Today at work, I bound five copies of a construction job proposal while listening to Prince. In the middle of “I would die 4 U” (good to know the “U” in song titles has been around for a while), one of the Vice Presidents of Sachse Construction stopped by to chat with me. One of the things I like about my host company is the lack of hierarchy– the CEO and I exchange emails regularly and no one acts too important to be bothered by a marketing intern. Anyway, Kat commented that he had seen me walking along Woodward on his drive into the office this morning. “Where do you live that you could walk to work from?” he said, shocked.
With the polar vortext/Michigan-in-January weather, Jean, my trusty 5-speed, has entered a light hibernation. Every morning, I consider the trade off between negative windchill and just leaving my apartment ten minutes earlier to walk, warmer, down Woodward in the sunrise. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t live far from work, but I do live far enough that to walk there seems like a thing, a whole little journey that cannot be done without preparation or activity– I listen to Michigan Public Radio in the morning, and call my mom or a friend on the way home. Both in the mornings and the evenings, its a pretty lonely walk. I only see a handful of people, most of them waiting for the 32 Woodward Bus, whose signs above the drive blink cheerily, “Have a Nice Day!”
When I start out walking, I have to remind myself that it isn’t that far of walk– only a little over a mile. I walked more to campus in college, I walked much further in London regularly, when I’d cut across Hyde Park from the Victoria & Albert. In Toronto a few weeks ago, all I wanted to do was walk around Queen Street West and Chinatown, where my boyfriend and I were staying. Despite the single digit temperatures, we went on very specific missions around the neighborhood, happily stumbling upon impromptu croissants and coffees, friendly Canadian shop owners, and a huge, Brutalist library where we got lost amongst books and raked concrete. I took these kind of urban surprises for granted in London or Portland, but Toronto reminded me how uncommon they are for most Americans, and now for me.
Despite my love– so much love– for Detroit, I have to admit that my mile walk to work feels too long and too lonely for an urban environment. Even in the heart of midtown and downtown, I pass half and full blocks of parking lots, and I’m reminded more of my walks near my high school in suburban Portland than even my walk to campus in suburban Provo, Utah. There’s too many lonely blocks where I pass half-occupied buildings, a burnt out church, wide expanse of parking lots. In the snow, it all feels romantic, the empty blocks of Brush Park providing a blissful, white vista to view Detroit’s Classicist and Art Deco skyline, rising and glowing pink in the sunrise. The graffiti on Cass Avenue’s once luxurious hotels seems almost picturesque among the quiet and soft backdrop of many feet of untouched snow. But it feels romantic and peaceful in a sad way, like a graveyard. I wonder how much longer these empty spaces will last, with Midtown and Downtown reaching 90+ percent occupancy and new developments (boutique hotel! mixed use apartments! condo development! restaurants! arena project! M-1!) announced daily. I believe in Detroit, in her comeback, but I can’t help but think of Sufjan Steven’s song, Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head (Restore! Rebuild! Reconsider!). Sufjan wrote about his hometown almost a decade ago, before the crash of ’08, during another, recent moment of heady optimism in Detroit.
For my job at Sachse Construction, I’ve been touring apartment buildings downtown. All the newer (especially loft buildings), were built right around 2006/2007. In fact, Detroit’s downtown apartment stock tells the story of these optimistic moments, just in their age. Two of the buildings I toured were built in the 1920’s (major boom decade!) and remodeled in the 1960’s (during a little known downtown boom, where downtown business owners tried to fight against the steady slip of devaluing downtown property and businesses). Other buildings were built in the 1960’s, others remodeled or converted in the early and mid 2000’s.
At the end of Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head, the chorus echos,
From the trembling walls. It’s a great idea!
Everything you want. It’s a great idea!
From the Renaissance. It’s a great idea!
It’s a great idea– urbanity, cities, the “resurgance” of Detroit. But perhaps this is the very thing that keeps Detroit from steadily coming “back,” its just an idea. And cities, places, people, are not ideas. Maybe our skepticism and distrust of cities (“you live in Detroit? Alone?” a nearby superintendent asks me, after hearing about my walk to work), comes from the fact that Americans– myself included– are essentially unfamiliar with the experience of urbanity. Sure, it would be nice to walk to work, to send the kids down the block to grab some eggs, to spend summer evenings cooling off with other strangers in outdoor cafes. But if all of this is just surprise, a vacation experience when we visit other cities, it is essentially unbelievable to exist in our actual lives.
The idea of a place (something suburbs, too, suffer from!), versus the actual reality of living there, is dangerous. As I’ve fallen in love with Detroit, I try to remind myself that just as you can’t sustainably love the idea of person, you can’t love the idea of a city either. Its exhilarating to fall in love with the potential of Detroit, but its more powerful to fall in love with her reality. I love Detroit as it exists for me, in this moment. I love her for all her emptiness and surprises that I drive to (like Baker’s lounge on 8 mile!), even as I whine about the lack of quinoa salads walkable from my office, or my inability to buy cheap bulk toilet paper on my way home. So while I walk down Woodward, or around Canfield street, I try to remember and appreciate Detroit and I in this moment, at the beginning of 2014, cold, but optimistic. Detroit and I consider, abstractly and fluidly, our futures and what they could look like.
We’ll see.
Further reading:
A lovely, love-letter (essentially) to a neighborhood in Detroit.
Studies show that you shouldn’t drive around your neighborhood, if you want to really like it!