Stepping out just before dawn in Detroit as the first traffic is assembling on the Edsel Ford Freeway, I am a lonely pedestrian in the city of cars, walking down Woodward Avenue to the center of downtown.
It’s lonely even as the sun begins to rise, partly because of the time of day, partly because everyone knows what Detroit has been through: riots, fires, razings, attempt after attempt to reassemble the city, all mostly failed. You can feel its great automotive success and its civic failures just looking down the struggling avenue, seeing the still-standing core a mile or two down, like Oz. Woodward Avenue—wide and car-loving, an eight-lane tribute to the convenience of the automobile, the device that made Detroit famous around the world, that once made it strong—is lined with monuments to the greatness of the city, along with boarded-up memories of the past, empty lots, scars. Transportation invented the place and, as the power of the car industry faded, as interstates shut off cities and drained their populations, transportation, or the lack thereof, critically injured them too.
A stranger in Detroit might be a little nervous, setting out on foot in the almost dark, given all that’s written and said about the city, given what you see on TV and hear in Eminem songs, but a stranger might also happen to meet a resident who is all revved up, happy to give directions to the downtown square, just ahead a few miles down Woodward. “Oh, you can ice skate there and in the summer they have movies—oh, it’s really neat down there,” she says. “Wait till you see!”
It’s almost a surprise to see new construction in Detroit, but there is the Max M. Fisher Music Center by Diamond + Schmitt Architects, a sparkling modern outpost of the Detroit Symphony, and, just adjacent, there are modern apartment houses going up, glass-and-brick construction that could be in Boulder or San Francisco or Atlanta but are in Detroit. Still, even Detroit residents seem to wonder why I am on foot and not waiting for a bus or a ride of some kind, surrounded as I am by four freeways within about a mile of each other: the Lodge, the Ford, the Chrysler, the Fisher. I pass the site of the old Motown office, at 2457 Woodward, and then crossing the Fisher—a.k.a. I-75—I enter downtown at last, and it’s as if I am entering a heart that has undergone bypass surgery. Some of the most beautiful old skyscrapers in America stand next to nothing at all.
Comerica Park, the relatively new Tigers baseball field, and Ford Field, home of the Detroit Lions, seem bigger than most ballparks, given their paucity of neighbors. And the car ads seem bigger too: huge building-sized advertisements that fill up office tower–free space, without irony. General Motors, a few blocks away, moved back downtown a few years ago, and it seems both courageous and courteous, I am thinking, when finally I come to Campus Martius, the new centerpiece of downtown Detroit, the center square.
Campus Martius, built in 2004, is everything Detroit wants to be, a magnet, a crossroads, a reenvisioned and reinvigorated public place. It is a brand-new civic space or maybe even an American piazza, though with an Au Bon Pain and a lot of poured concrete, it’s more plaza than piazza. Previously, two dozen or so lanes of traffic flowed freely through here. Now, there is a two-acre oval park that is the centerpiece of the redeveloping downtown—a place for movies in the summer, skating in the winter, for gatherings, for schmoozing—the schmooze being the act upon which all great public spaces are built. Around it stands a tentative collection of old and new and planned but not yet built office buildings. Among them is the new 15-story tower housing Compuware, the software developer that moved to downtown Detroit from the suburbs, as well as those businesses that recognize a good thing when someone
else sees it: a Borders, a Hard Rock Cafe, a Ben & Jerry’s.
And right behind it is the People Mover, a two-car monorail-like futuristic train, decorated, when I saw it, with advertising for automobiles, like a joke out of The Simpsons. And the People Mover carries pretty much nobody around the Detroit downtown—more a tourist attraction than anything to do with actual mass transit. Since it opened in 1987, the People Mover has pretty much been the sum total of Detroit’s public-transit system and a metaphor for a city ruined by urban blight, a train that circles over a city no one wants to be in, a train for which people would never, ever trade their car.
The Inn on Ferry Street is a complex of six buildings in the Queen Anne and Romanesque-revival style that sit silently in a neighborhood that was once filled with such homes, and it is here, a few hours later, that I meet Keith Schneider, deputy director and founder of the Michigan Land Use Institute. The Land Use Institute is a nonprofit, grassroots organization that is fighting sprawl in Michigan and attempting to shape development by supporting and quasi-evangelizing everything from watershed protection to farmers’ markets to wind power. It wants to do for Detroit and the state, and even to interested states and counties around the country, what the Marshall Plan did for Europe after World War II—rebuild it. Schneider has just driven a long way, some four hours, for a morning meeting at the Detroit chamber of commerce at One Woodward Avenue.
