Wheels of time creak in motor city

Boarded windows, beggars, loose manhole covers, stray dogs and a cold, whistling wind blowing from Lake Erie.

Just when Michigan's biggest town is most unpleasant to visit — in the middle of January, the Detroit Auto Dealers Association hosts its annual North American Auto Show in a city that certainly has seen much better days.

Motown is dying, a graffiti sprayed on a wall greets passers-by, straight near the convention centre.

Detroit tells the story of deep economic and social problems, which a city that relies on a particular industry faces over a decade-long downturn.

This has left hundreds of thousands in Michigan jobless, suburbs deserted and businesses closed. Motor City once was the cradle of the American auto industry.

Henry Ford began assembling his Model T from 1909 in new factories in Dearborn.

Suppliers and other carmakers, notably General Motors and Chrysler, followed with many other new plants. In 1909, Detroit was one of the first American cities to get asphalted streets.

In 1910 the first petrol station was opened and in 1915 the city put its first traffic light system into operation. During the 1920s, America's first city freeway was built.

Hundreds of thousands made a living from the car industry, commuting from their city apartments or suburban homes to the factories of the Big Three — General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, in Flint, Dearborn and Auburn Hills and others.

Nowadays the traffic lights are still changing their colours on most of the crossroads in downtown Detroit but there is hardly any traffic to control.

The centre of Motor City not only seems to be almost deserted, it literally is. More than 60 per cent of all office buildings are empty.

Skyscraper windows with broken glass gaze over the scene, garbage litters the street. Today, the population of Detroit is around 900,000 — compared with almost two million in the 1950s.

But the decay of Detroit did not necessarily start with any oil price worries or financial crises of the past.

The first sign of a fragile facade hiding serious social tensions became obvious as early as during the race protests of the McCarthy era from 1947 to 1956 and the first organised strikes in the car factories.

At this time, many white-collar workers preferred to move out of the city, heading to the suburbs and leaving the city's borders behind.

As a result, the car giants were forced to decentralise their factories.

The mass movement of auto workers, described as “aggressive migration'' by Detroit architect Andrew Zago, badly affected the city's structure.

In the 1950s alone, half a million mostly white citizens left Detroit city centre.

Today the vast majority of the population of inner Detroit and downtown is black, coloured or poor migrants from the south of the United States.

The racial make-up of the city was 82 per cent black, 12 per cent white, 5 per cent Hispanic and one per cent Asian in 2007.

Few more than 50,000 commuters — 21 per cent of the city's workforce — take their daily drive from the suburbs to inner Detroit to reach the remaining operational office buildings, notably General Motors' headquarters or the office tower of software producer Compuware.

After work, the majority of staff is keen to leave the city centre as soon as possible to return to their safe living compounds outside the metro area. “It's not worth staying in town in the evening. It's dangerous,'' a General Motors official says.

Austrian immigrant Ernst Soudek, who moved to Detroit in the 1960s with only $50 in his pocket and today makes a living as a university professor in Charlottesville, Virginia, says Detroit was “one of the most unattractive places in the US'' at that time.

It was also the most dangerous, he remembers. “Almost every day a murder happened in my neighbourhood.''

Not much has changed. Detroit still has one of the highest murder rates. Police are said to be either powerless or corrupt and have gambled away their respect due to bad crisis management.

Residents tell frightening stories about random drive-by shootings out of police cars, mass arrests during street battles and other brutality.

It is a vicious circle. Those who are not capable of leaving Downtown to move to the suburbs or to other, safer and more liveable places, remain trapped in Motor City.

In the town centre, most of the remaining occupied apartment blocks are dilapidated, because residents are no longer paying any maintenance contributions, some of them not even rent, let alone taxes.

The system of state-run schools has more or less disintegrated. The existing schools are strongholds of youth crime, says Joe Baker, owner of a restaurant on Woodward Avenue. No education, no job. No money, no mobility.

Anyone who wants to leave Detroit Centre needs a car. But there is almost no public transport in Motor City.

People travelling on the few buses are afraid of being mugged. Detroit's railway station stands as a ruin.

However, today Detroit downtown exudesa certain morbid charm, luring young people with the thrill of a dying ghost town.

Young white middle class students drive their cars to guarded parking lots nearby, deactivate their power-locked doors and take a few steps to the clubrooms.

Later in the evening, when the clubs close, convoys of cars can be seen driving out of town, leaving the streets in silence.

White steam swirls out of loose manhole covers, which glint in the light of the last few functional street lamps.

Facts

Detroit population
1900 285,000
1910 465,000
1930 1,568,000
1950 1,849,000
1970 1,511,000
1990 1,027,000
2000 951,000
2007 900,000

Motown

Detroit, the shrinking city, was the birthplace of the famous Motown-sound of the 1960s, created by mostly black artistes such as Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye or bands such as The Supremes or Temptations.

Other well-known singers and artistes from Detroit are Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Alice Cooper or Bob Seeger. In 1972, the famous Motown Records Company left their premises in Detroit and moved to Los Angeles.

Many of the nightclubs on Woodward Avenue offer Motown theme nights for revellers but in the city's popular hangouts residents prefer to listen to Gothic Rock.

This, says Sally Oaksfield, a junior manager with an advertising company owned by Ford Motor Company, is the best musical ambience for a night out in Detroit downtown.