Posts Tagged ‘Detroit’
Why Blacks are proud of Detroit
Posted on: June 28, 2009
A quote by David Goldberg in the article “G.M., Detroit and the Fall of the Black Middle Class” in the New York Times Magazine says it all; “It wasn’t that long ago that Detroit was the home of the nation’s most affluent African-American population with the largest percentage of black homeowners and the highest comparative wages”. While the rest of us are preoccupied with the fact of the death of Michael Jackson, himself from Gary, In, an old working town the truth about the reality of the Black Middle Class, which has shifted from Detroit to elsewhere in the country there is never enough that can be said about the rise and fall of the middle class from a small Midwestern class to the rest of the Midwest for those looking to redeem themselves through the manufacturing sector. Detroit was never an “educated town” full of white collar administrative jobs in call centers or government jobs or service industry jobs as many places where an African-American with enough of an education to stay off of the streets but not enough to make $50,000 a year could reside. No instead Detroit is a place where Blacks were once relegated to a single side of town and had eventually grew in population to take over the city and make the city their own. Detroit was that rare city in the North, in particular the Midwest, where this was possible whereas in other cities, including Chicago, the politics of having a city that was “half and half” or where Blacks were a minority created a situation ripe for the complex yet convulted politics of having enclaves of power and influence in small neighborhoods in the city yet no real presence in the city itself.
It isn’t that Detroit was the first American city to have a Black mayor, though many may have simply assumed that the designation actually goes to Cleveland of which Carl B. Stokes was the first African-American to become the mayor of an American city in 1967. Yet it was not long behind as Coleman Young held the office of mayor in Detroit from 1974 to 1993, and things have never been the same in Detroit. Many will say that Young destroyed the city, others will point to his legacy as a reminder that no one is perfect, five times or not. The truth of Detroit, as always, is somewhere inbetween; on one hand the virtual isolation of African-Americans in Detroit not just from other racial groups but the cultures of African-Americans in other cities as well can be a serious problem, on the other hand it has created the underpinnings for a unique celebration of African-American culture that can only truly be understood and appreciated by someone who was born and raised in the city.
It is not that Detroit does not have a diverse population outside of the Blacks and Whites that live there, but the way in which the city has developed has always encouraged and fostered seperatism, as was the case with many cities up North. To this day the demographics of the city is 81% Black, 12% White leaving just 7% for other ethnic groups which in a city of over 900,000 is still over 63,000 which means there are larger ethnic neighborhoods in that city than African-American neighborhoods in general elsewhere. Yet that in itself may speak volumes for a solidarity that you do not often see in other cities where African-Americans would be more likely to engage with other cultures and try on other things and experience something outside what outsiders may percieve to be the monolithic culture of Detroit.
You also see this in Atlanta and cities like Washington DC where generations were able to benefit from the “opening up” of the city. Washington DC actively and aggressively recruited African-Americans to work in the city as early as the forties whereas other cities were about to be thrown head first into our civil rights struggle a decade later. At least this is what I remember having read in a museum in the city somewhere; that African-Americans could easily find work in the city or is that revisionist history, have things always been as rosy in Washington DC as they are now? It isn’t that hard to figure out; when you have great pay at jobs that do not require an advanced education to get that were relatively easy to obtain and you could get the entire family to move into the city and you were free to celebrate your culture in ways that you may not have been able to do elsewhere it makes for a powerful combination. The question is, can the city leverage that level of committment and reinvent itself and make it a place where African-Americans would want to move to again in the near future or are those successes of the past a big part of how the city may get in its own way? The answer to that question is in part of what could put it over the top again years from now and help it to differentiate itself from the rest of the North as it is now pecieved as being the biggest casualty in the Rust Belt.
So it is easy for someone else to question one’s level of commitment without exploring where that commitment comes from. I can look at the city and raise any number of questions, but the city hasn’t done for me what it has done or given that sense of pride of me to that which has been born and raise there in particular if they are of a second or third generation resident. So the arguments are a moot point because in all truth the city does off a unique experience over other American cities, despite what it may look like to outsiders. The strength and relevancy of the city is not measured by residents through the same means that we measure the strength and relevancy of our own city or those that we admire.
This old man just rips your heart out.