Though the prosperous and even not-so-prosperous counties of Michigan might not want to hear it, Detroit is, in some ways, the state writ large. It’s a former industrial powerhouse that saw a lot of industrial jobs leave in the ’70s and continuing off and on until now. It’s a state where, as far as regional planning went, highway development was emphasized over nearly everything else—which in turn spawned the growth of tract housing, of development gone amok, of cheaply built though not always affordable development far away from the downtowns that, because of the loss of jobs and the rise of suburbs and exurbs, were emptying out anyway. For that matter, Michigan is like the United States, crisscrossed with roads, its productivity, its environmental health and the health of its populace, its quality of life threatened by past land-use policies based not on sustainable limits but on the idea that a bigger and faster road will make the world a better place.
“You wouldn’t believe how different this place was three years ago,” Schneider says, referring to downtown Detroit. He’s running a little late for the meeting, as he pulls onto Woodward. We pass Campus Martius—the place is filled with people, strolling, coffee-ing, talking. We park, walk two blocks to One Woodward, a 28-story tower built in 1963 by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of New York’s World Trade Center. The design of One Woodward is so similar to the Trade Center, in fact, that in the big lobby, with the tall glass windows, you can feel the Trade Center lobby in your bones. At a table on the 19th floor, there is a group of Detroiters enjoying coffee and bagels—a couple of Schneider’s colleagues from the institute, a legislative specialist, a professor, a fundraiser, a member of the regional chamber of commerce, a developer with an eye for affordable housing; the former mayor of Grand Rapids is on the phone. They’re talking statewide strategy for smart growth—the creation of the Michigan Transportation Alliance.
It’s a discussion concerning development between Ann Arbor and Detroit. It’s a discussion about the proposed widening of I-75 and I-94, proposals they oppose. It’s a discussion about defining the in-city projects they approve of. “Environmental integrity, social equity, economic development—you have to have a balance,” explains Colin Hubbell, a local developer. The ideas for the city, for the state, for the region all have to do not with getting rid of the car but modulating it, reimagining it as one type of transportation among several.
“The big changes in quality of life come when transportation is ahead of land use,” Schneider adds.
After the meeting, Schneider drives me around to see the lofts converted by Hubbell—a note of modernism in the middle of not much. We drive back through an old, beat-up neighborhood close to downtown where Hubbell has built some less chic but affordable housing: two-family condos rising like spring wildflowers through the snow.
Schneider’s vision for a new Midwest, which he continues to elaborate on as we whip through the city, is based not on fast food and freeways, but on emphasizing itself as a regionally distinct place—a place where, for example, as the institute states, “sales of local farm products [are] a normal part of everyday business … a means to invigorate the local economy, preserve farmland, and highlight the region’s bounty.” Because, as Schneider’s fond of saying, “If roads and highways were the keys to success, Detroit would be Paris.”
In Schneider’s mind, the fate of Michigan has a lot to do with the fate of Detroit. But can changing Detroit into a more transportationally diverse metropolis really make a difference in a state so car focused? For an answer, Schneider and his colleagues point me to Grand Rapids, which is where I am headed that evening. On my way out of the Motor City, though, I get lost on an interstate, miss an exit, find the beautifully reengineered Ford River Rouge plant, discover I am too late for a tour, drive out past more auto plants—some of them still alive, some of them dying—then through more suburbs. I stop late at night for coffee, first at Burger King, then McDonald’s, the only places I can find.
“I’ll go days without ever driving,” Andy Guy, the Michigan Land Use Institute’s point man in Grand Rapids, says excitedly as he sets out with me to walk through downtown. “Grand Rapids is really kind of the model in Michigan right now, of urban revitalization, of transit-oriented planning,” he notes. In 2001, Grand Rapids—once home to trappers and missionaries and the Ottawa Indians and which distinguished itself from
the rest of Michigan, and the rest of the United States, as home to the finest furniture makers in the world—was called one of the most sprawling major metropolitan areas in the country by USA Today. Now, Guy points out the walkability, the new pedestrian signs, and, additionally, what he describes proudly as “the affordable beer.”
Though Michigan has the fourth highest jobless rate in the U.S., the Michigan Land Use Institute sees opportunity in the economic downturn: Attract new jobs near population centers, and build a public transit–oriented infrastructure on which a recovery and a 21st-century economy can grow.
We walk through downtown, with Monroe Avenue full of people, a warehouse district full of remodeled factories and lofts, and up on the hill a huge new medical complex under construction signaling Grand Rapids’ intent to attract health-industry jobs. “The way that we develop is essential to how we compete in the global marketplace,” Guy says. “If we just look like anyplace else, who’s going to want to live here?”
