Is this the end of Delray?

Fran McCracken handed her lit cigarette to her brother so she could pick up her pet opossum.

“Isn’t she sweet? I love her!” the 50-year-old rasped in a smoky voice as she snuggled the razor-toothed animal like it was a baby. Then Fran stretched her right arm out in front of her, and the opossum instinctively coiled its tail around it and hung upside down like her arm was a tree branch. “But I gotta give her a bath, ‘cause she’s got fleas on her a little bit.”

Fran lives in Detroit’s Delray neighborhood, on a short, dead-end street along the banks of the Rouge River. Her front yard is a wide, weedy field where a whole block of houses and stores once stood. Her backyard is Zug Island, whose blackened, steel mill smokestacks tower behind her home, belching smoke and fire at all hours, infusing the air with the smell of chemicals.

“They let out some nasty stuff at night. You can see it,” Fran said. “My cat had cancer, and the doctor asked me where I live and I said, ‘Delray.’ He goes, ‘You live by any factories?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, duh, Zug Island.’ He said, ‘Oh my God, your cat’s full of cancer.’ Told me to move.”

But this is home. Her whole life has been lived in Delray, on a street so remote the police couldn’t find it when she called them this summer about someone trying to crawl through a window into the empty bedroom of her son, who died here unexpectedly at five days old from a birth defect. Her brother Tom lives next door in a house that’s identical to hers, except it’s got plastic sheeting on the windows, holes in the front porch and a furnace that doesn’t work. Their brother Kevin lives down the street in a ramshackle house their deceased parents owned, the home where these siblings grew up, in the neighborhood that’s all they’ve ever known.

“My neighborhood is nice,” Fran said. “It’s just peaceful down here. You go across the tracks, that’s when it gets bad. Yeah, you don’t want to go across the tracks when it’s nighttime. You find bodies — girls — all the time. Like the other day, my brother was driving down the street and they found a girl dead.”

In a city with plenty of rough neighborhoods, Delray is regarded as one of the worst. It’s been called Detroit’s backwater, its underbelly, the bowels of the region — which it literally is, in a sense, since the city’s wastewater treatment plant is here, receiving and incinerating the contents of everyone’s toilets in Detroit and 77 surrounding communities and filling the air for miles with a God-awful stink. .

The neighborhood lies in southwest Detroit, a few square miles roughly between Fort Street and the Detroit River, and from South Leigh Street to Clark. It’s one of the most diverse parts of the city, split roughly into thirds of white, black and Hispanic. It’s among the poorest. And after losing 90% of its residents since its peak, it’s one of the most abandoned.

Those left here say they feel under siege — by a city trying for years to get them to leave, by factories and industrial plants polluting their air, by criminals using their neighborhood to commit crimes in secret. But residents also speak of a bond in their shared isolation, a defiance toward those who look down on them as hayseeds, and a sense of anarchy and freedom that — for better or worse — can’t normally be found in a big city like Detroit.

Fran stood by her front gate next to her 62-year-old brother Tom, who was holding her cigarette while smoking his own. She asked him to hold her possum while she ran behind her house to feed her potbelly pig.

“No way,” said Tom. “Every time I hold her she pees on me.”

The pig lives in a doghouse, sharing a muddy lawn with two chickens, three dogs and six cats. Fran, who is unemployed and gets by on disability checks, is known around Delray as an animal lover, because anytime someone comes by with a stray she takes it in, even if the animal is technically livestock. That’s not unusual around here — a guy just blocks away had a horse in his yard for a while. Many folks have chickens. And a lot of people own several guard dogs, because there’s a feeling if there’s trouble out here, in this rural part of town, they’re on their own.

“It’s desolate,” said Tom, a retired trucker. “Ain’t nobody down here. You call the cops, it takes them three hours to get down here.”

Delray was founded more than a century ago as a small village on the river. Before being swallowed by Detroit it was the area’s fastest-growing suburb. But after years of decline it’s gone back to being a small village, with a big difference — now it looks like a village the day after the end of the world.

The people are almost all gone. The houses are missing. The stores are boarded up or bulldozed. Whole blocks are empty and overgrown with weeds and grass. The air stinks like sulfur and sewage. Residents wake up some mornings to find a thin film of mysterious industrial powders coating their houses and cars. Studies have found higher rates here of all kinds of bad things, from asthma to cancer.

Delray is Detroit’s ghost town, a landscape of empty streets that are eerily quiet except for the constant hammering sounds and banging noises of all the industries here.

The old village didn’t become this way by chance. Years ago, Delray was sentenced to die.

Back in the 1960s, the city decided that this neighborhood, already polluted and crowded with industry, should become entirely industrial. City officials figured if they zoned out new housing and moved enough factories and plants here, people would eventually get the hint and move out. It made sense to concentrate industries in one part of the city, and it made sense to get residents away from the most polluted part of town.