I know in the past I was like Detroit needs to lie in the bed that they made for themselves but this old man is proud of a legacy of him, his old man, and his son having worked at the same dealership. It’s hard to tell just how many dealerships like this are closing their doors but it just makes you wonder …
old school Detroit
Posted on: March 20, 2009
Enjoy some of this old school Detroit goodness from the 90s. You know you want to …
Check out dude at the end doing his thing, priceless
Best dance song from the 90s, hands down
Here’s one from the late 80s
if you really want to reminiscene here is another one, most likely from the 70s
I don’t know if The New Dance Show and The Scene are related, feel free to let us know.
- In: Detroit | development | opinion
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First off let me start by saying that I love Detroit. This strange city has seen some interesting ups and downs during the twentieth century. It was built on a single industry, but in it’s height saw many significant cultural movements occur. Most notably was Motown, but few realize that the city has also made interesting cultural contributions in many other ways. Techno music was born there, and the town has as many Arabs as other cities has Latinos.
But there are other aspects about the town that are downright depressing. As far back as the late eighties and early nineties Detroit has had an incredible amount of vacant land. Urban explorers have always marveled in the fact that whereas in other cities you get a few vacant blocks here or there, in Detroit there are literally hundreds of vacant properties that are literally a shell of their former selves. You can literally look through houses that have been firebombed, or buildings in which demolition began, but was never completed.
Yet an interesting article in the Detroit Free Press shows the real extent of the problem. Over 30% of the city is vacant. That means that for every 10 blocks, 3 are empty. Few realize that Detroit is around 139 square miles; big enough to contain densely packed cities like Boston, San Francisco, and the borough of Manhattan. Speaking of Manhattan, Detroit is no where near as big as New York City. But it is interesting that at least one borough and two other major cities can fit comfortably inside of the area of Detroit.
Like many other cities in the region Detroit had roughly twice as many people in 1950 as they do today. Back then the city had more people as Philadelphia does now. These days though Detroit could easily get by with only 50 square miles. Some have suggested that the city could turn to urban farming to raise money, create more greenspace, and serve some of it’s own food needs as well as employ it’s populace. Everyone knows that unemployment is highest in Detroit, and the city often alternates with Washington DC, Camden NJ and New Orleans as cities that have the highest murder rates per capital
The problem with redeveloping Detroit in this way is that it suggests a major paradigm shift in both the way in which Detroit is percieved and it’s uncertain future. Solace to natives of the city is taken in the idea that Detroit is a rough city in which to live, and a sense of pride exists in the fact of just how urban Detroit can be, particularly given that while physically, clearly it is not as urban as it once was, it still is in other ways. Loosing the distinction of having been a place where life throws it’s absolute worst at you, in fact life itself is not certain in the city, though you can be a survivor to have lived in such a rough place, tears at the soul of the city.
Yet with these large amounts of vacant lands much of what one remembers about Detroit is destroyed anyway. The city was built for the automobile; large roads that would take one for up to 20 miles through the city in a comfortable grid pattern. Nice expressways and highways with grand views. A bridge which brings you into downtown Detroit as you make your grand entrance as you are descending upon the city. Beautiful urban tapestry in the Art Deco style, and many of the bridges to go with them. The people mover, a piece of a rail track in which a train moves 2.9 miles one way and loops around part of downtown. Clearly a failed effort but still part of Detroit.
The irony is that in all things downtown Detroit will go unscathed; indeed if anything the decaying buildings downtown will be razed and rebuilt before any other part of the city is. If it’s populace ever returns, there may be enough money to extend or rebuilt the people mover. But the neighborhoods are a shell of their former self, if not literally separated by vacant blocks. People try to take care of their properties, but when it is the only one for blocks or acres in an urban setting it is quite disconcerting.
Now there are other cities with vacant land that has become quite a problem. Philadelphia is often immortalized on film for it’s vacant land and urban blight. In fact the city has had up to 40,000 parcels of land abandoned or in a derelict condition. Yet in Detroit it is not the same thing; Philadelphia is still somewhat in the enormous metropolitan area of New York, not exactly in it but most certainly it’s own metro borders it. Detroit on the other hand, is a far cry from Chicago, and it’s problems often seem isolated and to itself. Both are on the eastern border of their respective states. In fact if Detroit were on the other side of Michigan offering a nice alternative to how expensive Chicago has become bordering Chicagoland, this probably would have never happened.
