One of the stories we’re most proud of at Boat Magazine is this essay Jeffrey Eugenides, author of “The Virgin Suicides”, “Middlesex”, “The Marriage Plot” and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, wrote for us about his hometown of Detroit. In each issue of Boat, we try to capture that space people keep in their hearts for their hometown and the feelings and memories they fill it with. There’s almost always a little love in there, even if it’s mixed with regret or resentment or overshadowed by thankfulness to be out of there, or guilt for having left we almost always find it. Those feelings are complex and say a lot about a person and in this essay Mr. Eugenides reflects on his childhood in Detroit and how he feels about it being in the spotlight now for reasons he can’t quite get behind.

Against Ruin Porn

By Jeffrey Eugenides

Boat Magazine Issue 2 – Detroit

In 1960, when I was born, Detroit was the fifth largest city in the United States, the population standing at a healthy 1,677,144. In addition to being the center of the automobile industry, Detroit wasn’t far removed from its pivotal role in World War II, when it was known as the “Arsenal of Democracy” due to the production on its re-tooled assembly lines not of Buicks, Fords and Cadillacs, but tanks and B-52s. Detroit had a semi-great art museum, boasted the world’s tallest department store (Hudson’s), and possessed a reasonably sized downtown filled with the self-important bustle of commerce. Our family lived in Indian Village, a stately neighborhood on the East Side not far from the humble streets where my parents had grown up. Sometime when I was two or three, there was a shooting in the alley behind our house, or on the next block over, or ten blocks away – close enough, at any rate, to scare my parents into joining the exodus, known as “white flight,” out of Detroit and into the adjoining suburbs. A few years later, in the summer of 1967, the Detroit riots erupted, and after that the movement of whites from the city, perceptible beforehand, became a flood.

The results were predictable. A lowering of the tax base. A plunge in real estate values that further accelerated the depopulation as homeowners sold their houses in response to the collapsing market. Jobs disappeared, poverty increased, and, with it, crime and blight. Slowly, the city began to be hollowed out. Homes were abandoned. Stores closed. Great buildings like the Grand Trunk railroad station were reduced in operations and finally shuttered. Everywhere you looked, something familiar had disappeared, either torched or demolished. “The Arsenal of Democracy” became “The Murder Capital.”

I was just a kid, and it all seemed natural enough. I didn’t know that this wasn’t happening everywhere else. And though the city’s slow degradation often depressed me, coloring my sense of the world in a hue of melancholy, I didn’t stop to ask the reasons behind it.

Moreover, even as an adult, these reasons get more complicated the more I learn about them. For instance, I always accepted the common wisdom that it was the riots that made the automotive companies leave the city, taking jobs with them; but, in fact, Henry Ford had begun to move his operations out of the city decades earlier. The riots were a response to this abandonment of the city rather than its cause.

Detroit’s racial tensions go back a long way, too, essentially to the 1920s when African Americans from the South began to migrate northward in large numbers. With its large African-American population, Detroit had more members of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA (United Negro Improvement Association) than anywhere else in the country. W.D. Fard, the founder of the Nation of Islam, appeared in Detroit in the 1930s, adopting many of Garvey’s attitudes and recruiting methods. Earl Little, the father of Malcolm X, was a Garveyite, and brought his family to Lansing, Michigan in the 30s, leading to Malcolm’s brief (and, according to Manning Marabel’s biography, slightly embellished) life of crime, when he was known as “Detroit Red.” In short, the reasons for Detroit’s ongoing difficulties are racial, economic and political, and much too complex to discuss in detail here. This is the background, however, of the city I still call home.

As teenagers, my friends and I began venturing downtown at night. Our parents forbid this, and so we didn’t tell them where we were going. After 6 p.m. downtown Detroit was nearly empty in those days. It felt safe for the simple reason that so few people were on the streets. As we tooled around in our parents’ cars, we discovered amazing places. Our favorite was the Michigan Theater, a former opera house that had been converted into a parking garage. Carrying six-packs of beer, we hopped the fence and went inside to stare up at the ceiling of the garage, which had been left intact, the ornate balconies and gilded plasterwork, though falling away in chunks, still arching over the cars parked below. Sometimes we stationed ourselves outside the Cadillac plant – soon to be closed – at midnight, to watch the autoworkers come streaming out the doors as the shifts changed. Or we ventured into the Michigan Central railroad building as far as we dared, its twelve stories empty, the stairwells coated six inches thick in pigeon waste.

We didn’t know anyone else would be interested in these dire locales. The staggering nature of their disrepair filled us with a sick delight. We felt special to have discovered them, less suburban somehow, and in our callowness we believed that we were somehow dignifying these ruins with our presence, as though drinking a six-pack in an opera house converted into a parking garage was an act of solidarity with the city, as if we were the custodians of the ruins, the only ones who understood.

Years later, the artists began showing up. In the 90s, Stan Douglas took photographs of many of the places my friends and I had hung out in fifteen years earlier. Others who knew nothing about Detroit began to come to the city, smitten with the beauty of its ugliness. I know what these people felt because I had felt that way too, even though, as a native son, I should have known better. Sometime in the last five years, however, the ruin-porn got to be too much. Filmmakers and photographers from far afield, such as the French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, descended on Detroit to make coffee table books, speaking all the while of the city’s destruction in abstract or poetic terms, and acting as though they were bringing us the news about ourselves.

The reason I agreed to contribute these brief thoughts about Detroit for Boat Magazine has to do with the correctness of the editors’ attitude. This issue of Boat Magazine seeks to take a stand against ruin porn. It is everything a ghoulish filmmaker wouldn’t understand. Because I, too, have committed the sin of aestheticizing Detroit’s demise, I’m well aware of the seduction of this posture and, therefore, all the more eager to condemn it now. That’s what this issue of Boat Magazine is about. To see the city of Detroit as it is, today, a beaten-up, beaten-down place of incalculable difficulties, but a place where a half million people still live. What has happened to the industrial cities of the American Midwest is a travesty. St. Louis, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Toledo, Flint, Gary. It’s a big country, and if one place craps out on you, you leave it behind and find somewhere new. But not everyone gets to leave. Not everyone wants to leave. And so, if you visit the Rust Belt now, you come face to face with a central breakdown in American capitalism. No country that calls itself great can allow such a vast swath of its territory to be written off as has been the case here.

Detroit has died as a great American city. And yet it’s still there. Every time I visit, I meet wonderfully resilient people and have a tremendous time. The racial tensions, though by no means gone, have begun to dissipate. It’s not great, but it’s a lot better than when I was a kid. Not everything gets worse.

So here’s a little look at the Detroit that is. In my novel, “Middlesex,” I mention that the settlement of Detroit burned down in 1805. In response, the city father’s installed a Latin phrase on the city flag: Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus.

“We hope for better times. May it rise from the ashes.”

I don’t know if I believe it anymore. But it still applies. It’s still what any true Detroiter feels, though we’re the last people who’d ever try to sell you a little easy poetry.