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Tim Jeffrey has been published in every form and has written for newspapers and magazines from time to time. He has chosen a selection here of representative pieces, including some still unpublished articles and some blog-like rants. Going Back The Triumph of Saints and Heroes Park Is Again the Place To Be Detroit News Editorial Submission GOING BACK (back to top) Timothy Jeffrey© The clearest pictures of that time, black and curled from the chemicals of my father’s basement dark room, show striped canvas awnings over sitting porches of modest two bedroom bricks and a mix of simple close-together two-story clapboard flats. High above the street arches a cathedral vault of healthy maples, elms and oaks, stippling the peaceful lawns. It is Turner Street, the early fifties, the Livernois-Puritan area. Long before the wholesale devastation set in, I lived in an idyllic, magical Detroit that in my memory still holds rich, thrumming life and promise. That is how I remember it: a photo, fixed in time. The green grocer, the butcher, the barber...a shoe repair shop, a Chinese laundry, the pharmacist - even the doctor was at the end of my block. It was my Penny Lane. But the people, the adults after the war seemed to me gray as the photographs of that place do now, under-saturated, hollowed out. Disoriented. They were beginning “normal” life for the first time in the American Century. They were young first generation, English-speaking Americans who’d won a war, and the sudden abundance encouraged them to imagine they had engineered an American economic miracle. Especially in Detroit, where we made things. But I saw ghosts all around them. Detroit had just started building cars again after stopping in 1942. People from families that had never had a high school graduate were attending college on the GI Bill. My father tells me there was “an air of elation.” People were breathing again. Especially in Detroit, the engine of the war, the cradle of the industrial revolution. No one had ever lived in this kind of world, so we were starting over, new. New inventions, new-looking buildings downtown, new conveniences in the kitchen for mother. Most people walked or took the bus, but my father bought an almost new, sleek ‘53 Ford for our family. He ran his photography business out of the house, so he was often able to play with us. One day, he told his four kids that he had found something. Had one of us dropped it? He produced a piece of paper, singed on three sides, and yellowed. There were drawn lines, a compass north. We told my father excitedly it was a map! Son of a gun, he said. You’ve got something there. That was Detroit and this...our neighborhood? Wait just one minute: our yard? By golly. He had us step it off. Father said he half remembered a story about this area being a big old body of water long ago, when pirates roamed the seas. We had to walk it off several times because we were so shook up, we were starting to confuse each other. Back by the alley fence, three feet from the neighbor’s garage, he put the shovel in. When he hit the box, we jumped ahead and dug with our hands. We pulled out an ancient-looking jewelry box. Inside, we beheld pearls, other shiny things, a pin, a broach... Father told us he and mother would save it all for us until we were old enough to take care of it all. Our backyard was ever after a hallowed, magical place. But even at four, I would climb the fence and set off down the alley in search of my real parents. I suspect this was because my parents always told me they didn’t know what to do with me, or why I wouldn’t behave - but it could have been simple inherited wanderlust: both grandfather’s had migrated here from other places, and to this day I have never stopped moving. I began back then, shadowing a rag picker who towed a rusty Radio Flyer full of recovered detritus from the years of the city’s discarded production: odd rusting implements and car parts, chip canisters, bullet casings, spoons, tins, condiment bottles with colored remnants, bits of fabric, switch covers, lead pipe, and so on. He took it all to his garage and he kept it there, and people said he made things with it. Some people, my elders said, never got over the shock of the Depression and just kept collecting - against the chance of another collapse. They had lost their ability to trust the new city’s wealth or anybody’s words. I had seen pictures of the European rabble piles and my glittering, rutted alley looked like that, so I dug for lost treasures: Barbasol cans, good rocks, liquor bottles (still containing a finger of amber liquid), knife handles. I filled my pockets with history. Still, that pall on everyone: I am told now by my parents that this is only my fanciful invention - digging for clues by planting them first. But I am well-read, and I have concluded that the sudden abundance and the optimism of that time only resurrected the differences between neighbors that had - however miserably - linked all of us in food lines, union movements and victory gardens barely a generation before. Something of that common despair saturated the very air I was breathing. Even then, I knew what the Bomb was, that it could come at any time and despoil, maybe obliterate the humming, industrious vitality that excited my senses. Someone far away could take it from me and my Detroit. Detroit would be targeted first - I’d heard the adults say so, almost proudly. The war wasn’t over; they were eternally vigilant. So I was. When they wanted to cheer each other up, they drank Stroh’s beer and made Polack and Jewish jokes that I wasn’t supposed to repeat. We Americans didn’t trust everybody, I knew, even if I didn’t know who it was I should distrust. Plainly, someone wanted to undermine us - my family, me - someone who had never agreed with us, who secretly had more and wanted us to have less. Serious men in echoing shadowed rooms speaking uncomfortably into microphones on the new invention, our television, a wooden Muntz box with a brass-rimmed porthole that gave the impression we were eavesdropping on the outer world through a private telescope. The adults around me were serious like that at times, spoke of “them” - in a lower register so I wouldn’t hear - of the Ones who would soon come and would spell the end of my neighborhood. Another war was coming... I exploded popsickle stick machine gun nests of toy soldiers in the alley, tossing rock/whistle bombs from behind bushes to simulate unerring American air assaults. The Chinese didn’t like us, they said. Jimmy (whose family ran the laundry and lived upstairs at the corner) could talk Chinese with his parents... maybe about us. The Russians were already here, too, near Michigan Avenue. For sure, the Germans were mad at us. We were Irish, and until very recently, when we became cops and then politicians, no one would let us work. My grandparents on my father’s side spoke with a Scottish brogue, and that meant they would squeeze a penny till it screamed. Adults acted nice to me, but they laughed too urgently at their jokes, I felt, for people under siege. I knew they