We cross a street, and walk toward the Grand River, which is filled with fishermen today. In a matter of minutes we arrive at the brand-new transit center, Rapid Central Station, with its well-lit, white-tented top. Guy points out the bus routes, noting the system’s strengths and weaknesses—it does not go to the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, for instance, an incredible greenspace. “There are still some pretty significant cultural amenities that we can’t get to on a bus,” he says. He points to the map. “This is a pretty serious highway, and you’d have to be crazy to cross it.”
We walk some more, crossing the river where once there were rapids, passing the fishermen, seeing the new YMCA, a circle of glass; Guy waves to a friend. We walk to the library, where he is greeted by a librarian and chats a while. We walk to the local bookstore. We look at the construction site for the new medical complex. “I can sit here with a can of beer and just watch,” he says, clearly relishing the fact that in Grand Rapids you can feel the future—or at the very least a future. It may be wishful thinking, but as you walk through town, following the new signs, seeing the new buses, noticing the people on the street who are out of their cars—and even those still in them—you feel an actual change in the air, a place becoming a place again.
On to Chicago, the capital of the Midwest! Drive and drive and drive through Michigan and across Indiana, on a toll road that the governor has just leased to a private company since the state, he says, can’t manage the costs. I drive through Gary, Indiana, its neoclassical public buildings on one side, its old black factories on the other. I drive through the swamps and marshes and deserted industrial outposts that are the borderland between Chicago and the rest of the world. I drive for a while on the old four-lane road from Gary to Chicago, now desolate, except for a few strip malls, and think: Slow isn’t so bad.
I wake up early the next morning, in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, to run the three blocks to the lakeside trails, watch the dawn burn the fog, buy a coffee and the papers, and, two L stops to the north, have breakfast with Mandy Burrell, a writer who works with the Metropolitan Planning Council, who lives in this L-based neighborhood.
“There’s a ton of interest in living downtown now,” she says, walking in off Addison and Southport, a two-minute walk from the L line. And so much of the interest is based on what Chicago has—and has had since 1888 and the rest of the country now appears to want, or something like it, anyway: the L, short for elevated, as in elevated trains. Today, the lines are being rebuilt by a city government constantly pushed by a population that is craving alternative forms of transit, and the neighborhoods in the city near the stations are desirable because of those stations. “We’re starting to see a lot of hot neighborhoods,” Burrell says.
After coffee, we walk down Southport, joined by one of Burrell’s colleagues, Heather Gleason, who studied housing for the council and is currently a zoning expert employed by the city.
Chicago is a city that gets it, as far as urban planners see it. Or is getting it, anyway. For instance, what Carl Sandburg once called the “stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders” is now seeming very green, right down to the top of City Hall, which is covered with grass, since the mayor planted a field of green on top in 2001, the year Boeing moved its headquarters from Seattle, after Boeing officials described Chicago as a place they wanted to live. Walking through a neighborhood like Lakeview, you can see why an executive would like it and why a nonexecutive would too. There are new shops and nice old bars, fancy coffee places and an old restaurant, boutiques and a bar/Laundromat, surrounded by new and old buildings and still-affordable apartments; the housing is two and three stories high, the residential street an antidote to the tall skyscrapers downtown. The new townhouses are adjacent to the 100-year-old ones and neither appears to mind.
“They’ve managed to blend new buildings in,” Campbell says. “You don’t notice it right away. You don’t say, ‘This is new brick.’ Now, there’s three new buildings in a row.” These structures built right next to the L are not the most beautiful buildings ever constructed, but then again, you don’t have to be Frank Lloyd Wright to build in such a vibrant place. The city throws you into the mix; your work is improved by association, a point made as well by the desolate new buildings in Detroit.
The L isn’t just something that gets you through the city; it is a way you experience it. “I’ve sort of charted my understanding of the city by how many lines I’ve been on,” Burrell says.
We climb to the line, the train, the rickety wooden platform that feels like Chicago, where we part ways. To stand on the platform, to look over the neighbohood, to see the Midwest sky: The L seems like such a relic, a thing from an old painting or documentary photograph from the ’20s. It’s easy to imagine that people would want to sit in an air-conditioned car rather than rumble along in work-destined groups. But people flock together semi-willingly that morning and every morning for that matter: Chicagoans seem to love their old L. But Chicagoans also love their new L, like the Rem Koolhaas–transformed L stop at the Illinois Institute of Technology, now a futuristic passageway, a glass-and-steel halo over the everyday experience, over the trip to work and school and, nearby, the White Sox. That’s the thing about transportation: The new can seem very old very quickly, but if you go back to it, if you tweak it and spruce it up just a little, if you concentrate on what really worked and go back to it once more, then the old isn’t old anymore. It’s new all over again.
