IV. The City

THE COUNTRY HAS imposed a narrative myth upon Detroit: that it was one of the iconic modern cities until the riot of 1967, one of the worst race riots in the country’s history, which caused hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and resulted in the abandonment of the city by the middle class. The reality is that Detroit’s modernization is what most contributed to its collapse. In 1963, as David Maraniss recalls in his 2015 history of Detroit’s heyday, “Once in a Great City,” Wayne State University’s Institute for Regional and Urban Studies issued a report predicting that Detroit’s population — about 1.7 million as of the 1960 census — would decline by roughly a quarter by 1970 as a result of people increasingly leaving the city for the suburbs. With more businesses opening in the suburbs to support a growing middle class, there was less and less incentive for people to live and, more important, work in Detroit. The previous decade of construction, which had brought such remarkable architecture to downtown Detroit, had produced little in the way of actual housing, and had in fact uprooted many of the city’s predominantly lower-class neighborhoods. As Maraniss writes, “Detroit was being threatened by its own design of concrete and metal and fuel and movement.”

This was the case in many American cities that had prospered during the manufacturing boom of World War II, only to find such growth unsustainable. But none suffered quite as much as Detroit: With its empty Art Deco skyscrapers and entire neighborhoods effectively erased from the map through abandonment and arson, the city inevitably became a symbol of postwar America’s rise and fall. After Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013, the largest municipality to ever do so, downtown began to experience a development boom again thanks to the billionaire Dan Gilbert, who since 2010 has invested $3.5 billion in real estate downtown (with another $2.1 billion underway) and moved his mortgage company, Quicken Loans, and other businesses into the buildings.

In January, I walked around the city with Brian Conway, Michigan’s state historic preservation officer and the co-author of a two-volume series of books called “Michigan Modern.” We visited the Wayne State campus and Yamasaki’s McGregor Memorial Conference Center, a miraculous white box with white marble floors and white marble columns leading up to a series of second-story pointed hexagonal column capitals. Triangular skylight panels are arranged in a grid on the ceiling. It was raining heavily, and the space was cold and drafty. We also walked through Albert Kahn’s staggeringly beautiful Fisher Building, completed in 1928, a year before the American economy collapsed, and which a placard in the lobby describes as the city’s “largest art object.” The interior is covered in gold detailing, with chandeliers hanging like white pine cones from the ceiling. The ceiling itself displays an enormous mural of nude women with musical instruments, including a harp, surrounded by eagles and laurels. The elevators have bronze doors, carved with images of deities, one of them holding a car in one hand and a plane in the other. The building, after years of neglect, sold in 2015 (together with the neighboring 11-story Albert Kahn Building) for $12.2 million to a pair of developers (they are among the few landmarked skyscrapers Gilbert has not purchased) and is starting to fill up with businesses, which serve as a reminder of just how much distance there is between Kahn and our current moment: Muting the drama of the building slightly were several signs in the lobby directing visitors toward a Subway sandwich shop inside Cadillac Place, the former General Motors headquarters, also designed by Kahn, which is connected to the Fisher Building through a walkway.