were covering. My parents’ friend Cy, a cool “swinger” who called me “Daddy-o” and wore alpaca sweaters, chewing on a match - even Cy argued politics with my uncles so vociferously he spit a little. I associated that with Tony and Maria, the Italian neighbors who also spit unintelligible venom in their constant turmoil. It was a neighborhood: everybody knew each others’ business, but I was already noticing that right-acting people didn’t publicly acknowledge such things. Instead, everything they thought about other people came out in my living room when the adults gathered. I was trying to put this all together, to keep “a sharp look out, hep cat,” as Cy told me to do. My brother became a scout; their motto was: “Be prepared.” Sam, Charley the Barber’s colored “shoeshine boy,” chased us out and into the alley when we sneaked in through the back door of the shop to play boo through the hall curtain. But Sam didn’t laugh like the barber and the customers; we never heard him speak to the men in the chairs, who also never addressed him. Maybe he wanted to hurt us. Jimmy said he did. At church I saw bomber jackets, or those Chinese silk baseball jackets with bright colored piping - on the backs of which were stitched battalion names and wars, red dots on a lighter field cut in the shape of Korea. They weren’t like us. So, we were exploding them. * * * I ran away a lot. Exploring the alley, I would eventually be found at my uncle’s bar, under a beer truck, on the next block. My mother says they didn’t worry much because whoever found me would bring me home. Everyone was acquainted and no one would allow a child to be hurt. Maybe to reassure herself, my mother told stories of how I was safe, living in the same place my mother had been raised. Our house was still owned by “Pop” - my lanky, taciturn slightly alcoholic grandfather who I considered my childhood buddy (and would learn years later found me an unnerving, hyperactive nuisance). He had moved upstairs to give us the main floor of the cramped house. A lot of people lived like that. I was on the look-out (the ice cream man by my school whose protruding glass eye looked like an opaque funhouse mirror... adults cruising by in cars: kids were snatched somewhere in the city). I’d heard the parents say “they” were coming soon. In Cowboy movies, the Indians descended from blue-shaded, tall stands of pines, and I could see the same kind of trees over there, where I had never been, several blocks beyond the schoolyard. They would come from that direction. I would shoot them, to protect us. My city, my family. Me. My home, Detroit, of the first paved street, the first expressway, the first radio broadcast. Just then the first shopping center was being erected on the edge of town. Cars. We got to see the new models earlier than anyone in the country and the corporations often permitted employees to test futuristic prototypes in Detroit first. So, when Chrysler began developing turbines, we kids looked for them. Suddenly, just another day on the playground, twenty feet away in normal traffic, the hushed, paranormal mechanism would ghost past us like some galactic invader. The future. Our playground - at least the boys - stopped cold, entranced. History being made before our eyes. We were the ones who knew something no one else did. We told each other what we had seen, then we told our families. I wanted to grow up to be the one telling, because then everyone would look admiringly at me and be quiet and listen, like they did for my funny uncle. My own penchant for “telling” began, really, when Pop, who apparently wanted me out of his hair, used to take me out to the porch glider to sit with him and distract me. We made up stories. Our stories were of two make believe down on their luck goofballs named Charley and Jake. They were forever in trouble. Their lives played out before us on the block, where we were sure newer neighbors who we didn’t know so well were frustrated with the two. Pop would get it going: “Well doggone it, what are those two doing this time?” Then I had to pick that up, name some trouble (I remember “roller skating in the back alley...” as one repeated theme), then he would name the next outrageous incident and we were off. They never had money and someone was always chasing them. Neither of our clownish creations ever talked much, even to each other, or had a handle on how to fix their dire straits. But maybe that’s how the world looked to me: we had live theater in my neighborhood. Tony and Maria, who had lived three doors down since my mother had been small, were an ever-unfolding human drama. Though their broad front porch was a veritable proscenium, the small wooden back porch and yard served well as theater in the round if you happened to be out hanging clothes. They wore their old country tempers like millstones about their lives, never averse to letting the neighborhood know their most intimate thoughts on a host of subjects. Their debates were legend. But they were a comfort to me, because my parents said I had no self-control, either. I sneaked over the fence and watched them from the alley. Maria was from a wealthy Boston family, as it turns out, and Tony was not. A dark and eruptive - if gentle - man, he was road-apple brown (from years of hard outdoor labor) heavy about the eyes, and ham-handed. He looked scary. Their bouts - Olympian shouting matches punctuated with dishes smashing like a Laurel and Hardy film - boomed through the walls of their first floor until Tony burst into the backyard ahead of an astonishing string of Italian gutturals. As Tony knew when he escaped, Maria came no further, for some reason unable to step that far into the yard, a kind of demilitarized zone. She never descended into the yard. Superstition, perhaps. No one ever knew. Engorged, putting her not-so-fine-point on her arguments, she stood on the porch gesturing wildly, Tony answering with somewhat less vitriol and using similar hand signals until she was the only one talking and he stood waiting. But Tony never fought back, never hit her; and these were the days when no one would have objected. When he saw me or anyone else watching as Maria bellowed, Tony twirled a finger at his temple: Maria was nutty. Tony was trying to reassure me. So I was part of their lives. I found them fascinating because I knew them now, better than anyone else. After a little while, Tony hopped the fence and headed down the alley to my uncle’s bar. Like Charley and Jake, he was in hot water and using the alley for his getaway. He would come home, liquored up, when everything had blown over. People were no longer obliged to live in the city flats and apartments where they’d had to endure each other’s families, or had to share hallway bathrooms. These were not the peasant market streets of Tony’s youth. Now you could retire the matter to your own private space. Americans suddenly had money, and options. Things had changed. The most obvious was that no one had to bother with each other any more. They had already made Tony and Maria invisible. A physical manifestation of the chasms developing between us all, an expressway ditch