May 27 2009
Detroit & the Downfall of Monoculture
Jill and I drove to Detroit for Memorial Day weekend, which is the worst weekend of the year for driving America’s highways, but a fitting time to visit Motor City, it seems. Jill grew up in Detroit and still has that flattened Mid-western accent that makes her sound like a 1930 gangster’s moll from an old movie. Though she spent most of her years in Bloomfield Hills, a posh suburb, she went to college at Wayne State and, as an adult, lived downtown, for which she has fond memories.
The Perhaps no city in America seems as troubled nowadays as Detroit. Its demise sits squarely with the demise of the automobile industry. I’m tempted to wag a finger at downtrodden Detroit and shake my head in dismay and scold, “What were you thinking?†Talk about putting all of your eggs in one basket! I enjoyed our visit, I should hasten to add, and, in just a minute I want to talk about the cool Detroit stuff we saw. But first allow me to declaim on Detroit as an illuminating example of monocultures and why they don’t work in the long run.
If you’ve ever watched a movie like the 1956 classic, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,†you know the problem posed by a world where everyone does the same thing. The world of the zombie-like body snatchers is a monoculture. It offers no variety and no prospect for surprise. Ultimately, it’s mind-numbing and soul-crushing, if not life-threatening.
City planning in the 1950-60s took a monocultural view of “urbanl renewal†by bulldozing old neighborhoods and erecting highrise “housing projects.†The one-size-fits-all idea of housing projects ignored the history and diversity of existing neighborhoods. The result was alienation of urban dwellers and accelerated decay of inner cities. At the same time, a monocultural approach informed corporate farming, which bulldozed the traditional multi-crop system and replaced it with gigantic spreads of single crop growth. As a result, monocultural (corporate) farming has not only eradicated small family farms but also depleted the soil, increased reliance on caustic fertilizers and pesticides, and, in general, thrown nature out of balance.
Years ago, Detroit took a monocultural approach to its economic future by centering its energy and resources on automobile manufacture. The city thought nothing of expanding to its outermost suburbs—because automobiles made this easy—and so it gutted its once-vibrant downtown. Apparently, Detroit made little effort to expand its manufacture base, just as the automobile makers made little effort to expand their concept of the car. Among the car-makers’ many missteps, or arrogantly willful acts of ignorance, was their late acceptance of fuel-efficiency. Even as Detroit auto makers entered the era of fuel efficiency, they did so grudgingly. And now we hear them whine and whimper about how good they are for America.
At bottom, the belief in the benefits of monoculture is a belief that BIGGER is BETTER. Big banks make better decisions than small banks. Big factories are more reliable than small factories. Big investments are safer than small investments. This bias continues to inform government and policy-making, as we see in recent arguments asserting that we cannot let the American auto-makers fail because they are TOO BIG to fail and would take down too many other businesses. You see any irony in such thinking?
“Diversity†has become a watchword in recent years because we have learned that variety and difference are healthy in just about everything, from ecology to economics. Microfinance, for example, offers loans to the poor in developing countries. These are loans that traditional (BIG) banks would never offer, and yet these tiny loans (usually less than $200) to ambitious entrepreneurs (mostly women) enable seemingly helpless people to help themselves. About microfinance
It seems that Detroit today represents so much of what America got wrong or, rather, so much of what America used to be but can’t be any more. Alas, it’s not a diverse city; it is, in fact, one of the most segregated cities in the country (white outside, black inside), so the prospect of constructing a rainbow coalition of urban rebuilders seems slim. Also, thanks to cars, it’s a huge city whose core has fallen away. Detroit may be the abandoned-house capital of the country. The hope in struggling cities like Baltimore and Cleveland is that they are small enough, and manageable enough, to get control of their decay. Detroit may be too large to hold that hope.
Is Detroit too big to fail? It has four professional sports teams—the Pistons, the Indians, the Tigers, and the Redwings—and two new, state-of-the-art, retro-style stadiums downtown. It has a symphony. It has a cool, renovated old theater downtown. Also, it has Pewabic Pottery, one of the last remaining arts and crafts potteries in the country. Founded in 1903 by artist Mary Chase Perry and a partner, it continues production in its little-changed 1907 building, just a few blocks from the Detroit River. It produces some stunning work. We bought a big vase.
Detroit has blocks and blocks of gorgeous old houses, many of them in heartbreaking disrepair. Jill and I picked out many favorites and fantasized briefly about buying one and fixing it up. I don’t know that any city in America has as many ruined factories as Detroit. Taking photos of them has become a cliché, or so a young photographer told me when I asked if she was documenting the demise of the beautiful architecture. “Oh, I pretty much did all that in high school,†she said.
We made sure to stop by the the Heidelberg Project.in east Detroit. It’s an art installation created by Tyree Guyton, a trained painter. Not long after his return from Viet Nam, he painted and variously decorated the exteriors of abandoned houses on the block where he grew up. It’s a visual editorial on the failures of the city, so much so that Detroit’s mayor tried to shut it down years ago but failed. Free speech, after all. Now the fanciful, colorful block attracts nearly 300,000 visitors a year. Perhaps the greatest irony framed by Guyton’s installation is that, unlike the houses he has adorned, the installation itself demands regular upkeep and additions of fresh paint and new-found refuse.
Jill and I spent the day antiquing. We drove to York, Pennsylvania, home of Historic York—the architectural antiques warehouse that got us started when we began rehabbing our old house ten years ago. Speaking of anniversaries: Historic York has been in business for over 30 years. It must be among the first preservation-friendly non-profit salvage warehouse in the country. It used to be crammed into a small storefront on York’s main street, but now it’s in a bigger space in mid-town York. We almost never leave Historic York without buying something. This time, Jill pointed out a country cabinet that would fit well on our back porch. Suddenly, it seemed we couldn’t live without it. That’s how it goes: we never know we need something until we see it.
