Sunday, August 18, 2013

Borderland - Windsor and Detroit - part three



It was, as the postcard says, the ‘motor capital of the world’. In the 1940s, Detroit was America’s fourth-largest city, aiming - as its skyscrapers grew higher - to compete with New York. The city’s population reached nearly two million. It is now seven hundred thousand and falling. 

One of the friends and former colleagues I’m visiting this trip - Vince - is a Windsor native. He remembers standing on the Canadian side of the river in 1967 and watching smoke drift across Detroit; army tanks were on the streets and forty-three died. Whites left the city in ever greater numbers; Japanese automakers began their onslaught on the old American ‘big three’ and Detroit was said to be, not the motor, but ‘murder capital of the world’. 


Before boarding my bus, I peer into the United States, glimpsing buildings that once trumpeted Detroit’s elegance, power and prosperity. I’m heading for the biggest U.S. municipality ever to declare bankruptcy. The city owes $18 billion - or $19 billion, figures vary -  it can’t pay. 



Eight dollars return buys a ticket on a quite normal Windsor Transit bus that takes me to another country.  



A mugger’s pushover, I uneasily recall a T-shirt slogan: I’M SO TOUGH I VACATION IN DETROIT. To my surprise, on stepping off the bus, I am not immediately murdered/robbed/accosted by an aggressive panhandler. However, a fireman in uniform does politely ask for a donation to help keep the fire trucks running. 

Nearby, the 1902 Wayne County Building (Detroit is the country seat) is empty. Henry Ford once worked here and famed lawyer Clarence Darrow appeared on a case.


Despite expected signs of decay, I didn’t anticipate being so captivated by downtown Detroit. Many buildings in the core remain impressive and, at least, partly occupied. The ‘Flatiron-style’ structure on the right is the 1896 Reid Building. In the distance is the Union Guardian Building.


The Guardian Building was a product of the Roaring Twenties. Unfortunately, it opened in 1929, not the most propitious of years. 


If you turn off the irritating music, the building’s website makes for revealing reading, offering, as it does, ‘aggressive office space rates!’ This means going cheap.


According to The Detroit News, the downtown office vacancy rate is about 27% (although this presumably does not include the many crumbling commercial buildings beyond use). In downtown Toronto, the rate is a touch over 4%.

Another Twenties’ creation is the largely empty David Stott Building. It will be auctioned in September with a suggested starting bid of three-and-a-half million dollars. 


The Penobscot Building, named for an Indian tribe, was bought by a Toronto company last year for what accounts say was a bargain basement five million dollars. 


I find a taxi, garrulous driver and head uptown.

Finances here are so desperate that, shortly before my arrival, Christie’s, the auction house, was summoned to appraise The Detroit Institute of Arts. The city paper reported that, “while the move doesn’t signal a liquidation of artworks is imminent or inevitable, it is bound to explode fears that one of the country’s most significant publicly owned art museums is vulnerable…’’

I want to visit in the unlikely event the bankruptcy administrator tries to sell off the family silver. My reason is not so much Rembrandts and Canalettos, but Diego Rivera’s extraordinary ‘Detroit Industry’ frescos.


Commissioned by Edsel Ford, the Mexican muralist painted the vast cycle on four courtyard walls. It cost $20,889, no small potatoes in the 1930s; Rivera considered it his greatest work. The sometimes controversial frescos portray Detroit manufacturing at very near the city’s height.

I have long admired Rivera’s oeuvre, but with a superficial understanding of his beliefs and techniques. Although a poor substitute for coming here, I recommend the Institute’s Rivera website and excellent iPad app, well worth reading and viewing:


As I visit on a sunny day, shadows from the protective glass roof add to the cycle’s fascinating complexity.




In a limited blog, there is too much to adequately describe. However, one panel is - in the current context - particularly apt and the picture worth clicking on. Sinister figures prepare gas bombs. Chemical weapons were the atomic bombs of their day and there were many - my uncle included - gassed in the Great War. As Syria reminds us, gas is just as lethal in 2013. 


Oh well, at least a fresco can’t be chiseled off a wall and sold to a private collector. At least, I presume it can’t.