was suddenly laid across our street, cutting my paternal grandparents off from us. My parents told us they would move us out to the suburbs. I dreamed of a big empty field, no one around, the opposite of a city. Past the line of trees. Over There. A place like in westerns. I did not want to go. * * * In subsequent years, the exodus and sprawl continued apace. I was estranged, orphaned from a Detroit that was becoming all places instead of a company town with a fairly identifiable network of extended families, cultures, architecture, history. And I learned that “they” - with some terribly potent authority - had come. They chased out everyone I knew, and soon we all lived in contiguous Catholic parishes in the suburbs. City neighborhoods imploded. Whites scurried in new, fast and shiny, rocket-motif automobiles toward the borders of town like settlers in Manifest Destiny, or manned travel to a culturally featureless moonscape. Our parents said we were going to have more land and we did, kind of: home lots backed into one another, reclaiming alley space, covering traces of the pre-war past, breaking with any remaining vestige of “city.” At our back fence in the suburbs was a crumbling brick barbecue pit and a gnarled apple tree. My father cut it down and landscaped it. He cared a lot about how our lawn looked. He painted the clothes pole. Not until high school did I come back to the city, where I attended the college-prep that only accepted me because my father had gone there. I hated it, especially that I was in the company of kids who possessed more than I did, who didn’t have to work two jobs like I did, to pay their way. Hitchhiking the ten miles in and out of the city each day, I studied its decline: stores closing, homes and neighborhoods gone to shit. Our school instigated fights with cross town rivals at sporting events where (despite a popular misconception) whites jumped “them” far more often than otherwise. Weirdly, my “greaseball” white classmates and friends who hated “them” the most nonetheless wore thick and thins, Cuban heels, sharkskin pants and pinkie rings. Also, imitating inner city males, they smoked Kools, listened purely to Motown music, and said “man,” at the end of their sentences. Wanting the edge, to be the outcasts, they became what they hated. One Italian psycho east-sider I knew formed a band with three buddies who called themselves, “The 13 Screaming Negroes.” Brothers loved them. Rock and roll united the races. A secret had been kept from us, I remember feeling, and I hated the adults I had known for failing my trust. I was headed for the counterculture. I identified with blacks; I was an infiltrator. At least, saying so made me different from my contemporaries. That seemed important. But a place is what you are, and I would learn I was no better than any other white: One afternoon of my senior year, after “they” had arrived at the school, I had a psychology class that one of “them,” an advanced student, was allowed to attend with several other underclassmen. The teacher had left the room and I had wandered to the window as a few guys mumbled here and there. I was making fun of things and getting my share of attention. I had a reputation for skipping classes and serving time after school. That moment, one of the women who served us lunch, a slight, animated black granny, was heading across the parking lot as I looked out. I tapped the window and waved. She smiled, as she always did because she liked us, and waved back. Then, without her knowing, I said: “Bye-bye nigger lady...” And the sudden, shocked vacuum behind me brought it home: one of them was here. He was a kid I had greeted several times in the hall - because I wanted him to know we were not all alike, that I did not even enjoy these rich bastards, but especially, that I did not want him to feel uncomfortable. I wanted to protect him. I turned now. His frozen dark features were closed; he stared at his desktop. I sat down in the desk, dry-mouthed and scalded. After a space, the teacher returned. I never apologized. I never spoke to the kid again. * * * That summer in 1967, we watched the sky turn crimson toward the river and the curfew was announced and parents sat on their porches talking in disgusted whispers about them and their violent stupidity. Many of us were told we couldn’t ever go into the city again, even to see the Lions, Tigers or Red Wings. I was eighteen and disposed to anarchy. I needed to be where everything was happening. Blacks were always at the top of the list of forbidden delights for white kids and so, desirable attractions. They were new, they were happening, they meant trouble - like we stood for a cause, had an actual viewpoint. The City, therefore, held mystery, danger, and promise, especially if you could say you’d been around them. We drove down that night, watching the inhabitants set fire and loot. When “I Got Friday On My Mind,” our anthem, came on the radio, we blasted it: It’s going to happen in the city I’ll be with my girl, she’s so pretty. She looks fine tonight, she is paradise to me Tonight: I’ll lose my head... Tonight: I’ll spend my bread... Tonight: I’ve got to get -- The following spring, Martin Luther King was killed, right after making his “I Have A Dream” speech in Detroit. Then Robert Kennedy. Then, a little over a year after the riot had divided us all, the Tigers won their first World Series since the end of World War II and the city blew wide open again. Within minutes that afternoon - horns honking, toilet paper streamers hanging off trees everywhere and people with transistors pressed to their ears, jumping on the sidewalks and slapping backs and hands - I headed downtown. I have never seen the city like that before or since: surging, ecstatic throngs in love over being Detroiters. Buses marooned in the human river became party parlors which people entered and left through the windows. The bars literally dried up and more people spilled into the streets. Blacks and whites danced together there sharing bottles. Though some cars tried to make their way out of town on Michigan Avenue, it was hopeless. As one white driver inched along, a young brother mounted the hood and was joined by an equally blitzed white guy who scrambled to stand next to him. Both struck proud, indomitable poses reminiscent of famous warrior bronzes in Campus Martius downtown - a double racial ornament for the Future Detroit: two drunk fans. People all around cheered. I met a girl and we hastily repaired to my ‘65 Mustang where, in the back seat, we steamed things up. The door suddenly popped open; a black kid jumped into the driver’s seat and put the grab on my 8-track player. Our hands were occupied, so we were pretty much compromised. “Hey! You mind?” He swung around - not particularly disappointed or in a hurry to leave. Then, a sport, he said: “Sorry, man, didn’t know nobody in here.” “No big deal,” I said, ever the good citizen. It was a nutty Detroit night. We were all making charming mayhem together. Another first for the city: blacks and whites rioting with a common, peaceful cause. I worked at the time in a restaurant where