It was assumed that people would be eager to get out of such an inhospitable, unhealthy place. Yet for all these years, a dwindling minority of die-hard residents has stubbornly refused to go. For them, Delray is home. A familiar, comforting, neighborly, stinky home.

Now, the city is trying one more time to convince them to go. The long-planned new bridge to Canada is slated to land right in the middle of Delray, and the 170-acre customs plaza that will spread outward from the bridge’s footprint will wipe out much of the old neighborhood, splitting what’s left into two isolated pockets of semi-empty blocks. Those who choose to stay will be subject to a whole new level of noise and pollution. So the city is making an unprecedented offer to give residents another house someplace else in the city for free, plus a whole bunch of money to fix it up.

The city’s offer has generated interest among many residents, who’ve expressed eagerness to learn more. Some of them have said they can’t wait to get out. But despite the forthcoming offers, there are many longtime residents who say that no matter how bad it gets, they’re staying.

“I don’t think I’d leave, I guess, because I’ve never left the block. Been down here all my life," Fran said. "It’s home to me.”

Delray was once a thriving village, a charming riverside community of beer gardens and houseboats populated mostly by Hungarians who immigrated to the region chasing the promise of jobs. They had their own stores, banks, bakeries, restaurants, auto dealerships and movie theaters, plus a hospital and a library along River Street, the town’s main drag, a glamorous strip which for years was simply called “The Avenue” and which buzzed day and night with activity.

The area got the name Delray from Augustus Burdeno, an early settler who’d served in the U.S.-Mexican War in the 1840s and thought the growing village he returned to on the Detroit River reminded him of a town called Molino del Rey that he’d seen in Mexico. The other settlers took a vote and in 1851 adopted an Americanized version of the name.

Delray was incorporated as a village in 1897 with about 5,000 people. At one time, it had eight Hungarian churches within a mile of each other and several Hungarian language newspapers, earning it nicknames like “Little Hungary” and “Hunkytown.” It was also a party town — 33 of the 97 businesses in Delray at the beginning of the 1900s were saloons.

Then, everything changed. Starting in 1889, the village held an annual event called the Detroit International Exposition to showcase the area and draw businesses and industries to it.

It worked. First came a glue plant, then a rendering plant. Village leaders reeled in the first big one when the Solvay Process Company came in 1894, attracted to the site by the natural salt deposits found there, which it used to make soda ash, its main product. The chemical company quickly modernized Delray, providing the village with paved streets, sewers, its first hospital and a horse-drawn, four-wheel fire truck operated by Solvay employees.

In 1905, Delray’s 7 square miles, along with neighboring villages Woodmere and Springwells, were annexed by the City of Detroit after a special vote in all three suburbs, whose residents thought the move would speed up modernization.

That worked, too. Early on the city decided that Delray’s riverfront was an ideal spot for industries to concentrate. In 1901, Detroit Iron Works built two blast furnaces for iron-making on Delray’s Zug Island, which was artificially carved from the mainland when a shipping canal was dug to allow ships to pass through more easily. In 1903, Detroit Edison opened a power plant in Delray, followed soon by Peerless Portland Cement Co, Allied Chemical and Fleetwood Metal Body. Dozens of smaller companies joined them.

The Ambassador Bridge opened in 1929 just outside the neighborhood’s east border, bringing thousands of commercial vehicles streaming through the area. By the late 1920s, the village had been transformed from a quiet suburb to an industrial zone, and thousands of simple, low-cost houses were quickly built around the factories to accommodate all the newcomers who came seeking jobs.

Fran’s and Tom’s houses were among them. They live in one-story, cookie-cutter homes built a century ago and rarely updated since. And now theirs are the only surviving houses on their block. Barely.

“The roof leaks, the porch is falling in, I have no heat — my furnace crapped out on me so I have to use electric heaters in the winter to keep my pipes from freezing,” Tom said, leaning on his front-yard fence, smoking a cigarette, gazing past the empty field across the street where the only functioning business is a bar whose patrons, he said, like to come outside and drunkenly fire their handguns in the air on Saturday nights. Tractor-trailers and dump trucks bang along Jefferson Avenue — kicking up dust, shaking the houses and making a racket every time a tire hits a pothole.

“Look at the windows, how I got all the windows hooked up,” he said, pointing to the plastic sheets that were covering them. “I mean, I keep it clean, I keep it clean inside, but I don’t have much to work with. You know, I have no money. I’m on Social Security. I only get a thousand dollars a month. What am I gonna do with that? Once I pay the bills I’m broke.”

He lost the house a few years back, when he stopped paying property taxes and the county auctioned off his home for a few hundred dollars. The buyer came by, took one look at this sagging old heap of wood and shingles, said forget it, and wrote off the loss. Now it’s Tom’s, again. And he’s behind on his taxes, again.

A black Mercedes rounded the corner from Jefferson. Nobody around here owns a Mercedes. That meant that, once again, an outsider had come to remote Delray to do something they wouldn’t do where they live — to get high, get a prostitute or get rid of something — trash, tires, furniture, a body.

