Detroit is fucking awesome. I will be going to school in Ann Arbor
This is a classic case of "part one correlating with part 2."
Ann Arbor is 20 minutes southwest of Detroit, of course it's awesome. If Autoweek ever calls me to the mothership, I'd choose to live in Ann Arbor - it's a beautiful little college town, full of hot coeds, plenty of breweries, and I kicked myself for not getting a job at Automobile in
their old office at a former brewery.
The rest of Detroit? Terrible...but the last time I was there, for the auto show, I was fortunate enough to check out the coolest places and businesses of Detroit.
Green Dot Stables,
Cliff Bells, the
Fillmore Theater,
Slow's (an auto journalist staple),
John King Books, which is 7 stories of amazingness, and
Vinsetta Garage, a former 1910s service garage now turned into an amazing restaurant and partially owned by the Crain family, who pays my bills.
But yeah, Detroit boggles belief. One of my friends who lives by the Fillmore best described it as, "it's like a 1950s, 1960s industrial town that never evolved past that." So it's like a time capsule, at least the parts that are still standing. There are entire swaths of abandoned houses that have just been left there, houses that have burned down and nobody has thought to tear the charred husks down, because nobody owns the property, whole neighborhoods bulldozed into dust and foundations and wild grass,
packs of stray dogs, and wide open boulevards desolate with cars, except ones that were once on fire. Across from Slows is the
Michigan Central Station, which is 18 floors of emptiness and in the middle of an entirely empty patch. They bulldozed the old Tiger Stadium years ago, nearby there, but haven't figured out what to do with the empty grass. Slow's is on a complex of tight brick buildings, probably from the 1920s, but it's clear that it used to be a bustling neighborhood before people left en masse. When I toured Detroit with CrazyRussian I couldn't help but think, "why don't they just have a guy drive a truck through these abandoned wooden buildings?" You think the "apocalypse" bullshit is just that, bullshit, but you go there and it's mindblowing how real it is.
I try not to be pessemistic about it, as Detroit has finally convicted its shitty corrupt ex-mayor
Kwame Kilpatrick, and there are people who I know that are
doing great things there, and anybody I know from there is passionate about the city even if they may live in Ferndale or Royal Oaks. But this isn't China: it'll take years to revitalize the city, even if I want to hold onto the idea that it will. For the meanwhile - enjoy it, go to the places mentioned above, rent a big-assed V8 of some sort, and keep the doors locked.