gamblers, Mafioso bookies and hit men met, which was also where the sports heroes of the day and television personalities frequented. The owner was a spoiled suburban college business graduate with a flashy roll who desired like so many of them to act like a tough Detroiter, since that alone could get you laid in the right circumstance. He let me drive his Mark III all over town. I cruised the ghetto, where I got genuine respect, where they knew a boat when they saw one. My obnoxious country club boss wore alligator shoes and golf sweaters, but he was out of date now. He knew it, saw that my hair was getting long; I looked like the new direction. He asked me one night if any of my friends had some pot he could try. The barriers were coming down. I hear that he is now something of a comic legend in Detroit: after he lost a game of cards to the hoods one night, he spent the next 20 years opening restaurants that mysteriously burned down every other year. He got strung out on stuff. They hung him on a meat hook one night in an Eastern Market walk-in freezer by way of demonstrating a point. But I had quit him by then. I escaped my family, my town. I wanted to be somebody else, somewhere else. I hitchhiked around the country, bummed for a while, and when I told people where I was from, got a strange, in some cases awed, respect - even in California a month after the Manson murder. So I told the dweebs stories of my life “in the gangs” - of course, this time I was winning all those fights. I made up my Detroit for them, the entertainer. A lot has intruded since I went away to college: I dropped out. I drove cab. I was drafted. I refused to go. They were going to put me in jail. I’m a Detroit boy, I don’t scare. For some reason, they never prosecuted. Then I moved back into the city. It was a scary place by then. Streetlights rarely worked and cop helicopters ran their floods down my street almost nightly while sirens wailed. I was the only white guy for miles and the low-key coke salesman in the downstairs flat said to just stamp my foot and his boys would come up and take care of business any time someone gave me trouble. He meant the ones who were always trying to break in, sometimes as I sat there fronting them off from behind the door, shouting at them to go away. My dealer liked me: white boys were always of legal and practical use if you got stormed by the narcs. Of course, he was paying off a judge and some cops, and a state congressman regularly brought his girlfriend by for the occasional fix on the house, but you couldn’t overestimate the advantage of having a white boy on the premises. Guns went off all the time at night. Bodies were found in my alley. Almost every night, some crackpot down the street, as a ritual apparently conducive to good sleep, came out to his lawn in the dark, shouted: “Night, e'rebody!’ and squeezed off a couple rounds into the air to signal the end of yet another meaningless day. A drunken, well-dressed crooner in the rain walked under my street lamp in the deepest hour of night and put on a show, begging a lost lover to forgive him. The guy across the street inexplicably blew out his windows with a double barrel and still spent the winter there, appearing stolid but harmless in an empty lightless frame from time to time, peering out silently at his Detroit from a blanket burnoose. I thought of Maria, who regularly went to the front porch to lecture the neighbors regarding their insensitivity, bellowing: “You theenk ama craze? Eeza you! You acraze!” After a while, people put out cigarettes and went inside from their porches, closed their drapes. Today suburban homes have recessed postage-sized porches, and massive, largely unoccupied elaborate decks in back that cost more than most homes did twenty years ago. We turn away, go to the back room, to the back yard... That’s where Tony went when he left Maria, doubtless to preserve his health. No further than the garage, though. He rag picked a cook stove, a mattress and some other things, and he lived there. Divorce? Unthinkable. Put Maria away? Why? She was his wife. He would never have left her. She was bananas, but she was his world. This was his place, in this life. * * * I started a family, and finished two degrees, and ended up where I had always been going: I worked as an institutional counselor for juvenile delinquents. Wherever I moved the family, I have always returned to Detroit. I am good with kids, especially black kids, who I perceived as the fallout from my once-cherished Detroit, which had become society’s alley. They don’t trust any officials and they have heard all they’re going to listen to about everyone’s faith in them to change, to be better than they have been. They have a hard time trusting words. Most of the kids I worked with had no families or had patched-together ones, smattered wrecks with strewn or lost parts. Like my forbearers, I’m a mechanic from Detroit, a fixer of families ruined by the Great Escape. As time passes though, I am less drippy about it all; I have become instead a wizened Gabby Hayes, offering the boys cantankerous social and political observations in the form of storytelling, like this one I tell you now. For them, I retell the Detroit boy-wanderer’s transit and place them within an historically sound context that gives them a reference point. A lot of them don’t know who or what they come from. I give them a city. Your attachment to a place, what you identify with, is what you tell yourself it was. So, on Jefferson Avenue, hanging on a tripod that faces out to the river and the world (as tribute to our favorite son, Joe Louis), is a facsimile of the Champ’s curiously detached, extended arm and power-driving fist. Welcome, neighbor, to the city that has always devoured itself, arising again from self-immolation. Enclaves and bedroom communities that coincidentally butt up against each other, Detroit became a segregated killing ground defined by what has been taken from it rather than what it has become. True Detroiters as a result have a generational inferiority complex not unlike Palestinians - reactive, sure of themselves almost only when threatened. When we tell people we are from Detroit, we brace for the inevitably jocular or derisive rejoinder before demurring: “Well, I don’t actually live in the city itself, of course.” Or: we might brag reflexively that we are Hockey Town, The Bad Boys, Motown, Tommy Hearns, Aretha... (how can we make you love us?) Gilda Radner, Robin Williams, Lily Tomlin, Tom Selleck, George C. Scott...