“I think it’s suburbanites coming down here and dumping,” Tom said. If he sees someone doing something illegal, he bursts out of his house and confronts them with his camera phone. “You don’t do that shit in Sterling Heights, do you? Or Lincoln Park or where ever you’re from,” he yells at them.

Tom followed the car’s path with his eyes as it made its way to the alley behind his house, a choice spot around here for bad behavior.

“Actually, I don’t care what they do as long as they don’t dump,” said Tom, who found a pile of soiled couches left behind his house just a few days before. “Right here behind this building, there’s a big cement pad back there. I come home from work one night and they were right out there on the hood having sex. Right on the hood! I pulled up there, I says, ‘Hey, when you’re done, don’t forget to clean up your condoms,’ 'cause they take them off and throw them all over the ground back there,” he said, laughing.

This time, as the driver of the Mercedes rolled to a stop he noticed Tom watching him. The visitor hit the gas and took off.

Neighborhood life wasn’t always like this for the McCrackens. Their parents first came to Delray from the Niagara Falls area in the ‘60s, lured by all the factory jobs, and settled in what was a dense, family-friendly neighborhood.

“When we first come to Delray you didn’t have to leave Delray for nothing,” Tom remembered. “We had everything — we had a drugstore, we had a five-and-dime, we had two meat markets, we had a laundromat, we had a bowling alley, we had a movie theater, furniture stores."

By then, though, the neighborhood had long been emptying out. The population dropped from almost 24,000 in 1930 to about 20,000 in 1940, and down to just more than 17,000 in 1950. There was another small influx of Hungarians fleeing the Soviet crackdown in Hungary in 1956, and the city’s Housing Commission placed a small number of families in the area in the late '60s, many of whom lost their homes in the 1967 riot. But despite the newcomers, the population of Delray continued to decline as the children and grandchildren of the original immigrants moved to Downriver suburbs like Taylor, Allen Park and Wyandotte. The mom-and-pop businesses soon followed them. By 1970, the population was under 13,000 and plummeting.

The expansion nearby of I-75 in the ‘70s required the demolition of hundreds of Delray homes, as did the steady growth of the wastewater treatment plant, which the city built in 1940 and expanded steadily thereafter until it became the largest of its kind in the country.

In the face of all this, a City of Detroit Master Plan issued in 1955 and a 1963 federal study of the city’s riverfront both recommended that Delray should eventually become solidly industrial. In 1965, the common council approved the plan.

Stubborn residents fought the change at each step of the process, as in 1969 when 1,200 Delray residents chartered buses, jammed the common council chambers to protest a planned incinerator at the riverfront site of the defunct Solvay Process Co., and convinced members to vote unanimously against it.

But small victories like that didn’t stop an unmistakable trend. The depopulation continued, the protests grew smaller, and the crack epidemic of the '80s and the crime wave that came with it further emptied the area out. Between 2000 and 2010, a third of the remaining residents left. The last census data from 2014 generously estimated the neighborhood’s population at about 2,100.

That small core represents the die-hard Delray residents who have stubbornly refused to go — those with deep roots here, with generations in the same homes, and with longtime neighbors that have become like family, or in the case of people like the McCrackens, actually are.

“I’ve been down here for 49 years and it’s really sad to see all the houses go,” Fran said. “People set them on fire, they squat in the houses. But what can you do? It’s Delray.”

A man came walking down the street, looking downward as he scrolled on his smartphone, so he didn’t notice Fran’s barking dogs running out of her yard’s open fence and charging at him.

It was A-Ray, said to be the local pot dealer, suddenly surrounded by three barking pit bulls. “Hey!” Tom shouted to the dogs as he ambled over and grabbed them by their collars to drag them away.

But one of the dogs, a pit bull named Lucy, broke away and merrily followed the guy as he walked, wagging her tail. It was Fran’s new dog, her third now. And the dog was familiar with A-Ray.

“I knew her as a pup,” A-Ray explained to a surprised Tom. “When my brother had dogs, she was in the litter. That’s why she’s following me.”

A-Ray’s brother is known around Delray as Peanut, and Peanut kept this pit bull as a guard dog, but Peanut was headed to jail, and that’s how Fran got yet another pet. “He has to get rid of his dogs and asked me if I could take her and I said, ‘Don’t do this to me, Peanut.’ ” Fran explained. “He said, ‘I know you’ll take care of her.’ He’s goin’ to jail for a long time.”

The cops arrested Peanut in May because he ran a blind pig out of a house on nearby Vanderbilt Street, and a 24-year-old Detroit woman named Asia Nash vanished from the party one night and was found lying dead the next day in a nearby field with two gunshot wounds to the back of her head.

“They found that dead body on a Sunday morning,” said Harriet McPhail, who lives on Vanderbilt, a few doors down from Peanut’s now-empty home. “My mom was going to church, and they seen the body laid out there, all the people going to church that day.”

The victim had tried to rip off a drug dealer, Fran had heard. Her last hours were spent at this house, police had heard. So they raided the place.

