Posted on 08/05/2009 10:07:51 AM PDT by canuck_conservative
Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the 1920s — the booming home of a glamorous new industry, a place where huge fortunes were conjured in years, sometimes months. But while the creators of the computer industry have as yet bequeathed very little to the built environment, the automobile industry piled up around it an astounding American city, in astoundingly little time.
The Detroit of 1910 was a thriving Midwestern milling and shipping entrepot, a bigger Minneapolis. The Detroit of 1930 had rebuilt itself as a grand metropolis of skyscrapers, mansions, movie palaces and frame cottages spreading northward beyond the line of sight, exceeding Philadelphia and St. Louis, rivaling Chicago and New York. I had a chance to tour central Detroit recently, my first visit to the downtown core in many, many years.
Some of the old visual magnificence remains, has even been improved. The Guardian tower displays again the blazing colors of its vaulted atrium, long covered up by dry wall. The marble adorning the Fisher building still glows. The Renaissance Center, once as walled and moated against the city as a medieval castle, has lowered its defenses, especially on the side facing the Detroit River. But for the most part, all is decay. Whole towers stand empty, waiting to join the long line of grand structures that have either been abandoned to pillage and ruin, like Detroit’s once magnificent neoclassical skyscraper of a train station, or else pulled down entirely, like the downtown Dayton Hudson department store, once the largest enclosed shopping space in the United States.
Detroit’s fall was as steep and rapid as its rise....
(Excerpt) Read more at network.nationalpost.com ...
Would appreciate some feedback from those more familiar with the city.
Stopped reading at this line:
“Detroit was vibrant then, and it remains vibrant now, she wishes to argue… like Sarah Palin’s career, it’s just advancing in a different direction”.
Frum can’t resist skewering Palin in every thing he writes.
WTG, Frum. You just had to slip in that dig, didn't you? What a maroon.
One thing for sure is that Detroit becomiing a black majority city had nothing to do with its decline or present status.
Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Chicago are vibrant, booming cities?
This clown is missing the obvious.
Detroit was killed by unions, libtards, and Rats.
Just the same as everywhere else.
If the answer isn’t unions, this is cr@p.
Growing up in the city in the 60’s and 70’s, the worst thing to happen to that once-great example of the American Spirit was Coleman Young. He was a Marxist/Collectivist and stacked his administration was cronies and criminals.
One could see the rather rapid disintegration of the city after that point.
Perhaps businessman Dave Bing can resuscitate it somewhat,
but the core group of crooks are still there.
Personally, I’m not going to hold my breath.
Detroit: The Triumph of Progressive Public Policy
http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=10743
Excerpt:
Imagine a city where all the major economic planks of the statist or “progressive” platform have been enacted:
* A “living wage” ordinance, far above the federal minimum wage, for all public employees and private contractors.
* A school system that spends significantly more per pupil than the national average.
* A powerful school employee union that militantly defends the exceptional pay, benefits and job security it has won for its members.
* A powerful government employee union that does the same for its members.
* A tax system that aggressively redistributes income from businesses and the wealthy to the poor and to government bureaucracies.
Oh yeah, I figured the unions were too obvious.
That has happened in virtually all major urban areas; the result is that they suffer.
Detroit is now an outhouse.
Once great city, now some one wants to take vacant land and turn it back into farmland.
I almost cry when I see my Dad, when I drive were I use to deliver newspapers.
One block is empty and full of weeds. Also my Dad has rarcoons in his backyard!!!
I’m a life-long Detroiter, and I’ve lived long enough to witness the death throes from the Great Society years through today. I venture into Detroit often in the early morning hours, camera in hand, to record the amazing devastation - and to remind myself and anybody who will listen exactly where the collectivist mindset leads.
One critical piece of this puzzle has been left out of the story - the city’s tax policies. Detroit levied its own income tax, which was the straw that pushed many of the city’s workers out. This was often attributed to “white flight”, but it was a separate issue - an entirely economic one.
After the worker’s exodus, the city decided to levy a commuter tax to make up the deficit. That’s when the businesses started pulling out wholesale.
That tax is still in effect. You actually pay a premium for the privilege of living in Detroit, putting up with non-existent city services, a city hall with a “greater than thou” attitude, rampant crime and entire regions where the police no longer patrol. Is it any surprise that you cannot find a supermarket in the city?
Detroit has been killed by politicians - politicians who arrogantly refuse to recognize the results of their own actions and decisions.
I love Detroit, but the city is beyond life support. There are sparks of life in there still, around the cultural center and in the very heart of downtown; the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and a hanful of other institutions that have managed to survive in spite of the horrific conditions. These are the exceptions, standing in stark contrast to the rest of what remains - a city that was once the industrial center of the world.
To any who do not feel the national political battle worth fighting, I invite you to visit my home town.
Palin is a joke. Wake up.
“Detroit was vibrant then, and it remains vibrant now, she wishes to argue… like Sarah Palin’s career, it’s just advancing in a different direction.”
From this left field gratuitous swipe at Sarah Palin, Frum spouts some predictable pap about race and arrives at the crux of the problem with:
“If the promised land did not yield the hoped-for industrial jobs, it offered something else: generous new welfare programs, the ashy false fruit of urban liberalism. The children of the parents who accepted the fruit grew into the criminals who drove first the middle class and then the working class out of the downtown and then altogether out of the city.”
Having hit the nail so squarely on the head, Frum goes on to the more important factor in the decline of Detroit. “Not enough gays.”
/facepalm
The NappyOne
Detroit is a fine example of liberal good intentions gone awry. If the Obama Administration gets all it wants, the whole country will look like Detroit.
As the white working class departed, Detroit became a black-majority city, governed by a deeply aggrieved and flagrantly corrupt political class. Political dysfunction spiraled the city into another cycle of dissolution and abandonment — and the abandonment in turn provided the politicians with..”
It sure took Frum long enough to explain Detoilet’s problem.
I guess to be ‘PC’ he had to hide the truth in a jumbled ramble of word salad.
your story is my story. I personally believe that Detroit is beyond hope.
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