(Do you see us?) Once the center of a stove industry and the fur trade, Big Timber, Iron, Chemical, Mineral, Railroad and Automotive...they all pass through, bankrolling their escapes. Detroit, built and still surrounded by Big Money, into whose coffers our mayors still dutifully deposit architectural treasures and plumb city contracts, defacing the landscape, as if Detroit were merely a luckless aging whore, trading her jewels for a warm coat and a temporary fix. And I come back home. But the Bomb seems to have been dropped. A friend from out of state told me Detroit is the ugliest place he has ever seen. “Looks like the illegitimate offspring of a dalliance between Trenton, New Jersey and Los Angeles.” I could tell him that Detroit is rebuilding at a ferocious rate (roads, stadiums, the African/American Museum, bridges, buildings, neighborhood developments), that he doesn’t know our spirit. Father Cunningham’s Focus/Hope, I could tell him, born of the riots, whose programs have fed, sheltered and trained masses of the forgotten - that’s an inner city miracle! The cutting- edge technology of the Focus/Hope Industrial Center attracts foreign envoys, statesmen and corporate giants the world over who come to learn how to turn their cultures toward the new century. These are stories worth celebrating. But it’s time Detroit quit trying to appeal to everyone. Instead, I’m telling you: a city is only, ever, a matter of storytelling, and Detroit must know its story. Here is mine: I cannot leave Detroit or pretend I wasn’t here. I came back to find pieces of me buried in the kids who are running away from home, ashamed, looking for their Family of Man. For all of us, Detroit remains an angry old neighbor, screaming at us from a porch. The Triumphs of Saints and Heroes (back to top) The American culture has become a veritable soft-bellied road warrior cult of competing ideologies and morally neutral materialism. As a result, America’s youth - whether isolated by social advantage or cultural deprivation - suffer the delusions of shut-ins and cover with clever cynicism and pervasive ingratitude. The young only learn and mature by emulating noble adult example; to date, America’s youth have not been greatly impressed. What is on their mind is their personal and cultural abandonment, which begets either vengeance or detachment. Busy sorting out ways they can acquire and take their time growing up, their anomie seems almost charming, as if they were a strain of pure bred pup we hope will never grow up and bite. The sixties generation they may idolize at times (with their parents’ often illegitimate abetting), if they are even aware of that time, received too much media credit for activism when, in fact, few were actually involved in manning the barricades during the civil rights and anti-war movements. Until the Beatles and Dylan, American youth were voiceless, the term “teenager” hardly twenty years in use. Conformist and hopelessly dependent on prevailing opinion regarding most everything, their unoriginal defiance, with some few exceptions, took the form of organizing and speaking out at the behest of and seeking the acceptance of remarkable icons of literature, government and even sports - but only after their cultural Godfather, John Kennedy, had been abruptly taken from them. Orphaned then like a generational Hamlet, they collectively resisted and disobeyed on principle and with genuinely felt distrust for the same people who had put Americans in camps, or others behind bars for their beliefs. It was a basic values training that ultimately husbanded a more fair-minded and environmental society, fostering a whole generation bent on preserving the bedrock of American freedom for all. But a certain aggressive vein of disenfranchisement in that age of social disobedience runs through the American consciousness and expresses itself even now, like some bizarre social dyslexia, in things like contentious Hummer owners declaring their freedom to waste as some kind of inalienable right. As a result, sayings from those Days of Rage like, “Think Globally, Act Locally” have little resonance for the young now. Though their minds may still constitute fertile ground in which to nurture a social consciousness, the rootless among them, those raised by television and strangers employed at the day care, to say nothing of the millions who hail from divorced families, have grown up without much in the way of a neighborhood as a reference point. So no apparent “local” comes to mind. They have learned their lessons well: expect nothing. Like silent protestors in a sit down strike, they practice meaningful inertia. Even when they want to know, institutional disinformation campaigns muddy the intellectual waters and caricature any truth into mere urban legend within minutes, instantly disproved without fact checks or due process, delivered hot and ready, racy, tasty and indigestible. It would take work for the American youth to examine and declare their opinion of the information flourishing in their midst, and they have rarely been required to take much in the way of risk or sweat equity, and understandably (if disappointingly) see no reason to initiate the effort. Their inability to contemplate the attendant dangers, approaching disability, certainly derive from the lack of moral example in their homes, from parents who are either too busy or focused on their own pursuits to imagine the fallout. Ideally, children’s minds should be fed truthful stories of greatness or moral lessons conveying that contributing to one’s extended family to ensure the safe conduct for the benefit of all inspires, protects and preserves...a life well lived. But that life must be seen and experienced, not rumored in storybooks alone. If a person is no longer able to see that greatness in their elders who orally transmit their own story, then they must remain children, because they have no role in continuing traditions and no obligations. So today’s teens are stuck where any youth must be - in fantasy. They are obliged to create their own tale of noble triumph. But without a sense of your goodness and fervent ideals, your story, as is true of some many young today, must be told in isolation and becomes more extravagant, surreal, and grotesque with the hour. Perhaps this is so because although they continue to obsess, as has been the case with all youth for all time, about sex, murder, money and mayhem, these evolving awarenesses are now infused and stricken with the social, emotional and global dislocation, visions of pandemic chaos, environmental collapse and almost cartoonish armageddon that can paralyze any of us, though for a lot of the current youth these are no more than abstract concepts, as exciting as they are troubling. Small wonder at their extreme, almost suicidal bouts of drinking on the campuses and the gunplay at movie theaters and house parties. The luxury of remote viewing ends up necessitating participation and the longer it takes, the more sudden and violent the impact. When humans are separate, they must find a way to make contact, and the further they drift away, the more errant their perceptions of themselves (without feedback) and their paranoia about the will and intentions of others. So we collide with one another, or eliminate ourselves. If the sixties generation came into the world after World War II fearing the bomb, polio and other crippling and life-ending diseases, there was consistency: they grew up living by strict rules that, defied, promised well-defined peril. They studied without benefit of drugs, excuses, or technological distractions; they walked to get anywhere. No less hopeful, young people now though still idealistic own nothing of themselves, whether pampered by a