there, for generations; Detroit was always on the way to becoming something else, with a population that no sooner peaked than it began immediately to shrink. The riot of 1967 was still almost two decades off when this ex-migration began, so that wasn’t the reason. Not that there’s a single or a simple explanation. But one thing is clear. The people who came here never intended to stay. And it is this prospect of improbable — but indicative — human behavior that has been making Detroit significant almost from the beginning.

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Explains a lot, really.

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Originally Posted by canuck

So I have to disagree with you English that one needs to be from Detroit in order to posit an opinion on how things are in the city.

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I didn't mean to imply that; I just appreciated his in-depth analysis going back hundreds of years into the city's history, which is something that the national and international press hasn't done in quite so thorough a manner. Herron's essay challenges us to remember that some of what Detroit became preceded Henry Ford and automaking, something that even residents forget.

My post wasn't meant as a knock against those who don't live in the city. After all, Sugrue doesn't live here, either, and he rocks.

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Originally Posted by canuck

So I have to disagree with you English that one needs to be from Detroit in order to posit an opinion on how things are in the city.

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Jerry Herron isn't from Detroit.

It wasn't at all obvious to me that Herron's essay had a main point, but insofar as I could identify it, it seemed to me to be that the seemingly ephemeral nature of urban Detroit is the result of causes that are not unique to Detroit but part of a universal American experience, which for historic reasons has come to its fullest flowering [[and deflowering) in Detroit.

A lot of people seem to think that Detroit is sui generis and that its experience is either not meaningful to other cities at all or that the important causes of its decline are not the systemic American ones. It is pretty clear that Herron does not agree with that.

On an unrelated note, to clarify one thing that might not be clear from the previous posts: Karen Dybis' bio says she lives in Grosse Pointe, not Detroit proper and not in Oakland County.

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Originally Posted by English

I didn't mean to imply that; I just appreciated his in-depth analysis going back hundreds of years into the city's history, which is something that the national and international press hasn't done in quite so thorough a manner. Herron's essay challenges us to remember that some of what Detroit became preceded Henry Ford and automaking, something that even residents forget.

My post wasn't meant as a knock against those who don't live in the city. After all, Sugrue doesn't live here, either, and he rocks.

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Yes, you are right about the superficial treatment the city has been given in outside media. There may be a built-in cultural component that produced the demise of Detroit. I mentioned this on a post in the On Detroityes thread yesterday. Detroit was feared by the colony in New France because Cadillac was a maverick and was a threat to commerce in Montreal and Quebec. The french colonials expressed their wish to abandon Fort Detroit many times to the king's advisor Pontchartrain. The bit about Henry Ford certainly is reflective of what we in N America have become. The ethos behind so-called development means we can demolish or abandon a thirty story office building and build a new more efficient one next to it and stick a green flag on it...
Detroit is not alone in this, it may be the flashiest exponent of this. Montreal has the olympic stadium "Big O" which cost a billion dollars in 1976. The retractable kevlar roof was changed a couple of times, and once tore apart in the wintertime because of snow during the auto show. There is a new roof solution which will cost between 2 and 300million bucks to build. This is for a stadium that is no longer used by the Expos ball team, another stadium is used for the Alouettes football team and The Impact soccer team built a new stadium next to the Big O stadium or as the local media call it: "The Big Owe". So much effort for so little gain except for the contractors...