Satellite view of Detroit and Windsor, showing Lake Erie (bottom) and Lake St. Clair
Detroit’s street map has often been described as a
palimpsest. I’ve called it the broken hub of a wheel dumped beside the river
(which isn’t really a river; it’s a strait), but my metaphor actually leaves
out most of the streets. How the map came to look as it does today is a story
of…well, palimpsest, really: the occasional plan, destruction, expediency, and
economic interests. (Neglect and decay affect the look of the map on Google
Street View, but so far don’t seem to play a huge role in altering the map
itself.)
Detroit lies on the northern side of the Detroit River, a
strait (in French, un détroit) running
between Lake Erie (a Great Lake) and Lake St. Clair (a Still-Decent Lake). It’s
the only city in the US where you head south to get to Canada. That means that
Canada is beneath us. On a map, anyway.
Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit was founded in 1701 by a
rather colorful character, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac, whose
achievements also include (in no particular order) inventing a fake noble lineage
(the “de la Mothe Cadillac part)—complete with a fake family crest, a
simplification of which you can see today on the Cadillac next to you in the
parking lot; losing his entire fortune (reputedly by ignoring a fortune
teller’s admonition to not do anything
foolish like poke the Nain Rouge with a stick); and moving to Detroit’s
younger, more popular sister, New Orleans. Couldn’t stay put, that Antoine.
Physical and social mobility, and reinventing yourself were things you could do
quite easily in the “New World” where no one knew you. They became popular
hobbies in Detroit, where people came for opportunity and left when it dried
up, often reinventing themselves in the process.
A statue of Cadillac in Hart Plaza. On the right, he stakes his claim on a Lexus.
I took these photos in 2008, I'm not too proud to admit..
I took these photos in 2008, I'm not too proud to admit..
The city’s original white settlers brought with them from
their native Normandy a method of divvying up the land they stole from
Detroit’s native Wyandots and Hurons. That method was to lay out “ribbon
farms”: very thin, long strips of land that gave each farmer his own access to
the river (which isn’t really a river; it’s a strait). The oldest roads in
Detroit mostly reflect the locations of the ribbon farms and/or are named for
their owners. That’s why so many of Detroit’s streets have funny French
spellings, despite no one pronouncing them in French anymore.
Ribbon farms: Notice they did the same thing on the other side of the river, too.
Fast forward about a century, and in 1805, Detroit stakes
its claim as a city by doing what all cities do at some point in their history:
burning to the ground. (Just ask Chicago. Or San Francisco. Or London. It’s a
cliché, really.) Two major Detroit tropes occur with that fire: (1) the Nain
Rouge is seen dancing in the flames, the bastard; and (2) Father Gabriel
Richard, co-founder of the Catholepistemiad
(later sensibly re-named the University of Michigan) and priest at Ste. Anne de
Détroit Church, said something along the lines of “Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus,” which, being translated, means, “We hope for
better; it will rise from the ashes.” Whatever language he actually said it in,
it was such a great line it was eventually made into the city’s motto, and has
been kept ever-relevant by generation after generation of Detroit pyromaniacs
(the bastards).
Detroit city flag, incorporating the motto and the 1805 fire, as well as the three national flags that have flown over the city.
In 1806, Chief
Justice of the Michigan Territory Augustus Woodward produced a plan for
rebuilding the city. He laid out broad avenues in interlocking hexagonal
patterns with parks or plazas at the intersection points. The plan was supposed
to have been expandable with the city’s future growth: just add more hexagons! (W. HawkinsFerry calls the plan “so French in its geometric precision.”) Woodward’s
plan inscribed a new pattern over the surviving traces of the old ribbon farms.
Residents hated it at the time, because they no longer recognized their
hometown.
The Woodward Plan. Grand Circus Park makes more sense now, doesn't it?
Someone drew up this image of what the interlocking hexagons would have looked like,
had Woodward's plan been expanded.
had Woodward's plan been expanded.
Woodward’s plan was never expanded, though, despite the
city’s growth. Through the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution
was taking place throughout the U.S., and Detroit was no exception. Thanks to
its location in the Great Lakes system, Detroit became known for ship building,
making stoves, and doing all manner of things that involved bending or shaping
metal. (That eventually proved useful when the automobile came along.) As the
city expanded, thanks to industry, it did so according to the demands of
economic interests. Detroit was not alone in this. There was a growing sense
throughout the U.S. that its booming industrial cities were dirty and
unpleasant, organized as they were around industry rather than civic life. In
Detroit, for example, the river front was crowded with shipping yards, with no
public recreational access to the river.