parent or at the mercy of the street and the courts. To emerge from this, they must emulate someone. Yet their options for “heroes” are limited: Talk show bullies whose stock in trade is anything but exploration of truth or debate about ideas and principles; rap artists who tend toward emasculated, superannuated thugs or self-aggrandizing clowns eulogizing other bullies and crank heads. They might admire loud-mouthed, stock-trader-whiz kid varieties who are no more than WWF wrestlers in ties, or overpaid athletes whose love for material reward is only exceeded by their need to be worshipped for shameful displays revealing of nothing so much as their astounding insecurity. So the mind of today’s youth turns inward for its example, the very definition of mental illness. As we clung during the Great Depression to Fred Astaire’s exaggerated elegance on the silver screen and laughed at baggy-pants comedians on stage, today kids cling to stealing, beating, rapping, robbing hoods in cyber fantasies to achieve imaginary control over circumstance, however implausibly and vicariously. Or, technological voyeurs, they watch “reality shows” to find some form empathic connection with their own chaotic and inexplicable malaise. And because most don’t even deliver newspapers or work before their parents have paid their way through college any more, much less labor at a respected and traditional trade, they are under-socialized. The lawns are smooth expanses of snow in the winter, the fields empty in the summer, the windows un-soaped at Halloween. They don’t know how to speak to others, even how to fight. They are naive, numb and unprepossessing, but nice, generally, lest they miss out on some advantage. Their minds mull favor and they are well-schooled in manipulation and agreement. In such an environment, how would we expect them to raise their voices for any cause that held no assurance of payment? They are imitators not out of fear that they would be rejected by their parents or punished and kept from what they desire - indeed, almost none of them have ever known denial of any pleasure. They are addicted to and focused on their sinecure. So, contrary to the popular perception of their generation, these youth have not been inundated by the information glut. Instead, they chose higher ground, where they stay dry, untouched, curious about, perhaps even disbelieving the onslaught of information-without-context. But from that vantage the world is a flat vista, and you are marooned. With no information, nothing like belief and worse, little curiosity, nerve or confidence, one remains a timid observer in his or her lot. But we should not mistake their worth and fail to hope. The minds of these youth are still inquisitive, only stillborn. They are preoccupied with matters of themselves - income, comfort, safety - based on their fear of disappearing without the outward trappings of existence. They do not know or own their story, so they must invent another, which will uniformly be a self-protective fantasy, like a flawless graphic video game, which unfortunately fails to document the triumph of saints and heroes throughout time, but the shortcut solutions of impatient, frustrated strangers. PARK IS AGAIN THE PLACE TO BE (back to top) by TIM JEFFREY In the twenties it pulsed with life and swarmed with people: restaurants, clothiers, hotels, public baths, retail, music. Famous and infamous Detroit personalities, socialites and underworld figures circulated nightly along the four block west side corridor running north from Grand Circus Park to the Fisher Freeway, resembling Chicago’s Rush Street. Today, Park Street appears to be only another discouragingly stark, desolate visual counterpoint to the sparkle and activity pulsating a block east in the theater and sports venues that signal Woodward Avenue’s - and by extension Detroit’s - revival. Yet in the long shadow cast by the Ilitch empire’s Fox Theater and Hockeytown, Harrington’s nine year-old watering hole, the Town Pump, a destination well before it was fashionable to grab a drink or a bite downtown, continues to thrive on the corner of Park and Montcalm. The youngest of ____, Sean had traveled the world working in restaurants, sailing to his hearts delight, and studying what would be his life’s trade in the restaurants of Europe and the Caribbean and saving some bread before he settled back home in Detroit. He had by then come to some firm conclusions regarding how customers should be treated and fed when, only a year or so in business, he began to dream (some would have said, back then: “hallucinate”) that his business was the beginning of a resurrected Park Street. He scraped up $400,000 and bought an old building surrounded by rubbish and wasted lots where other businesses once stood. He heard far off music… Which, finally, four years after Harrington began to gut the old Iodent building across Montcalm from Town Pump, is about to start up as he opens “Centaur,” a clubby, “cool” multi-level lounge. Early in 1999, however, the lanky young entrepreneur would lead small groups of friends, potential investors and the curious through the dank, lightless hollows and drafty stairwells of the former Iodent, inviting them to envision drinkers, quiet games of tournament pool; over there, cool music, classic murals. This required an active imagination. Inside soot-caked windows, ancient must assaulted the lungs and eyes; shoes scuffed grit, making dull, echoing lonely sounds; mildew stained peeling wallpaper, rotting sills and rusting spans. For decades previous to that, Detroit’s various strategies for an economically viable resurgence had boiled down to two narrow and unnecessarily opposed concepts: build large scale, major event attractions to draw activity; or rebuild an affordable downtown housing base to draw people, then service them with small and, ultimately, larger businesses. It’s a familiar, even stereotypical Detroit scenario, a ritual which seems to organically reenact itself every ten to twenty years: while struggling, downtown entrepreneurs attempt to manage businesses in blighted, fringe neighborhoods, the cycle of demolishing historical edifices, architectural landmarks and crumbling eyesores begins anew, to erect the next “vision” of Detroit’s ever changing face. Rather than representative icons like Stroh’s, Motown, or Vernor’s, the skyline metamorphoses into faceless, high-profile redevelopments like GM’s Renaissance Center, national hotel and eating chains, stadiums, concrete waterfront residential bunkers...until, all hope abandoned, casinos. While he agrees that large developments are critical to the city’s life, Harrington’s dream instead is for Park, as it was in the past, to become an identifiable small business enclave with foot traffic, a bonafide entertainment district that will sustain life and activity. And why not? Park Avenue during the Iodent years teemed with life, from the Clover Club in the Detroit Building - where Nat King Cole and other greats once performed - to The Penthouse, a favorite mafia hangout in the forties and fifties. Even Harrington’s Town Pump, where twenty years before the