Detroit’s issues are more insular; it is a city that you can avoid altogether traveling through the Midwest going elsewhere to the country. You do not even have to go through it to visit other cities in Michigan, let alone any of the other major cities around there in fact unless you’re seriously considering visiting some parts of Canada it can be avoided altogether. So you really have to want to visit Detroit to concern yourself with it, there’s nothing forcing you there.
Yet if you have heard about the city and it’s problems there is everything magnetically attracting you there, a masochistic instinct to want to try it on for yourself. It is a very odd city; the uninitiated think that there must be gunshots going off all the time and that you are always in harms way. It is anything but, I spent a few weeks up there back in the early nineties. You would hear a gunshot or two at night, but other than that it was quiet, very, very quiet, like the quiet before the storm. Depending on where you are at you may never see anyone anyway. Watching the news, in which you hear every night that a few people had been shot or killed, was more disturbing than actually exploring the city and seeing it for yourself.
So the city now stands at a crossroads. Continue to shrink and see the city abandoned as few as 700,000 people will live in the city by the year 2035, or create more parks and greenspace and yes, some urban farming. Detroit could make some technological breakthroughs which would return some of that long lost respect the city has had for innovation. Yet another contribution to the American tapestry, it will be interesting to see what happens with the city in the near future …
Last year around this time there was bloodshed in the streets as fanboys fought and defended the companies they had grown to love against the Open Source movement. The Apple community had long found the vindication they had looking for all of these years; the success of the iTunes store and the iPod set the stage for people to buy the iPhone, which was going to pimp smack the industry and win over even more customers. It didn’t matter that the carrier was At&T, who was vilified for their poor customer service, the iPhone, as most of Apple’s hardware, was a strong enough product people would sign up for an agreement anyway on a crappy network just to get their hands on the device, and many did. Microsoft was having a bad day and fair weather consumers turned against them because of Vista and all manner of anarchy ensued.
At the end of the day though the market share of Linux had only rose by small margins, in part of the lack of communication and any cohesive efforts to really communicate to the consumer why their product was better. The Big Three suffer from the same image problem; tens of brands, no clear leadership, and indifference and manhandling of ignorant consumers that simply do not want to believe that what Detroit is offering these days is a sure thing. Technically they suffer from that same problem as well; these vehicles are very complex and intricate and aren’t easy to understand on the surface, they cost a lot to buy and in that people fear even more to maintain, no one wants to be on the side of the road.
Yet such is exactly what you should have expected from companies with huge reserves of cash that could afford to do what they had done for so many years. Back in the late 90s Steve Jobs had left Apple and went off to pursue development of a new platform called NeXT. He hired Paul Rand, at the time the best logo designer on earth to come up with a new image for this machine. They had Ross Perot’s money, yet it all fell apart because it was ahead of it’s time. So Jobs ended up back at Apple and put what he had learned into Mac OS X. In some respects it used off the shelf Linux technology and in others a nice face was put on top of the technology and sold to consumers ignorant of Unix as something new and completely different. But it worked and OS X has continued to be a success then and Apple was raised from the ashes of mediocrity.
Clearly the Big Three may never get that money they’re looking for from the government, which is too bad. These days fanboys are out in the streets again claiming that American consumers are unpatriotic and are leveraging an unfair assessment against the Big Three and not giving them a fair chance. You hear rhetoric about what “the true cost of foreign goods” is, among other things. They belittle people who drive foreign vehicles. You hear it on an intellectual level from panelists on cable news shows, the UAW, and people who post on forms. They have interesting arguments, but their tactics remind you of the crusades; individuals ready to go to war to spread dogma without any real consideration for the people they are trying to reach.
It isn’t that said people do not need to be reached that is the problem. The issue is that you are blaming the consumer in that your own personal failures as a company or an institution are being highlighted. Their first mistake was in pandering to the consumer and giving them too much of what they wanted. Consumers do not know anything and certainly do not have any resources to do anything about what they do know. You don’t give people exactly what they want, and then all but eliminate options for that consumer that is not part of the mainstream as a business practice. Most companies that give consumers precisely what they want go the way of the dinosaur once people’s fickle tastes change.
Steve Jobs did not give people exactly what they wanted; many hated OS X and did not understand the reason why the company had to make that shift. But they weren’t programmers either, and there are times when you have to take that high road in order to carry out that vision that takes decades to implement. They knew that gasoline would inevitably be a problem in that people needed to shift towards hybrid technology. If they were going to make a living off of sport utility vehicles, modified truck chassis, then they should have been more aggressive about implementing the technology back then at that time. People were more than happy to pay a $5,000 to $20,000 premium for the vehicles anyway more should have been done about gasoline efficiency at that time.