Harriet, 47, and her sister Pam, 52, sat on their front porch, drinking iced tea, smoking cigarettes, reading Cosmopolitan magazine. Wind chimes dangled above them. Iron bars protected the front door behind them. A wood sign by a window read, “The McPhail Family” in quaint lettering. A small American flag was affixed to it. Harriet had the day off work at a property management company downtown; Pam was unemployed and collecting disability after falling down the basement stairs and breaking her neck.

The McPhail sisters have spent most of their lives here, along with their mother, Gloria, 77, the house’s owner. Their brother Ken and his wife Kim own a house a few doors down. Their nephew Ken Jr. lives a few houses from that one. Like the McCrackens, the McPhails have remained in the neighborhood where they’ve been for years, largely because of family and familiarity.

It was lively for a while around here, they said, what with an after-hours club operating for two years in an old house a few doors down from theirs. “Loud music, fights, women dancing, stripping,” is how Harriet summed it up. Police put a stop to it in a hail of flashing lights a few days after the murder. The sisters had hoped the neighborhood would return to its former serenity after that. But they were wrong.

There once was a beautiful school at the end of their block, on West End Street, one of the main arteries crisscrossing Delray. Built in 1894, McMillan School had wide brick archways, decorative stone relief accents and a central tower featuring a large outdoor clock. It was an ornate capstone to Delray’s finest neighborhood. Generations of local children were educated there until their numbers dwindled. The school survived a threatened closure after protests by parents in 1993, but it was shut down for good in 2001. It spent years as an abandoned eyesore, stripped bare by looters and torched by arsonists until it was finally torn down in 2009.

And on the empty lot left behind, a cement company had recently set up shop, providing materials for the rebuilding of the nearby freeway, which was getting new ramps to accommodate the new bridge that’s coming to the area.

That site embodies the history of Delray in miniature — from grand to grimy, from family oriented to industry dominated. The temporary cement plant brought a lot more noise and pollution to the McPhail family’s doorstep. And it sentenced the family matriarch to a life of confinement inside her house.

“It’s causing a lot of disturbance in the neighborhood with all this traffic and dust,” Gloria complained in a soft voice. “That’s one of the reasons I can’t be outside.”

She sat in the family’s living room, sunk into a plush couch, hamstrung by lung disease, tethered to an oxygen tank, watching television with the windows closed and the curtains drawn. Still, she wasn’t fully protected from the Delray air.

“Sometimes I can smell it in here,” she said. “It’s a terrible odor.”

City officials knew that life for Delray residents like the McPhails would become worse when the new bridge — and the related activity that comes along with it —became a reality. So in June, Mayor Mike Duggan announced that the city would offer Delray residents who live outside the state’s buyout zone — the land that will be physically occupied by the bridge's footprint — an empty, tax-foreclosed house somewhere else in Detroit, as well as up to $60,000 to improve their new home.

The money came from an agreement the city reached to sell 36 city-owned parcels of land, underground assets and about 5 miles of city-owned streets in the path of the new bridge to the state in exchange for $48 million. Of that money, $23.6 million is to be used to offer homeowners in Delray the chance to move to another neighborhood. For residents who choose to stay, another $9 million will go toward soundproofing their homes and monitoring the air quality around them.

To Harriet and Pam, this sounded like a great offer. They’ve had enough of the shrinking neighborhood. They were ready right away to take the money and run. But it wasn’t their decision to make.

“I’ve been wanting to go,” Harriet said. “But it’s my mom. To her, this is her home. She purchased this home. It’s hers. Why should she leave it? That’s how she feel about it. It’s home to her.”

“I love it here,” Gloria explained. “I’ve been here a long time. My church is over here. My family is over here.”

Forty years ago, Gloria and her late husband, Chester, moved here from Manhattan. They came to Delray to escape the burgeoning crime of New York, to live in a family oriented neighborhood, which Vanderbilt Street has always been. Even Peanut, the after-hours club owner, set up his blind pig just a few doors down from where his grandfather lived for years, where he used to play as a child.

But then Gloria’s neighbors left, their houses went away, Chester passed away from cancer, and the big trees that once gave shade to families in the summertime now loomed over empty lots, providing only a reminder of all that had been lost.

And yet, she never left. “It’s nothing like it used to be,” Gloria admitted. “But it is home. This is home.”

But as the piles of gravel and sand grew at the cement plant, as the dump trucks and concrete mixers in the neighborhood increased in number and the air became choked with dust, Gloria finally broke. Maybe it was the emergency trips she had to take to the hospital, or the unexplained morning nosebleeds, or the blood she was spitting up, but she reluctantly began thinking of the flyer on her fridge that spoke of the city’s offer to get out.

“All these factories and things, and all this dust, is not good for my breathing,” she said. She planned on attending a community meeting to hear what city officials had to say. “I’ve been over here a long time, so it’s going to be kind of bittersweet. But for my health I need to try to do better. I need to try to help myself.”