Purple Gang was known to gather, had its heyday. From the forties through the seventies, Park thrived on the many folk still living in the apartments above who could shop in a 24-hour store, visit a Turkish bath, get shoes and boots repaired in a leather shop or have a drink and dinner at Cliff Bell’s, an upscale restaurant that featured band music and dancing. For many of those years and into the eighties, a magician’s supply survived on touring professionals’ who sometimes made the trip to Detroit specifically to visit Park Avenue. The incongruously ornate former Detroit Police Academy across Park from the Town Pump was originally built by Henry Ford’s wife when she was rejected for membership by the Womens’ League down the avenue: if she couldn’t be in their club, she would just build her own. Not unlike Sean Harrington, who over those four years quite without the cooperation large scale concerns can expect in similar circumstances has stripped out and created - in what was once a neighborhood factory during the booming twenties – a stylish dining and music experience with a feel of those slick twenties in the medium price ranges. A relatively minor, workmanlike footnote in Detroit’s history of blue collar constructions, the eight story Iodent was built as the flagship for the Wormer and Moor Real Estate Company. But the Crash of 1929 soon changed that and several tenants came and went before the Iodent Toothpaste Company made it their headquarters in the forties. Now, along a newly poured cement floor and anachronistic Deco highlights, the wafting, eclectic mix of everything from jazz, modern, soul, rock, trance, swing, and even twenties ensemble sounds will emanate from bands set up on the second floor, bathing the premises in “cool,” as Sean sees it. A place where “people can sit and talk after work or meet just before the show,” and of course, after. “Suit-friendly but some jeans, too,” the owner guesses, a contrast to the crowd next door at the Pump, perhaps, with a less intrusive musical presence and slower pace beyond the new, black framed insulated glass that gives those inside a full view of the action on the street. And nobody is questioning now when the young entrepreneur envisions more activity out there in the future on the order of tony streets elsewhere, this time with decidedly soul-city trappings. Cliff Bell’s has been bought and will become a restaurant again and, in time, the Iodent will feature market-rate dwellings on the top six floors. Harrington’s Iodent restoration is one of a growing number of small business developments in the whole northern half of the downtown these days. But size is not the only distinction between Harrington and corporate interests downtown. Although the city had initially shown a curious disdain toward the project, Harrington, seasoned at a young age by the tough demands of the restaurant business and the wildly speculative real estate downtown market “did it with no backing, with the banks telling me no, with the DDA telling me no,” and would not be intimidated or discouraged. Having held out for funding from H.U.D. and elsewhere - which he had errantly been led to think would be available and that would have reduced debt service on his building loan - he now sportingly dismisses the tough years spent paying the freight and waiting on construction holdups for what will end up being a $4 million project as he tried to finagle a better deal. It was a learning experience “and that’s that.” Consigned to construction limbo and wrestling with the inevitable building department snafus that frustrate many a developer in a city like Detroit – every day of which can threaten a small businessman with financial ruin – Harrington kept his eyes on the future. And the future, in the case of Centaur, is now. Excitedly, Harrington now points out the chalk marked floor where a handsome bow-fronted, black and silver banded deco martini bar will stand. Overhead, the wide staircase ascends on the way to the second floor entertainment room to an abbreviated open deck overlooking the main floor that will accommodate small parties at a handful of tables. Though it does not follow the layout or have anything like the old, comfortable hotel joint appeal that attracted a ready public to the former Purple gang-hangout Town Pump when he opened in 1996, the Centaur on the other hand will have it’s own personality. Utilizing a twenties Parisian Deco motif, the overlapped, geometric black woods with silver edging, lights concealed behind stainless steel back-lit sconces, spare railings, open floors and windows give it a slick, upscale feel without unnecessary airs or flourishes. Tasteful, imported pink Indian stone floors throughout; solid, customized, backed bar stools and couches; classy full length mirrors in the larger bathrooms; and suspended from the second floor ceiling, an eighteen foot knockoff of a Fisher Building Deco chandelier drops to just above the main floor bar through an oval cutout in the floor. Guests can see down, or up, be seen, or gaze out to the street. The wide staircase surmounted with a reproduction of Marcel DuChamp’s “Nude Descending A Staircase,” which created the stir that began the Deco period, sets a stylish tone from another time. Every space has been thought out and filled with the same whimsical good cheer or pleasant opportunity for private conversation or sociable interaction. The club’s principal icons, licentious half-horse, half-human monsters of ancient Greek mythology, besides being stately and wise advisors to Jason, Achilles and Heracles, were violent sorts whose debauchery forever characterized them as emblematic of man’s bestial nature. On the new premises, Harrington’s tongue in cheek conception transforms the beasts into charmingly fertile and randy epicureans leaping across murals on the back walls, stalking over and under heat vents and around light fixtures in search of pleasure, wine and women. The menu will be small and will run to finger foods, hors d’oevures, perhaps stuffed poppers, with crab and so on. The atmosphere is less a dining experience than a meeting place after work or before the show, to listen, talk, perhaps play a game on the 9-foot competition pool table on the second floor or have a couple go-rounds on the dart boards. The refurbished second floor arcade windows will open into the room permitting the strains of nightly Detroit tunes, from whatever musical group is holding court that night on the northeast corner riser, to once again float onto Park Avenue after years of haunting silence. A long way from drafty, musty, dark and lonely - and a lot closer to breathing life back into Park Street. Though Harrington considers himself a businessman first and not by any means strictly a preservationist, he insists that reusing attractive historical Detroit architecture to turn a buck only makes sense. “I liked the Hudson Building like everybody else, and I hated to see it come down. But people are missing the point,” the intense, boyish restaurateur comments, surveying other neglected buildings down Park street. “You need more than one building to make a downtown