If you read between the lines of what we know about sport utility vehicles now it would appear that people were driving around on old technology made to look new in the fact that it was an SUV to begin with. They had locked themselves in by creating new factories that were only able to make if not just one car, a handful of vehicles that relied on the same chassis. That is just insane and as the banks relied heavily on cheap money Detroit was expecting consumers to continue to buy SUV into oblivion. It is no wonder that they are bankrupt now.
One poster on a forum I had visited suggested that the UAW is now only hiring people at $14 an hour anyway, and that the days of old where people were making upwards of $30 an hour were behind us. Yet labor in and of itself was not the entire issue; hopefully no one had really thought that. Speaking of labor, it is true that purchasing foreign automobiles from companies whose factories were in Southern Right To Work states where workers are free to leave without any notice and companies are free to fire them at will does come across as being definitively unpatriotic. Yet most of us who weren’t cutting it or getting any breaks have left the North for the South anyway. That is a hard sell to those masochists that love to continue to live up North; or is that easy to say because in the New South you are absolutely nothing without your college degree anyway. The slums look nicer, people are bit friendlier about things but it is the same bull if not worse.
At the end of the day none of that matters. This is about companies on the verge of bankruptcy and their followers trying to explain their way out of their image problem in order to prolong the pain and suffering that is going to come to millions of individuals caught up in the web who have put so much of themselves and their assets and living into these corporations they can’t move. They couldn’t convince the American government, and the people have spoken many years ago on the matter. Unemployment ranks will swell, people will eventually find another job and lets hope they can get unemployment benefits long enough to do so. There may be a whole lot of people seriously considering construction as an option, or perhaps they’ll end up in the service industry. In any rate giving the infrastructural issues where I’m at now we sure could use the extra hands …
The fall of Christine Beatty
Posted on: December 2, 2008
Probably time you can do with your eyes closed. Yet for Christine Beatty the opposite seemed to ring true. Concerns about how her child was going to be cared for during her short, 4 month time away. Shame that while she had connected with Detroit and it was her home and the place that she was proud to have lived in she had let the city down. Kilpatrick was quintessentially, the best and worst of Detroit encapsulated, everything you think about and love to hate about Detroit. Beatty, on the other hand, was someone who while reading her plea came across as someone caught in the game trying to get ahead a tad too greedy trying to stuff her pockets who seriously thought in her own mind, convoluted as those thoughts had been at the time, that she was helping the city.
Now this wasn’t the Beatty that we had seen during the trail. Back then she lied on the stand, rolled her eyes, and was as indifferent as Kilpatrick. But the old photograph that circulates showing Beatty and Kilpatrick back in 2002 suggests a different story; a woman perhaps enthralled with the attention from someone as powerful as a mayor with wide eyes “going to Washington” as they say wanting to make a difference.
Sure there is plenty of drama to go around, and I’m sure many outside of Detroit will start to tune in to see what else unfolds. A bunch of talented, smart individuals duking it out regressing and digressing in front of the camera. If you’re really interested, there is more than enough video over at freep.com (Detroit Free Press) to keep you away from your soap operas. But none of that compares to seeing a sharp, well dressed Christine Beatty walking to the courtroom still composed break down and cry on the stand. Reminds me of an old movie where a Black woman becomes a career shoplifter and has to loose her job at a department store because she was caught up having stole to make her mother look good. The mothers conditional love had her daughter putting herself in harms way just so she could wear the latest Armani, Chanel or Saint John. Her only way out was to lay in fertilizer in the back of a rusty pickup truck while cops swirled around. Excellent movie I just can’t remember the name of it.
Which brings us to quintessential Detroiters wearing their best designer gear in the best and worst of times. Yet this time none of that mattered because the games and fun were over now. The shame and fear that seemed marked across the face of someone who may have went to City Hall innocent and unscathed now corrupted with power taking a fall; a true shame indeed …
Are we telling Detroit as in the Big Three to drop dead or Detroit as in the city of Detroit itself to drop dead?