Nobody knows why 29-year-old Amanda Lynn Benton drove from her home in suburban Melvindale to a rough southwest Detroit neighborhood in the middle of the night in September last year. Nobody knows why two young men carjacked her, beat her viciously and threw her into the trunk of her own car. And nobody but those young men knows why they drove to Delray and chose a vacant house on Vanderbilt Street in which to toss her body and start a fire.

“They dumped her in that house down there,” said Harriet, pointing down the street to the spot where yet another corpse was disposed of in Delray.

After the woman’s charred remains were removed and the yellow police tape was taken down and the suspects were arrested and charged, the house sat wide open, an aura of grisly death still lingering, until the minister from a church around the corner got fed up and boarded it up himself.

“That’s how our neighborhood is,” Harriet said. “We do stuff like that.”

“Yes we do,” said Elder Charles Heath Jr., pastor of 2nd Chance Christian Ministries a block over, who had pulled up moments before in his burgundy church van. “The city never came out,” he said. “They did bring us the wood after we cried out. It was some people who was there putting up stuff, dolls, and we saw it and they told us what had happened. I didn’t know they found a lady dead in there. I said, ‘We need to board this thing up.’ It was five of us. Spent the whole day cutting down weeds just to get in there.”

Heath had been at a west-side church until four years ago, when his bishop assigned him to this part of the city that he’d never heard of before. He moved into a former Hungarian church that was abandoned years ago.

“It’s a tight community,” noted the pastor. “The people that are here are people that’ve been here for years, and they’re protective of one another. But you got all this stuff in the air, people are getting sick from that. That’s what’s hurting the people. Stuff like that has taken the zeal from them, from wanting to do something. You complain about stuff, it doesn’t get done.”

He was here to visit Iola Patterson, the McPhails’ elderly next-door neighbor, at a home where Smokey Robinson was singing from a boombox that someone had brought outside, and charcoal smoke was billowing from a grill set up on the sidewalk. Relatives were visiting from out of town, a barbecue party had broken out and a growing crowd of neighbors and family was gathering under the big tree next to the sidewalk.

They were all aware that a new, publicly owned bridge to Canada has been in the works since 2004, with the American end to be located squarely in Delray, and with the costs covered by the Canadian government, to be repaid by tolls. They’d all heard of Manuel (Matty) Moroun, the sole, private owner of the aging Ambassador Bridge, whose perennial but unsuccessful lawsuits aiming to stop the inevitable financial competition from the new bridge have delayed its completion until at least 2022. They’d all seen the flyers that said the city would offer to find them a home elsewhere before the new bridge makes Delray even more inhospitable than it already is. But they were undecided whether they’d go.

The woman hosting the barbecue was a good example of this reluctance. “Mother Patterson, she’s been here a long time,” the pastor said. “She can’t afford to go somewhere and move and start all over again.”

As the men of the family grilled outside, Mother Patterson — as she’s respectfully called around here — was inside her house, in the hot kitchen, making peach cobbler and baked beans. She lives here with her daughter Martha, 65, and son-in-law Jeffrey Robinson, 64, whose daughter Jennifer, 25, lives across the street with her husband Dilbert, 31, whose toddlers were playing at the grown-ups’ feet.

“Everybody’s related,” Jeffrey said, sipping a beer, referencing everyone on the block with a sweep of his hand. “I take pride in that, man.”

Mother Patterson came out to the covered front porch to take a break from the heat of the kitchen. The 85-year-old moved very slowly, using a walker, and finally settled in an old chair that her guests patiently and carefully situated as she sat back. Her chihuahua stood by her feet and barked at everything it saw.

“It's depending on what kind of money they offer me,” she said. “If it’s where I can have family and friends around, I wouldn’t mind it, but I would rather stay right here. Got a little garden right back there, a lot of vegetarian stuff, you know? I can plant some right here and eat off of it right there. I had tomatoes up here this tall as my mailbox, so I like that.”

Joyce Moon, a family friend, sat next to her on the porch, dressed as if for church, holding a cane, watching over the woman she says is like a second mother.

“Well, they’ve been trying to take over Delray for many, many years,” said Moon, 53. “It’s a nice area. I feel they shouldn’t have did that — take it over, all different kind of companies. A lot of my old friends are gone. It’s very quiet now. My sister says it looks like a desert out here. She doesn’t like coming back here anymore. But life goes on. Things change.”

She, too, grew up here, on nearby South Schroeder Street, where now there remains just a single house whose owner has spray-painted his frustration with the changing neighborhood in graffiti phrases like “No Bridge!!” and “Tyranny is now!!!” right on the vinyl siding. But Moon moved away long ago to another, faraway part of Detroit as her neighbors abandoned her street one by one. “You know, there’s not going to be a Delray,” she warned.

“Well, I’ll just have to find another Delray,” said Mother Patterson, trying to think of a comparable place. “I don’t know. I’ll probably find somewhere out in the country.”

