An Old Neighborhood is a Rich Tapestry
A Walk through Southwest Detroit
A long walk is an intricate tapestry, and every weekend I weave a three-hour work of art. I try to get my normal errands done, like groceries or the drug store, but primarily I am moving at an exercise pace for 10 miles, along a long and mostly unplanned path.
I get a steady stream of questions about how could I possibly enjoy these walks. Am I safe? Aren’t Detroit's residential areas a mess? Isn’t block after block boring? What will I do if I get tired?
My answers involve something called “the old neighborhood.” The old neighborhood is a central fact of a great city – and usually one of the fondest friends of anyone who grew up in one. I grew up in an urban neighborhood - much transformed from its peak, but a part of the family to me.
Pining about the old neighborhood is not nostalgia, really, it’s a vivid benchmark of the opportunities we expect, how we expect others to behave, the ways we want to interact. In my old neighborhood, I saw a lot of what our neighbors did and a lot of what they needed; I joined other kids playing ball, and mom had us shovel the snow for all of the elderly people. In close quarters, familiarity can breed contempt, but it can also foster close and rewarding connections. We didn’t have big factories close by but my father could secure employment at two different hardware stores when needed.
The "Great Cities" that used to power our country are tapestries of these small town-like neighborhoods. The ‘town’ is the cocoon and an umbrella for occupants, as well as a filter. The big business of factories before the last closed in the late 1970s was an overlay. The classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (Jane Jacobs, 1961) described buildings and streets scaled to pedestrians, dense with varieties of activity. The mix evolved like a great forest, rather than coming off the assembly line of some remote, omnipotent multinational business.
When I cross Michigan Avenue at the Lodge Freeway today, I see a small slice of Bagley Street where freeway construction interrupted it, 60+ years ago. There’s an ocean of concrete behind me, so the small tree-ringed corner opening beckons.
A repurposed fire station, a corner store and restaurant cap streets of shoulder-to-shoulder housing (one block having 140 year old structures next to new glass-windowed and metal-framed condos). Planters, lawn signs, and yard art distinguish each of these doll houses, very different in design. West of Trumbull, iron fencing bunkers the south side of the street, in harsh contrast to the colorful mix of storefronts and new buildings on the north side, as if to state that the subsidized housing units behind it Do Not Belong.
Old neighborhoods are all about belonging. Something for everyone. They offered any type of housing opportunity you might need and met the basic needs for goods and services of neighbors - virtually all, on foot. My childhood neighborhood had several churches, schools, commercial strips, and every type of housing within a mile of our house. Anybody could find an affordable place there. A funeral home, Honda dealership, stores, concert venue, hall, movie theater and bowling alley as well. i still have dreams set in the corner “path” (we called the empty lot) and can name the occupants of every house on my block.
My Wilshire-Chalmers area gave me so much life experience, with people, sports, school, jobs. Shoveling the snow for older people, sitting on the porch and talking the ears off of a genteel couple, getting scolded for littering on someone’s lawns. Corktown and Southwest Detroit are about as close to that traditional form as you can still find in Detroit, though no doubt with a fabric heavily disrupted by outside forces. Nothing stays the same in life, but are these areas as self-contained as they used to be? No, so much of life happens elsewhere now. And most easily move.
Great City neighborhoods have long fascinated Americans, often for bad reasons. Notorious crime, poverty and health issues since vast immigration triggered their rise in the 1800s were all subsumed by animosity to Black Americans in my lifetime, after Blacks had the misfortune to stream into cities after manufacturing decline started. Today, these neighborhoods are outdoor museums with 400 years old artifacts from colonial America (Baltimore, Boston, New York, Philadelphia) and 200 years old artifacts of industrialization (Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, St Louis). With every stretch of humanity and activity once there, it’s not surprising that they now also display the nation’s most complex social, economic and environmental problems.
At Corktown’s birth, circa 1840s, half of the people in American cities were foreign born, and Corktown had Irish immigrants. The Mexican impact becomes clear the further west I head on Bagley Street. In the shadow of the Michigan Central Train Station, rapidly transforming with Ford’s investment and a leg of the Joe Louis Greenway under construction behind it: a taco truck, Honey Bee La Colmena, festively colorful murals. Even the Ambassador bridge approach from I75 isn’t a hard border between Corktown and the more functionally named, and decidedly more Mexican charactered “Southwest.” Streets narrow, their buildings facing all sides. With few driveways, I imagine how the area once teemed with people. It’s still full.
I walk in the street near The Boulevard. I don’t want to trip on uneven sidewalk flags, or be charged by dogs behind fences edging the postage stamp front lawns. Too, I have a long-held habit of claiming the street, litter and water backups and all, smiling at the young guys I walk by down the roadway or the kids rolling bikes in and around me. I move easily through a crosswalk in front of fast approaching cars in another of the many bonding acts of trust that happen in a community. My trust is second nature now; never broken.
At this age, I’ve been around - I’ve seen some things, like this old neighborhood has. The list of public policies that the neighborhood has withstood includes: Lodge Freeway and I75 interstate construction, urban renewal clearance along Fort and W. Lafayette, various housing policy aggressions. National and regional policies have depleted Detroit’s tax base, leaving the neediest in the starved center. Now, Ford Motor Company’s electric vehicle campus is already drawing residents and business. City bike lanes modernized Bagley’s streetscape in the Mexicantown district, as will its greenway and expanded Riverside Park. The nonprofit Detroit Riverfront Conservancy is constructing the Ralph Wilson-funded park also on the river. The federal infrastructure money windfall is another salve. Change will still be a constant.
It’s not what you see as you walk that is interesting - though the handmade bicycle, porch accessories and colorfully painted fences catch my eye. It’s what you don’t see in southwest Detroit and most of the older urban neighborhoods: affluent white families. I see people clustered on worn porch steps, moving bags from their aged cars, and they are people of color or young men, or elderly whites moving determinedly along the street to carry out the rituals they learned in decidedly different places generations ago, when they first moved to the neighborhood.
The day I left my old Wilshire neighborhood for the last time, for college, I remember thinking that i could not have had a fuller treatise on democracy or capitalism than growing up in that elegant web. Now, neighborhoods are even richer to me. Corktown developed before Detroit’s mega-factories, and continues to grow and change, much as I have in those decades since leaving home. I walk them a little worn, a little gingerly too, knowing that, soon, neither of us will be the same.
Janet your words are a joy to read. I absolutely cherished growing up on Wilshire. Your writing takes me back to all that wonderful history. It was just a wonderful place to grow up. We were community and connected. My sisters and I still talk about growing up on Wilshire. I picture my childhood home so clearly in my mind's eye. I loved growing up with your family on the same street. What memories.
Thank you for revealing hidden gems.