When New York was told to “Drop Dead” by Ford in 1975 it was in one of it’s most tumultous decades. Ten percent of the people had left the city in the seventies, more than any other period in it’s history. The New York that was left was a city of extremes in which it had went through it’s darkest hour, and by 1990, when things began to turn around again the population had only risen by 3 percent. The decade that followed though, showed growth that the city had not seen since the thirties.
New York City turned itself around in part not just due to it’s own marketing efforts and the word of mouth buzz that always draws people to the Northeast, but because America truly believed in the city, for better or worse. True New York isn’t the city that it was in the eighties or even the nineties, and perhaps it shouldn’t be on some level. Few would argue that the place isn’t far more accessible with less crime than it ever has been overall, particularly in certain neighborhoods. It is still recognized as the epicenter of fashion and entertainment, though other cities have surely made their own mark since then. You can still chase your dreams in that city, even if it is like 20 times harder to do so now than it was at that time.
Yet I have to wonder if Detroit, who should drop dead as they probably will not recieve the assistance they need, or little if any at all, will whether the storm. Detroit inspires that curiousity and on some level the auto industry did allow individuals to chase their dreams. A relatively unskilled laborer could learn the trade and make a decent living for themselves. It brought many to the Midwest, many of which have simply relocated elsewhere in the region after Detroit’s decline. It was a force to be reckoned with.
So many of us would like to see Detroit come back to prominence I wonder how many of us are truly doing anything about it. This city has to find a way to move past that old twentieth century legacy into one in which other industries can make it into a very prosperous place again. Not just for some either, but for anyone willing to work hard enough to make their own way, just like the auto industry had made that possible over 30 years ago.
When people leave the city of Detroit, the suburbs continue to grow. I wouldn’t give up on the city until the population of said suburbia was actually to go into decline, and there isn’t any real reason to forsee that happening any time soon. So we’re still talking about over five million people in an area of the Midwest that has all but been forgotten by the rest of the country. It’s just an issue of either having the city grow and chew away at it’s surroundings, which is easier said than done, or create a climate in which people would want to move back into the city, which again, may be easier said than done. Either way I remain an optimist as to what the future of Detroit may hold.
- In: opinion | politics
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So now we’re considering a bailout of the automakers as well, which on the surface seems like a terrible ordeal. I mean how much money do they need at this point in the game? Of course this is coming from someone who didn’t feel that the banks should be bailed out either. But I’m not a politician or an economist, and aren’t sure what the real extent of the damage would be if they weren’t. Also, I have to ask myself, “are you taking what works for yourself, from a self-righteous perspective, or what is truly good for the rest of the country”?
Yet it troubles me, and angers me, to consider a bailout of the automakers. First off the banks have only gotten themselves into trouble as of recently, the automakers, on the other hand, have been producing garbage since the seventies. The writing was on the wall then, and the Japanese were making better cars that got more mileage at that time.
The automakers have pushed for legislation and reforms and all other manner of means by which to avoid any type of regulation, like the banks, for decades now. The automakers were able to effectively prevent the government from putting any real regulation on gasoline efficiency, for example, but still failed miserably at the end of the day. There was a time when the automakers had the cash to at least develop new technologies, but now if those technologies aren’t already in development chances are they would never get around to developing them.
I should buy shares of Ford for $1.91, just for symbolic reasons, as a true American. Yet the automakers, again, allowed individuals doing the same job, repetitively, to be paid like $30 an hour some up to $100 an hour because of elaborate union contracts and agreements. In no other industry, not even in construction, can you expect to make those types of wages without really banging your head up against the wall, just to do labor. I’m not saying that the labor was easy, I sure as hell could not work in an automobile factory, but it’s still labor nonetheless.
I can appreciate a construction worker making $30, even $50 an hour to improve infrastructure and build roads, office parks, hospitals, etc. This is something I may have to use but an automobile, that is something I do not want to have that I would be a lot better off without. It is a luxury, unless I live in an area that truly does not have public transportation. But regardless of what I think of what they make, because quite honestly people are willing to pay for the automobiles and the money was there; it’s akin to complaining about what atheletes make when you pay hundreds, if not thousands, to show up for a Super Bowl or to watch games on TV.
Automakers went from paying really good money for people to not just live there, but to enter the middle class to hiring people on a temporary basis at like $7 an hour never to hire them on full time. Get rid of them during the off season. You would think that would have been enough for them to save money, yet it wasn’t.
