![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus
Aug. 12th, 2009 11:28 pmI went for a 2 AM walk last night to see the Perseid Meteor Shower. There aren't a lot of completely dark places around here I can walk to, so I went to the park and just tried to see where there were no streetlights. It was futile anyway; the lights were bright and so was the moon, and I could barely even see the stars. It was nice to walk in the dark, anyway. Everything was very quiet, and it would have been scary if I didn't already love the place so much...it's particularly gorgeous at dusk, when everything is green and the river is just a little dark and there are fireflies, and it looks like a fairyland.
*
Tonight, Brian wanted me to drive him down to Ferndale. I usually take 9 Mile Road, which goes straight down from a few blocks away from the apartment to downtown Ferndale and is a reasonably sedate, suburban stretch of road. But Brian needed to go elsewhere in Ferndale, so we took 8 Mile Road, which is anything but sedate and suburban.
I don't know if this is something that's unique to Detroit, or if it's a feature of all big cities, but the difference in a mile can be astounding--there's such a sharp and immediate contrast between rich areas and poor areas, sometimes just across the street from each other. I mentioned this to Brian. "Contrast?" he said. "You want to see contrast? Take Woodward to Seven Mile, I'll show you contrast."
We ended up in Palmer Woods, which is an incredibly nice area--the houses were all enormous and Victorian, and the country club seemed thriving. Then we hopped over to the other side of Woodward to Palmer Park, and took one of the one-way streets east. It wasn't as opulent as Palmer Woods, and not as eerily immaculate as, say, Farmington Hills. But it was obviously a nice street--the houses were big and gorgeous and well-maintained, people were sitting on their front steps and socializing, and there was even a New Age store with a hippie drum circle and little kids running around in the fountain out front.
Then Brian directed me to drive to the next street over, to a street which ran west. It took a couple of minutes for me to realize what was wrong. Every single house on that street was burnt out; some of them were nearly collapsed, some of them just blackened, but they'd all had fires. The windows were all smashed, and the road was riddled with potholes. The lawns were crazily overgrown with three-foot-high grass and wildflowers and shrubs, almost more like a jungle than anything; the grass and weeds growing in the ditches threatened to even overtake the asphalt. In a few years, it probably would have been entirely overgrown, impassable.
I'd never seen a street like this before. I've been to the neighborhoods Brian's friends live in, where there are two or three squat houses or burnt-out places that stick out. I've been to my dad's old neighborhood, where a lot of the houses are boarded up or burnt out, and some of them aren't even there anymore. I've been to his friend Margaret's neighborhood, with huge old houses boarded up, where her restored Victorian mansion is the only place on the street people live. Areas that eroded slowly, where houses burned down one at a time, where people couldn't afford their houses or got kicked out or just moved, and nobody came in to take their place. Even those places seemed oddly peaceful, like they were just resting, waiting for people to move in and renovate and rebuild and make it alive.
This street wasn't anything like that. It was dead. Brian said there was a gang war just on this street, that all the houses had "flamed out" in a span of weeks. He said the last one had been sold to a friend of his, who bought it from the desperate owner on a whim and paid $2.38 (and a cigarette) for it. "All the streets going west around here are like this," he said. "The streets going east are all fine."
I love the place I live, and I want to move into the city proper someday, when I have the money. (Brian is doing this now, fixing up an abandoned house with ten friends. I'm not that handy or resourceful; it's Farmington Hills just now.) Things have been shitty for a long time here, but I know they'll change, slowly, even if the vacant lots become farms instead of factories. The city motto means, "We Hope For Better Things; It Shall Rise From the Ashes," and I think it will.
I want to go back and take pictures of that street. And I want to go back in a year, in five years, and see how it's changed; if it's been rebuilt and reclaimed and revitalized, or if it will be grown over, decayed and unrecognizable.
*
Tonight, Brian wanted me to drive him down to Ferndale. I usually take 9 Mile Road, which goes straight down from a few blocks away from the apartment to downtown Ferndale and is a reasonably sedate, suburban stretch of road. But Brian needed to go elsewhere in Ferndale, so we took 8 Mile Road, which is anything but sedate and suburban.
I don't know if this is something that's unique to Detroit, or if it's a feature of all big cities, but the difference in a mile can be astounding--there's such a sharp and immediate contrast between rich areas and poor areas, sometimes just across the street from each other. I mentioned this to Brian. "Contrast?" he said. "You want to see contrast? Take Woodward to Seven Mile, I'll show you contrast."
We ended up in Palmer Woods, which is an incredibly nice area--the houses were all enormous and Victorian, and the country club seemed thriving. Then we hopped over to the other side of Woodward to Palmer Park, and took one of the one-way streets east. It wasn't as opulent as Palmer Woods, and not as eerily immaculate as, say, Farmington Hills. But it was obviously a nice street--the houses were big and gorgeous and well-maintained, people were sitting on their front steps and socializing, and there was even a New Age store with a hippie drum circle and little kids running around in the fountain out front.
Then Brian directed me to drive to the next street over, to a street which ran west. It took a couple of minutes for me to realize what was wrong. Every single house on that street was burnt out; some of them were nearly collapsed, some of them just blackened, but they'd all had fires. The windows were all smashed, and the road was riddled with potholes. The lawns were crazily overgrown with three-foot-high grass and wildflowers and shrubs, almost more like a jungle than anything; the grass and weeds growing in the ditches threatened to even overtake the asphalt. In a few years, it probably would have been entirely overgrown, impassable.
I'd never seen a street like this before. I've been to the neighborhoods Brian's friends live in, where there are two or three squat houses or burnt-out places that stick out. I've been to my dad's old neighborhood, where a lot of the houses are boarded up or burnt out, and some of them aren't even there anymore. I've been to his friend Margaret's neighborhood, with huge old houses boarded up, where her restored Victorian mansion is the only place on the street people live. Areas that eroded slowly, where houses burned down one at a time, where people couldn't afford their houses or got kicked out or just moved, and nobody came in to take their place. Even those places seemed oddly peaceful, like they were just resting, waiting for people to move in and renovate and rebuild and make it alive.
This street wasn't anything like that. It was dead. Brian said there was a gang war just on this street, that all the houses had "flamed out" in a span of weeks. He said the last one had been sold to a friend of his, who bought it from the desperate owner on a whim and paid $2.38 (and a cigarette) for it. "All the streets going west around here are like this," he said. "The streets going east are all fine."
I love the place I live, and I want to move into the city proper someday, when I have the money. (Brian is doing this now, fixing up an abandoned house with ten friends. I'm not that handy or resourceful; it's Farmington Hills just now.) Things have been shitty for a long time here, but I know they'll change, slowly, even if the vacant lots become farms instead of factories. The city motto means, "We Hope For Better Things; It Shall Rise From the Ashes," and I think it will.
I want to go back and take pictures of that street. And I want to go back in a year, in five years, and see how it's changed; if it's been rebuilt and reclaimed and revitalized, or if it will be grown over, decayed and unrecognizable.