Bang! A dump truck hit a rut in the road and made a jarring noise that could be heard for blocks. So did the 18-wheeler behind it, and the cement truck that followed, and the bulldozer after that, as this daily parade of industrial activity drove down the busy Delray artery of Dearborn Street, past Vanderbilt Street where the family barbecue was being held, past the empty fields that stretch on for blocks now, past a shack of a gas station that’s the only place in town for the McCrackens and the McPhails to get their cigarettes, and past the corner of Cobalt Street, where, a few houses down, Mike Donovan could hear every one of those trucks banging by.

The noise doesn’t bother him. Nor does the smog drifting over from Zug Island, nor the train’s blasting horn as it passes through the neighborhood, nor the stench of the sewage that fouls the breeze that ripples the plastic that covers his windows.

“This is an industrial area and I believe in industry,” he said firmly. “I ain’t against business. They run a little business out, all of our people’s out of work. Pollution — they holler about clean air, everybody wants to breathe clean air. But every time they close one of them companies down because of the Clean Air Act, where’s it go? Japan or China or something. They’re working, and we’re out of work.”

The retired 73-year-old was sitting outside on his front porch, shirtless in the sunshine, a wild bush of white hair atop his sunburned head. His daughter Mindy, 34, and unemployed, sat next to him, wearing a do-rag, smoking a cigarette. Their dozen or so chickens pecked at seeds in their backyard coop. Their two dogs barked whenever a stranger passed.

Their house is just off a dead-end street, up against a shipyard, surrounded by collapsing houses and junk-filled yards. It might look rough here, Mike said, but it’s always been safe. Unlike on the other side of the tracks, as everyone west of those tracks likes to say. “Go a little ways on this side of Livernois it’s pretty decent, but you go farther toward town, don’t walk there at night," he said. "It’s just that simple. It’s completely different. It always has been.”

Forty years he has lived here. And in all that time, none of the ills that Delray residents complain about have bothered him. “We were always used to the industrial neighborhood, so the train and the trucks and stuff, I don’t even hear it,” he said dismissively. “You just go to sleep.”

It’s not so easy for his neighbors. Lisa Roland lives across the street with her husband, Marc, and their four kids in a rickety house whose paint is peeling, whose upstairs window is broken and whose cobbled fence barely holds back two snarling pit bulls that bark incessantly at visitors. A small American flag juts out from a homemade mailbox.

Delray is full blast in her face. The Fisher Freeway soars high to the side of her yard, providing a soundtrack of constant traffic and the odor of exhaust. Bright lights set up to illuminate the freeway’s ongoing, bridge-related construction used to shine in her house all night, keeping her family awake. Underground blasts from the nearby salt mine would shake everything in the house. A billboard towering across the street blots out much of the sky. And the lush, overgrown field beneath it provides a home to critters like foxes and groundhogs and other animals not normally found in a big city. “I swear I seen a coyote over here about two years ago in the winter,” said Lisa, 41. “I stay as far away from there as possible.”

Years ago, when the gas station on the corner was built, a sewer pipe got crushed, and now every time it rains hard or there’s a fast snowmelt, everyone’s basement on this block backs up with sewage. But nobody dares complain, Lisa said.

“I would bet my life savings that none of these houses would pass a city inspection,” said Lisa, who’d seen Mike and Mindy Donovan sitting outside in the early afternoon and walked over to sit and smoke with them. “None of us would. So we don’t complain because we’re kind of stuck. We start complaining, they start wanting to get in.”

That’s one reason Mike won’t go to the community meetings where the city’s offering home improvements to those who choose to stay here. He doesn’t trust the city, hates politicians and thinks such offers of assistance are scams.

“They’re gonna have people down there to offer you inspections for your houses, they’re gonna bring people in to fix up your stuff, low interest and all that,” he said. “Any of these old houses, ain’t none of them gonna pass inspection. They’re a hundred years old or better. They’ll bring them in, give you a big bill when they’re all done, and they’re still gonna move you out. So anybody who lets them inspectors in to start inspecting their stuff, as far as I’m concerned, is crazy. It’s just a way for them to suck them in.”

He has no intention of taking the city’s offer to leave, either. His house is crumbling, but it’s his. It’s paid off. His property taxes are only about $500 a year. There’s no place else where he can move and live this cheaply. This neighborhood is home, and his neighbors are family. His daughter stays here, and his son lives only blocks away.

“The people in Delray right now is happy with Delray,” he said. “Everybody gets along. Nobody bothers us. We don’t have problems down here, we don’t have the crime like everybody thinks we got. A lot of people are scared to come down here. They are. I got friends, I tell them I’m in Delray — ‘Oh man, we can’t go down there.’ ”

Mindy agreed. “Even, like, the people that get lost down here because of the freeway construction, I kind of feel sorry for them, ‘cause they look so scared,” she said. “It’s not really that bad, but they get lost when they get off this exit.”