The great thing about warehouses like Historic York is that you can make an offer, especially on a consignment item. So we made an offer. And the offer was accepted. Turns out, the country cabinet had been sitting there for a year. Jill claims she saw it the last time we visited but didn’t say anything because our focus was elsewhere. That’s another part of the phenomenon: you don’t see what you aren’t looking for, no matter how cool the item is.
While in York, we stopped at Big Steverino’s warehouse. We met him through his eBay store. Big Steve scours the east coast for architectural antiques and brings home some very cool stuff. This time we got a killer piece of stained glass from him—cheap because it’s damaged. We figured we could get it restored. But then, after returning home and having it appraised, we learned it would cost $900 to fix. Obviously, we don’t know much about glass. But now we know more—meaning that’s the last time we’ll pick up a piece like that, thinking it’s a bargain.
Short of the failure of my first two marriages, nothing has been more humbling in my life than working on this house. It’s a showcase of my mistakes—like my first attempt at plastering, found in a dark recess (fortunately) between two door jambs. It looks like crimped pie crust. I can’t even talk about the tile job I abandoned in the master bathroom a few years back. Looking at it now, I don’t know what I was thinking. But isn’t that how life works, we look back at ourselves and shake our heads in wonder.
Sunday, Jill and I went rock hunting with the dogs to bring more texture into the garden. We find rocks, big and small, in Jones Falls valley, about a mile from our house. The Jones Falls River , which runs through the middle of Baltimore, used to power the mills, many of which still stand. As always, we used Jill’s battered Honda CRV to haul our load.
We’ve been working on our garden to ready it for the Charles Village garden tour the first week of June. Our garden is four years old this summer and our two maples are getting big enough to shadow a good portion of their beds. Which means we have been re-locating some plants and putting in new ones to accommodate the changes.
Winter was hard enough to kill even our rosemary and mint, two plants I thought never died. However, some plants, like the butterfly bush in the north bed, have made a stand and are clearly here to stay. The rose bushes Jill and I salvaged from a friend’s yard last spring–originally planted in 1948–have taken hold and are thriving. I’m amazed at how much abuse old rose bushes can take and still keep going.
Placing rocks in in a garden takes some thought. You can’t just toss them anywhere. You have to make them look like they belong–usually by burying them partially. We also use boulders around the pond to complement the pond’s rocky sides. The honeysuckle is starting to go crazy near the pond, and the hosta beside the pond’s filter is monstrous already because it gets all the spillover.
This year we decided to plant the herbs in single location because last year, as the garden grew, we lost track of them. In fact, there were several plants — like a cluster of chicks and hens — that disappeared under abundant groundcover. We’re learning what thrives and what needs watching.
One frog survived the winter. We call her Lucy. A few of her tadpole siblings survived too. Jill is frog-crazy, so she just ordered 15 leopard frog tads. These will mature quickly and leave the pond for the garden. Lucy is a green frog. Greens are much more civilized than bulls. We got rid of our bulls two years ago. Because we’re a city garden and completely walled in, we don’t get any visiting frogs.
I’d have thought the media would have made a fuss about this. In these days of ultra-corporatization, I guess Disney fruit doesn’t make much of a story. But it gives me pause, mainly because I’m suspicious of huge corporations taking over any and everything. My father grew up in California’s San Joaquin valley, where most of America’s produce comes from. He lived amid the orange groves in the days before mega-farming. For a time, I lived there too. I loved the sweet pungent stink of rotting oranges from the groves. Come spring, pink-white orange blossoms rain from the trees like blizzard snow. On cold winter nights, the wind machines—airplane propellers mounted on tall poles– chatter over the groves, churning the air to keep the freeze off the fruit. In my father’s days, farmhands would light smudge pots in the fields, filling the groves with smoke to fight the freeze.
My grandmother worked in the packing houses until she was 72, grading oranges on the line eight hours a day, five days a week. She’d wear a sweater against the warehouse chill, and white cotton gloves to save her fingers. She sorted oranges according to size, sending the too-small or mushy ones either to be juiced or pulped (for animal feed or fertilizer). She often had a box of the best navel oranges on her porch. After graduating from college, I lived with her for a while and ate oranges every day. Now, nearly every time I pick one up, it reminds me of her and her hard-scrabble life.
For the longest time, the orange was a luxury item, a rare and costly fruit imported from far-eastern lands. Here in the U.S., the orange remained a costly item until transcontinental railroads and well-maintained highways made it more accessible and more affordable—circa the 1920s. Before it became a common grocery store item, it would show up as a Christmas treat, because that’s when the orange was most abundant and easily obtained. Whenever nineteenth century novels describe Christmas, they inevitably mention the orange in a stocking or as dessert.
One participant announced that, in Spain, Disney markets hamburger shaped like Mickey Mouse’s head. Another recalled drinking Donald Duck orange juice as a kid. I remember it too. Also noodles with Popeye the Sailor on the box. Kellogg’s corn flakes always had a sports star on the box. So what am I complaining about? Celebrity endorsements have been around for over a hundred years. They’re integral to our culture, for better or worse. Still, I’m attracted to the less flashy unknown brands—and modest packaging that reminds me of the seemingly simpler times. Most oranges still come that way, in part because oranges don’t need flash. They are already flashy, God bless them.