In the 19th century, most U.S. architects trained
only by apprenticeship. The few that did pursue academic study had to go to
Europe to do so. Even then, most of them didn’t bother to finish their
programs; a diploma was simply not necessary to their practice back home. The fashionable place to study was the Écoledes Beaux-Arts in Paris, which urged a return to classical architecture, and
other things you can read about on Wikipedia.
But something happened at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The
fair’s Director of Works Daniel H. Burnham saw an opportunity to showcase his
ideas about making Chicago the sort of place people might want to live in, so that the Midwest’s nouveau-riche might settle there (i.e., spend their money there)
rather than just pass through on business trips. So he assembled a team of
artists, architects, and landscape artists and had them apply the Beaux-Arts
aesthetic and ideals to the fair’s site on Chicago’s lakefront. With this
project, Chicago’s lakefront was beautified and reclaimed, Chicago’s reputation
for its architecture began, and the City Beautiful movement spread like a
cliché through the nation (but one that renewed rather than destroying cities).
The Beaux-Arts style prefers to give its buildings and statues a great deal of "look space."
Today you can drive (or ride a train) from Chicago to
Detroit in about 5 hours. Apparently it took the City Beautiful movement nearly
two decades to make the trip around the turn of the 20th century. In
1910, Detroit’s mayor, Philip Breitmeyer, founded a City Plan Commission, which
immediately set about bringing Daniel H. Burnham and his similarly-middle-initialed associate, Edward H.
Bennett, to Detroit to do some much-neglected city planning. Nothing much had
been done since the Woodward plan (which was designed for a population of
50,000; Detroit had reached 700,000 by the time of the Burnham and Bennett
plan) other than Michigan Governor Lewis Cass’ 1830 development of old “Indian
trails” into military roads radiating out, outstate even, from the city’s
center: Fort Street, Michigan Avenue, Grand River Avenue, Woodward Avenue, and
Gratiot Avenue. (Poor Fort Street, only a street…)
I can't find any images of the Burnham street plan, so instead, enjoy this photo of Daniel Burnham, left, and Lewis Cass, right. Burnham's eyes look so sincere, but surely he's hiding something under that moustache. Cass is either reaching for his wallet or having chest pains.
I took this photo in October, 2012, on the way into Mercury Burger and Bar. They have great French fries, and, I have it on good authority, quite tasty poutine as well. (I'm a vegetarian, so I wouldn't know.)
By the early 20th century, Detroit had an
extensive and efficient streetcar (trolley) system—at its peak, in some
locations, streetcars arrived every sixty seconds! But with the popularity of
the automobile and the even greater popularity of moving to the suburbs, the
streetcar system fell into disuse and was closed in 1956. It is rumored the
streetcars still operate in Mexico City, which purchased them from Detroit. (No,
San Francisco, which has the hobby of collecting other cities’ steetcars,
doesn’t have them.)
>sigh<
Also with the rise of the auto industry, the need for
efficient freight transit into, out of , and across the city led to freeway
building. As with many other projects, from the Michigan Central Station to
general “slum-clearing” (read: corralling non-white people and poor white
people to less desirable locations), the freeways saw the city exercise
“eminent domain,” condemning buildings and displacing many people from their
homes, and disrupting or effacing historic neighborhoods. I-75 famously had to go right where Paradise Valley, the Black cultural center of
the city, was, destroying world-famous jazz and blues clubs among other important
sites. Corktown, Detroit’s oldest neighborhood, was widely razed for the
Michigan Central Station and its Beaux-Arts requisite of a really big park in
front of it to set it off. Freeways also disrupted Corktown and neighboring
Mexicantown, the latter of which has also had to put up with the AmbassadorBridge dumping ¼ of the commercial traffic between the U.S. and Canada right
into its residential areas. But thankfully, both neighborhoods are seeing
renewal in recent years.
Children enjoying the fountain by the Ren Cen on the Riverfront on a hot and muggy summer day, 2008.
So, as with any city, the street map will continue to
change, as will the landmarks and features on that map. Happily, in recent
years, the riverfront has been transformed into delightful public space, where
children play in fountains or ride the carousel, and people of all ages bike, walk,
take lunch breaks, just hang out, or even fish in the Detroit River. All while
looking down on Canada.
We're watching you, Windsor.
(Actually, I have nothing at all against Canada. Vive la Windsor!)