“Here in Delray is probably as low as you’re going to go,” Lisa said. “We make the east side look good — that’s how people view us. They view Delray as the last stop in Detroit, the last step before homelessness. ‘You stay in Delray?’ I can’t tell you the looks that Mindy and I have gotten. ‘Yeah, I stay in Delray. I’m proud of where I’m from. That’s my home.’ ”

Her family moved here from Chicago 34 years ago. Lisa’s mother, Vivian, owned the family house; when she died, Lisa moved in. Her stepbrother lived next door. Like the McCrackens and the McPhails and the Pattersons and the Donovans, hers is another Delray family that stayed in the neighborhood where they’ve lived for years because their relatives have stayed here too.

“We’re family oriented,” Lisa said. “Your neighbors become your family. They watch out for you, they watch out for your kids, they watch out for your house, your cars. We take care of one another."

Plus, there’s the freedom they can’t find anywhere else. Here, they don’t have city officials bothering them over pesky rules and laws and ordinances, like they do elsewhere.

For example, Mike noted cheerfully, when he owned a trucking company years back, he could bring home his 18-wheelers and leave them in the streets and empty fields near his house without ever getting a ticket from the city. “It was perfect,” he said. “I could park one in the middle of the street, leave it all winter, who cares? My buddies live in the suburbs, they couldn’t even take theirs home and wash it.”

Inside Mike and Mindy's house, the living room walls are covered in faded family photos — pictures of kids, grandkids, nieces and nephews, interspersed with portraits of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. And high above everything, on a shelf atop the fireplace, alongside candles and crosses and garlands of rosaries, sits a portrait of Mike’s late wife, Theresa, next to an urn holding her ashes. She died two summers ago, at age 70. From cancer.

Lisa’s mom died not long before her, at age 66. From cancer.

“A lady around the corner — the Garcias — her mother died of cancer,” Lisa noted. “She also grew up in Delray. She was in her 50s.”

Come to think of it, they all noted, a lot of people in the neighborhood have died from cancer.

So many things could be causing this, they speculated, from now-gone companies like waste-oil processor Sybill, cited more than 100 times by the county for air quality violations before it went bankrupt in 2001; or the Wayne Soap Company, which boiled animal entrails from slaughterhouses and routinely caused nausea for a radius of miles around it before closing in the 1990s; to current businesses like the Marathon refinery in neighboring Oakwood Heights, which, for years, left wind-spreading piles of petroleum coke along the Delray riverfront and whose ZIP code has been named the most polluted in the state; to Peerless Metal Powders across the railroad tracks, which was the subject of neighbor complaints, state citations for emissions violations and a lawsuit in 2000 by residents who feared the effects of the strange red dust that fell on their Delray neighborhood and killed their plants and grass.

Now add the emissions from thousands more commercial trucks streaming over a new bridge from Canada every day, and things will only get worse. Yet none of them gathered in the living room planned to leave.

“It’s one of those trade-offs — move to the suburbs where everything is clean and fresh and you don’t have to deal with it but you can’t afford it, or stay here and live somewhat comfortable knowing what your money situation is,” Lisa said.

She’s making barely more than minimum wage at a sausage plant, her husband’s unemployed after an injury, they’re behind on their property taxes and they have no savings at all. Even if they wanted to leave, they can’t afford the taxes and upkeep of a new home. At least here in Delray, you can live on next to nothing.

“I’m not going to find this somewhere else,” Lisa said. “I mean, I might find a house, but I’m not going to find a home, and that’s really the basis of it. They might give me a house, but they’re not going to give me a home. They’re not going to give me everything that’s associated with a home."

By contrast, over on the other side of Livernois, the part of town that lies across the railroad tracks where Mike said he wouldn’t walk at night, George Chene couldn’t wait to get out of his Delray home.

“I ain’t gonna miss this house,” said the 39-year-old with disgust.

He was standing shirtless in front of a two-story shell of rotting wood, peeling siding and broken windows where he’d lived for several years with his 63-year-old girlfriend Linda Mynes and Linda’s unemployed 42-year-old daughter Marion. Like a lot of Delray homes, it was old and it was falling apart. And today was their last day here. It was moving day.

“There’s so many memories I’ve had in it over the years. A lot,” he said. “Other than that, I can’t wait to get out of here.”

That’s because a lot of those memories were bad. George pointed to his stomach, on which he’d gotten tattoos listing the names of all the relatives and friends who’d died recently, along with their birth dates and death dates, in blue cursive script.

“My dad had a stroke getting into the shower,” George said, his finger touching each name on the list as he spoke. “Leon died from the swine flu. Arnold died from a massive hernia; I mean, it was the size of a brick right here sticking out. And then Gary died of a heart attack. And Johnny also died of a heart attack.” The last one, Johnny, used to live in a broken-down motor home parked at the side of the family’s house after Linda had taken him under her wing like a forgotten stray, and Johnny’s name still needed to be added to the list on George’s belly. People around him were dying quicker than he could save up for a new tattoo.

