Having grown up in the Cass Corridor, I often heard the legend that Detroit's leaders had set up that neighborhood to be a slum, and that city leaders didn't care about the crime there because the area was meant to be the red light district.
When I was a kid I believed the legend, but as I got older I dismissed it as "just street talk." But when I recently researched the matter for a book I'm writing, and it turns out the legend was true.
Here's what I found in the newspaper clippings:
Detroit's old Skid Row was a stretch of several blocks along Michigan Ave., roughly between downtown and Tiger Stadium. It had always been a source of concern for the city's leaders.
In the mid-1950s the city announced plans to tear down Skid Row, although it would be several years before the demolition actually began. City planners wanted the area razed to make way for “International Village,” an ambitious development plan which was to feature shops and restaurants representing different nationalities.
The City Council fretted endlessly about what to do with the riffraff who would be displaced after Skid Row was gone. The politicians wanted to contain the winos, prostitutes, drug addicts and other undesirables to one community, rather than having them scatter throughout the city. They discussed several potential dumping grounds, finally settling on an area north of downtown known as “Jumbo Road,” which at the time was near Third and Selden.
[[By the way, I contacted Cindy, the current owner of Jumbo's Bar, and the daughter of "Jumbo," who owned the bar for many years. I wondered whether Jumbo got his nickname because of the area in which he opened his bar, or vice versa. She wasn't sure, although she pointed out that her dad was a small man, which would make sense, I guess, in the odd way nicknames sometimes are bestowed. At any rate, that area once was called Jumbo Road.)
Just before the old Skid Row was to be demolished, the city councilmen set about transforming Jumbo Road into the Cass Corridor like a gang of bureaucratic Dr. Frankensteins. To lure the Skid Row residents, they voted to convert an old hotel on Brainard into a city-funded homeless shelter. They urged other social service agencies to move to the neighborhood. Blight laws limiting the number of pawn shops, motels and bars allowed in a given area were relaxed in that part of town.
Prior to this intervention, the Cass Corridor/Jumbo Road was a decent middle-class neighborhood. The residents understandably didn't want their community turned into a human dumping ground, and they launched protests against the city's plans. But their concerns could not stop the machine.
Police eventually stopped patrolling Jumbo Road in any meaningful way. After all, the city’s leaders wanted the neighborhood to be a place where vice flourished, so while there were a few gung-ho cops around [[like Bando), they generally weren’t concerned with what went on there. I know of a cop in the 1970s whose bosses told her, point-blank, to stop busting prostitutes and dope dealers.
So, in the early '60s old Skid Row was leveled. The pie-in-the-sky “International Village” scheme never got off the ground — but the herding of the city’s unwanted into one isolated community was a smashing success. The Cass Corridor was born.
How's that for a social engineering project? The city manufactured a red light district out of whole cloth!
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