district and if you only focus on that one location, you know, what about all the other, smaller possibilities that are going to waste here?” Harrington’s perseverance has been rewarded and his faith affirmed by the blossoming of Harry’s, the Gem, the Detroit Brewing Company and Bookies, in the Book Building along Washington Boulevard, to name a few recent destinations in walking distance which themselves anchor retail resurrections of their own, only tangentially related to or marginally dependent sporting dates at the new stadiums. “We’ve been down here thirty years,” Sean Harrington reminds, referring proudly to his family’s resolve in surviving the hardest of times in a city legendary for mismanaging its dowry. “You think we’re leaving now?” This is a reference to his father, Bill who initially attempted to turn a quick buck in 1966 by purchasing the former Hotel Royal Palm, now the Park Hotel, as an investment. The plan was to sell it within a year or so, and move on to other real estate opportunities. At the time, one year before the riots, Detroit had been vying for “Model City of America” recognition. Bill bought, the city burned, the exodus followed and Bill got flattened, obliged to move his family into the hotel and adopt their new neighborhood. But Bill Harrington was right on the money…just a couple decades off. Undismayed by the setback, Bill formed the Park Avenue neighborhood group that eventually evolved into the Grand Circus Park Association by 1980, a motley assemblage of local business and government folk (and not a few visiting sentimentalists) including people like well-known and successful preservationist Chuck Forbes. That association would conceive of and began steps toward creating the then-outrageous dream of a prosperous, revived theatre district - to include the Gem and Century Club, the Fox, the State, and the Elwood - which today symbolizes a rare, contemporary Detroit success story on the order of an economic miracle which Sean would like to emulate on a smaller scale. “Look, everybody wants to come down here and have a good time,” he convincingly launches into a favorite speech celebrating the unique aesthetics of the small business, back streets of Detroit. “What can the suburbs offer that compares with the downtown? What would prevent us from creating something like Birmingham right here on Park?” He has inherited his father’s enthusiasm for accomplishing things others find risky or ill-timed. And the hard-headed patience to see it through. “The beauty of this city is that you can talk to people,” Sean Harrington enthuses. “At the end of the day as you’re walking down the street on your way home, you sit down and meet people who enjoy getting to know one another. It’s like a family down here.” “We joke about it a lot,” laughs one member of that extended “family,” business buddy Tom Moisides who played a part in both the Harmony Park building revival and now owns Tandem, across town. “It takes guts and perseverance. So we’re like frontiersmen. We’re in a 300-year old city where we have to reinvent ourselves. That’s the beauty of what Sean is doing. He hasn’t been afraid to jump right in and make it happen.” “Just like Chicago or Boston,” Bill Harrington insists with finality, “any city is a neighborhood.” Sean Harrington is betting on it, and will tell you it’s more than idealism that guides his judgment: “Revitalizing Detroit comes down to: do you want to live in chain house developments and brown subdivisions where you get to pick House A, B or C - or do you want a choice? Well, Planet Hollywood and Starbucks are all fine and good... But what about the local ‘Joe’s Bar?’” The Detroit News - Editorial Desk (2003) - (back to top) Honest, constitution-respecting Americans should be outraged by the bargain basement, euphemistic avoidances - notably unchallenged and even imitated by this newspaper and other responsible organs of the free press - that astonishingly even liberals like Mr. Levin (June 15) lean on these days: “Exagerrations” and “Overstatements” by our intelligence people? Is this NewSpeak on the order of Worldcom’s “overstatement of profits?” Such intellectual coardice is unbecoming...and dangerous. The fact is, analysts were not errant: though they informed the Cheney people there was nothing to warrant an attack on Iraq, they were sent back to their rooms. As they concocted more agreeable scenarios, to “get on message” ala Wag the Dog, the only real experts who had been in, knew and investigated it pronounced Iraq toothless and broken. We are Americans and our covenant with the world is an honor code, something higher and finer than the manipulations and lies of petty dictators. For one, forgeries and stolen, outdated information have been presented as fact. Thousands of Iraqi civilians slaughtered, documented around the world with the glaring exception of our own “free” media. No Weapons of Mass Destruction; no al-Qaida connection; no truth to Mr. Powell’s melodramatic assertions; no Saddam Hussein (and no “Saddam Bunker” ever existed, despite what the media reported, without facts, dutifully taking down the military’s sanctioned, prettied-up inventions); no bullet-holes or wounds in Jessica Lynch...these should rouse pointed questions unencumbered with vague or misleading prose. Based on our own criterion we are, factually speaking, allied only with Israel as the worst existent threat to world peace: we invaded a sovereign for no cause, continue to supply terrorist organizations (“freedom fighters” in the American argot) worldwide, and harbor our own still-unaccounted-for weapons of mass destruction. We are the progenitors of weapons both biological and chemical, and war is our number one export. We train others to torture and violate, and insist all except Israel and ourselves will be judged by international bodies of law. Even the ostensible moral high road, about striking back for 9/11, is a sham. We planned this attack and issued rebuilding contracts years before - I can testify to this from intimate experience. But news folk could find it out, if they looked, and wanted to preserve free speech enough to report it. The empty oratory and criminal illogic they instead parrot, excused with flag waving references to our forefathers, has been elevated to an art form, imploring an All-American God to backstop our baseless vengence. The American people deserve to know everything. Demand an investigation. Demand the press print what they know when they discover it, not when it is expedient to reveal. Or forfeit the option to ask why we should be seen as the duplicitous, self-deluded barbarians we have now confirmed for the world we are capable of being. Because such childish and un-American posturing from citizens and journalists - repeating the administration’s sales and marketing slogans rather than seeking the truth - makes us a road warrior cult waving flags like talismans, reduced to being no more than casino gamblers blowing on dice to good luck themselves out of the next catastrophe. You might better spend your time contemplating Biblical lessons regarding pride coming before the fall. (back to top) |