All of these people had stayed in this house at some point, and nearly all of them died here. Johnny was found lying dead outside by the front door. Gary was found stiff in the yard by the dogs one morning. Arnold died upstairs in a dirty room, as his child slept in his arms, after the hospital sent him home and said there was nothing they could do for him after he’d neglected his health so long.

“That’s why I hate this house,” George said. “It’s cursed.”

Luckily for George, he and his family didn’t have to wait for the city to make him an offer. His house was on Dragoon Street, right where the new bridge’s customs plaza will be, and, as part of their process of assembling land, the Michigan Department of Transportation cut the family a check to leave this house and find another, better home somewhere else. Anywhere they wanted, they were told.

Finally, they could get away from the smokestacks, the smells, the trains that would stall on the tracks and trap them on this street for hours at a time, the thieves bold enough to come to the door two days before Christmas and rob them at gunpoint of all their presents.

George lit a cigarette as he stood on the homemade plywood ramp he’d built for Linda, who's been confined to a wheelchair ever since she developed diabetes, then lost a leg, then lost her eye, then needed around-the-clock care. George had been a trucker, but his only job now was as a state-paid caregiver under the Home Help Medicare program, taking care of Linda.

A borrowed tractor-trailer was backed up to the ramp, and it was already full of decades of belongings. Next to the house was a string of empty lots where their five dogs ran free, where the family had parked a half-dozen junk cars and where they’d left Johnny’s crummy old motor home, its nose still nudged against the house’s wall, like Johnny had been trying to snuggle right up to the house and be part of the family.

Their home was incredibly filthy. The walls were dirty. The floors were caked with mud. The windows that weren’t broken were covered in a smoky yellow film. The air stank of rot. And there were rat droppings everywhere — on the floors, inside the cupboards and streaming in trails out of the three fist-sized holes the rats had chewed into the baseboards of the kitchen walls. The infestation got so bad George bought poison, mashed it in Crisco grease and smeared it on the floors. That killed one wave of rodents. “But then the cockroaches came back that weekend,” he noted. And the rats died inside the walls, adding to the stink of the house. A new wave of rats came to replace them anyway.

That wasn’t half as bad as the bedbug infestation.

After all that, it shouldn’t have been hard to convince the family to go. But Linda had been in the house for nearly four decades, and it wasn’t so easy to walk away. “It might have looked like garbage, but that was home,” she said. It was where she had her big shade tree out front, and the birds she’d watch every day, and the fold-out table by the sidewalk where everyone would go sit and talk and smoke cigarettes.

“It was nothing less than five star to her,” said Linda’s stepson Brandon Mynes, 23. “She loved the house until the end.”

Plus, there aren’t many rules in Delray, and Linda always liked that. “You can do what you want to do,” she said. “Like if I moved to River Rouge where my daughter is, your car would get ticketed every day if it’s parked wrong. And she’ll have a ticket if her grass isn’t cut. She’ll have a ticket if she don’t shovel her walk. We don’t worry about that. So that’s why I love it here.”

The family reluctantly hired a real estate agent. Combed through house listings. And after an extensive search, they found a new home they all agreed upon. Finally, they were leaving behind the rats, the bedbugs, the memories of death, the house crumbling around them. They were leaving behind Delray.

And moving to Delray.

The family found a house barely a mile away from their old one — just outside the bridge’s footprint, across the railroad tracks, on the corner of West End. Now they’ll be twice as close to the wastewater treatment plant as they had been, half the distance to Zug Island, a half-mile from the Donovans’ block, a street over from the McPhails, down the road from Fran and her animals, a couple blocks from the coming entrance ramp to the bridge, and right next to the temporary cement plant that bangs with activity until late at night and keeps their new neighbor, Gloria, shuttered in her home.

None of that mattered to them, though. This house had new siding, a new roof, air conditioning and a fence around the yard for all the dogs. Most important of all, they got to stay in Delray. They could’ve moved anywhere they wanted. But they couldn’t say good-bye to this familiar, comforting, neighborly, stinky old place.

“I got as close as I could to my old house,” said Linda, beaming. “I’ve lived in Delray all my life. I think it’s great here. It’s the best place to live. I wouldn’t live nowhere else. It’s my home. I love it here.”

The new house didn’t feel quite like theirs until a few weeks later, after they’d filled the clean rooms with all of their belongings, and deposited the empty tractor-trailer in the alley, and let the five barking dogs outside to run free around the property, and parked a bunch of old cars on the lawn, and brought Johnny’s sad, unused motor home and put it in the yard, its nose snug against the house, like it always had been. Now, it felt like home. As only in Delray a home can be.

“Go walking in that new house, it’s just, man it makes you feel better to just be able to walk in there and just be able to say, ‘Hey, this is my home,’ ” George said. “It’s totally different, like wow, but at the same time it’s like the same, ‘cause I’m still in Delray.”

John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep.

Ryan Garza is a photojournalist at the Free Press. Follow him on Twitter @ryangarzafreep and Instagram at @ryangarza.