We grew up in Detroit—yes, the city itself. It’s not as if we spent two decades cowering in fear. Our neighborhood was North Rosedale Park, on the northwest side, and for nearly two decades the beautiful things about living there easily eclipsed the crimes that finally drove us away. But the crimes and the beautiful things were never easy to disentangle.

We moved to North Rosedale in December, 1975, just after I turned one and my sister turned three. My mom thought that she’d gone to heaven. The day we moved in, our neighbor Mrs. Halsted stopped by to make sure we knew about Community Christmas—which turned out to be a beautifully organized arts-and-crafts assembly line for local kids and kaffeeklatsch for their parents, free of charge. Then our next-door neighbors the Youngs invited us to their annual Christmas party for everyone on the block. One night it snowed, and my parents woke up the next morning to find their sidewalk already plowed by emissaries from the neighborhood civic association. On our first Christmas at our previous house in Detroit, burglars stole our winter coats and all the presents from under the tree, leaving a stampede of muddy footprints on the living room carpet.

My parents had no idea what a paradise North Rosedale could be until they moved in. All they knew was that they could buy a gorgeous house there for only thirty thousand dollars, and that was good enough. It was a big yellow-brick colonial, built solid in 1928 and clearly designed for a family with means: a wood-burning fireplace in the living room, a leaded-glass window on the stair. Down the center of the house, a two-story laundry chute. (I desperately wanted to throw my sisters down it, but the doors were too small.) In the walls, a network of talking pipes—a primitive yet magically effective form of intercom. Best of all, in the basement, not one but two secret rooms. The sheer marvellousness of the place coupled with my father’s modest publishing-company salary made for some ridiculous juxtapositions of luxury and frugality, like we were rebel forces who’d just captured the palace of a dictator newly fled: we’d sit in the dining room under our crystal chandelier eating store-brand cereal with powdered milk.

It was good enough that there was a lot we were willing to ignore. Five months after we moved to North Rosedale, three men with guns took my mother’s purse while she chatted outside a friend’s house on a perfect May evening. When a cop arrived, my dad pointed out that the muggers now had our home address and our house keys. What to do?

“Well, you go into your house, you turn off all the lights, you get your gun, and you spend the night sitting behind the front door,” the cop said. “If somebody tries to come in, you can start shooting.”

“What is this, the fucking Wild West?” my dad said. “Anyway, I don’t have a gun.”

The cop rolled his eyes. What can you do with these liberals? Instead, we slept at a neighbor’s house—we had a hundred neighbors who would have dropped everything to host us. The next day, we went back home and stayed there for another eighteen years. My parents had two more daughters in that house. We never got a gun. It was the greatest place any of us have ever lived.

In moving to North Rosedale, it seemed that we’d unintentionally joined an intentional community. It was a neighborhood of co-ops: for nursery school, for food, for babysitting. At night, a volunteer neighborhood patrol cruised the streets. When my mother was confined to bed after surgery on her spine, our neighbors got together and delivered hot dinners to our house for a month. It wasn’t an ashram or a kibbutz, although there could be a slightly religious tinge to the neighborhood idealism—lots of people who lived in North Rosedale, including my parents, were committed Catholics in the social-justice vein. But, if there was a single ideal that unified us, it was integration.

Detroit’s record of racial segregation and housing discrimination was for much of its history so blatant and extreme that in a blind taste test you’d swear it came from the Deep South. North Rosedale had a reputation as one of the most successfully integrated neighborhoods in the city. Not that this was a competitive category—it was one of the few neighborhoods in the entire metropolitan area that was much integrated at all. The neighborhood tilted from a white majority to a black majority in the eighteen years that we lived there, but at a much slower speed than in the rest of Detroit. Black or white, the parents who moved their families to North Rosedale tended to be people who were keen on maintaining the balance. It was a modest experiment—proximity was all our parents were really asking for, especially for us kids. They simply wanted integration to seem normal to us, black and white kids together in school and on the playground, running through each other’s back yards, dropping in at each other’s houses for dinner.

Unlike a real intentional community, there’s no interview before you arrive in North Rosedale to make sure you’ll be a good ideological fit. The test was your very choice to move to the neighborhood. Detroit has been shrinking for more than half a century—since well before the 1967 riots—and there are only two broad reasons why anyone stays: they have utopian ideas or they can’t afford to move. Almost by definition, if you lived in North Rosedale you could have chosen to live elsewhere. It was assumed that you chose our neighborhood because you shared our collective sense of purpose. There was a certain pressure to participate. There was a real anxiety that we needed everyone to participate if the neighborhood was going to continue to thrive. Almost next door to North Rosedale is a neighborhood called Brightmoor, popularly known as Blight More. Much of Brightmoor matches what Detroit looks like in the popular imagination—an alarming amalgam of city dump, crime scene, and wild prairie—and it served as a warning of what could happen to us if we weren’t vigilant. (Did our happy oasis in North Rosedale rely on the misery and the blight that surrounded it? Sure it did. We could only afford to live there because the city as a whole was failing. Detroit taught me that all happy places feed off the blood of the doomed.) The most anxious among us formalized their commitment to the city by joining a group called the Stayers. Needless to say, not all the Stayers stayed.

What really pulled the neighborhood together was an inspired bit of urban planning. Just around the block from our house was a beautiful four-acre park, in the middle of which was the Community House, a well-used yet grand multipurpose building owned collectively by the residents. It’s difficult to overstate just how significant the Community House was. Every neighborhood should have a place like this. There was always something going on: a party, a political meeting, a play staged by the community-theatre company. I know that lots of neighborhoods have community centers, but this one was different. Partly it was the space itself that made it special—the Community House was literally the center of the neighborhood, and the park set it apart like a green frame around our hive of activities. The building itself was permeated with the kinds of nooks and crannies and hiding spaces that kids live for. In the summer, we transformed the Community House and grounds into a neighborhood festival called June Day, complete with a parade, a midway, and a concert in the park. In the winter, we’d flood the soccer fields for ice-skating.

It was the eighties, when Detroit was best known for its murder rate and for burning itself down on Devil’s Night. But, if you squinted, life in North Rosedale looked almost quaint. The Fuller Brush man sold his wares door to door. The Dy-Dee truck dropped off clean cloth diapers for my baby sisters. It was like we were making a second attempt at some idealized nineteen-fifties version of American life, with parades and theatre and Girl Scouts and a big neighborhood pancake breakfast on Mother’s Day, only this time doing it with as much racial integration as we could muster. But the results sometimes came out twisted. I joined the neighborhood Boy Scout troop (which met at the Community House, naturally), and, while we often took camping trips out in the wildernesses of Real Michigan, we didn’t learn much about wildlife—our troop leaders had more enthusiasm for the flora and fauna of the city. Once we were picking up trash on the median along Bretton Drive when Mr. Lawless, an ex-cop, spied a small glassine envelope. “Look, boys,” he said. “You can see there are still traces of cocaine in here.” Another time, I asked him to identify a pair of bullet shells that I’d found in my back yard. “Ah, those are .22s,” he said, pleased to share his knowledge. “Probably came from a Saturday-night special.”