The dispicable state they’re in now, even if they were to get rid of the unions and everyone was making like $10 an hour it woudn’t matter. They have to switch things up a bit. Not everyone wants a supercomputer in their car, create simpler vehicles that can get like 70 MPG for those who want it that don’t care about the latest technology, create those fuel wasting vehicles for those who are okay with like 12 MPG and something inbetween for the rest of us.
I have tried to support our own though; hell automobiles are about the only thing remotely made in America that is left. All manners of unusual problems I did not know that you could have with an automobile, like power steering going out, electrical problems, so on and so forth. American automobiles will run forever if you have the money to throw into them, even Ford/Mercury. But if you’re on a tight budget and just have enough to make the payments and skip on insurance to get by stay away from them at all costs.
It really is the luck of the draw. I know people still riding in Fords from like the mid nineties that never had any real trouble, and others that had problems as soon as they purchased the vehicle. I had a car with a dead thermostat; car was always cold never would warm up, though it would drive it was just real shaky. Was it a computer problem, or was the actual thermostat itself dead I’ll never know. I eventually solved that problem only to have issues with my rack and pinion, which was more than the car was worth so I just kept a lot of power steering fluid around.
It’s no wonder that the automakers are in the shape they’re in. Should we bail them out, well yes only so that like a million more Americans won’t be out of work. But we won’t like it, and sure we’ll complain about that much be added to our tax burden until this mess gets resolved …
Other blogs I check out
Posted on: August 13, 2008
- In: news | opinion
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I’m not from Detroit but I am still from the Midwest. Still have a soft spot from the place though I refuse to live there. Still pulling for Detroit to come around not just economically but just their rep in general which is badly battered and bruised these days. S* that’s going on with Kirkpatrick isn’t helping that either. Yeah it’s a three ring circus it seems; only in Detroit you’d say. The city will go on unscathed as though it never even happened.
It’s a cool site though.
Best aggregation of news from the top sites period. Kicks Yahoo’s a*; truly one heck of an offering.
Not always accurate, but if you’re a nerd like myself you want those trivial facts quickly. Learned all kinds of s* on there, now Google Knol is trying to compete with them, which will be interesting.
When other newspapers started b* and crying about the web taking over The New York Times went about creating one of the best online sites for a newspaper ever. Kicks everyone’s a* I haven’t found anything that even comes close to the s*.
If you want real talk, not that edited take on stuff that even most blogs offer topix is the only way to really get both points of view. Sure they play a lot of games on there but it’s one heck of a site. They partner with a lot of newspaper sites, and sites like Ohio.com often link up to them and allow them to manage their message boards.
I’ve never actually read the Detroit Free Press but their website is the real deal. Some of the best online video you’ll see from a newspaper, IMO. Their coverage of the Kirkpatrick scandal is riveting, to say the least.
That’s it for now, but those are my must see sites for browing the web. Also forget to mention zdnet.com, as the infighting not only between the respondents but the writers themselves are entertaining and a quick way to kill some empty time at work.
A different side to Detroit
Posted on: January 17, 2008
- In: Detroit | opinion
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I found some quality footage of life in Detroit, Michigan inadvertently. When you do a search on YouTube for Detroit you find all of these videos celebrating how awful the city has become and what do you know some 8 MM footage converted showing how the city was vibrant back in the mid 50s was part of the mix. This is a real beauty, in fact if you think of what the city has turned into since then it’s rather bittersweet.
Embedding was disabled of this footage, but you can check it out here.
If you check on that one link you’ll get links to the other two reels on the side.
Most of the footage of Detroit focuses on it’s slums and how it’s deteriorated. The irony is that millions, if not billions, have been poured into it’s downtown, not unlike the tactics taken by other cities to reinvigorate their economies. But I have yet to find slums quite like that in Detroit, but in their sheer mass and the extent of the damage that has been done. Buildings that are hollowed out, sometimes to the extent where the front of the building exists but not the back, or the other way around. Entire neighborhoods that have been razed, left over by neglected empty blocks predominated by weeds. Entire office buildings and skyscrapers that have been abandoned for decades and remain empty.
These days the Renaissance Center is a grim reminder of the broken promises that redevelopment promised Detroit. It stands proudly, all shiny and “new” but hundreds of yards from abandoned buildings. I’m still looking for a turn around to this town …
okay so the skinny jeans didn't work out for me so well ... 
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