Detroit once burned to the ground, much like her rival Chicago. In 1805, after a rather difficult first century of changing political hands twice and being under the perpetual threat of invasion from Canada (come on, you can laugh), the mostly French-Canadian inhabitants of the city found themselves having to start over from scratch. Thus we have the motto of the city: Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus. While the dominant culture of the city would then change into a melting pot of both internal and external immigrants much like New York, the heart of her founding people would remain in a resilient population that would turn adversity into reason for existence. How?
A precarious existence next to Upper Canada turned into a port of entry and departure.
As the wounds of 1812 slowly began to heal through the 19th century, trade began to grow between the two banks of the river. Western Ontarians were, and are, a far more agrarian folk than their brethren to the east of the Niagara Escarpment. Michigan would later include a strong agricultural base, mostly in fruits and vegetables, in its diverse economic portfolio, but its emergence out of frontier life came at a comparatively slower rate than neighboring Ohio and Indiana. People came to Michigan, after all, to harvest timber or trap beaver. You came to Michigan for the one last piece of the frontier lifestyle that could still be found east of the Mississippi. If your family followed, they would most likely set up camp in the more serene domesticity of the rich croplands of the true Midwest, not some off-the-beaten path place that would not even become a state until 1837. That said, a lot of people did come to Detroit, all 46,000 of them by the time tempers flared at Fort Sumter. They needed food, and what they could not provide for themselves they could find across the way. Position was everything, after all.
Position was how Chicago grew from a backwater fort into one of the greatest cities in the world. Chicago was a transportation hub, a gateway between east and west. One would get off the boat in New York, sure, but if one wanted to move deeper into the land, one ended up with countless native born Americans before a great menu of destinations awaiting them at this gateway. Despite the open nature of the continent, nearly all travel somehow centered on the great bottleneck there. Traffic still does; multiple interstates get their start in the city, leading in a great radial pattern to all points except due east into the drink of Lake Michigan. The great northern transcontinental roads and railways all stop here, and some of the success that New York achieved as the premier port of the United States was in the fact that Chicago was at the other end of a passage to the west, be it by canal and lakes or rail.
Chicago never had the benefit of being next to Canada, however, and certainly not the benefit of being a mere three hours and change away from Toronto, with a bit more of a double investment getting one to Montreal and thus the ocean. Or, if one was feeling overly patriotic, one could still take the Empire route through Buffalo and onto New York. Yes, Detroit had, and has, the distinct advantage of also being a transportation hub, and then one on international scale. Detroit could serve as the staging point for more than just settlement expansion and agricultural commodities trading. Detroit could serve, rightly so, as the center of a Great Lakes powerhouse of natural resources both arboreal and mineral. Chicago was the doorstep to the west, sure, but Detroit was right at the center of everything industrial east of the Mississippi. If ever there can be declared a true capital to the Great Lakes, it is the city right at the middle of them. Of course, back then raw materials for industry were all the rage, and this included people themselves, some free, many not so free.
Detroit was for many the last place they would experience of an American existence. Detroit was the last frightful stop for escaping slaves heading to safety in Canada through the Underground Railroad.
The thing was, some of these slaves would one day return, and Detroit became more than just a gateway. Many other people would come in their wake, from many different lands and cultures. They would come because of racial tolerance and freedom, not in spite of it. They still do today; Detroit has one of the most diverse immigrant populations outside of the major port cities of New York and Los Angeles. Freedom, a reasonable cost of living, good living conditions, excellent paying jobs in a number of fields, all of these and more attracted people to a city that truly encapsulated the American dream far more than the crowded slums of packed New York or even great gateway Chicago.
The new Underground Railroad works the same way.
Immigrants finding tough restrictions, discrimination, and economic difficulties in the United States have been increasingly turning toward Canada as an alternative destination nation. Now, as then, many make a life for themselves there only to find that they still want to make a go for it, largely because of relatives who have done so, in the United States. Detroit actually turns out to be one of the first places that springs to mind for making this happen. How do I know? Personal experience. Having spent time in various INS offices, I can assure my readers that the two most diverse waiting rooms I have been to were in Detroit and New York. In a rather sterile and tranquil modern version of Ellis Island, voices from around the world crowd daily into the immigration offices on Jefferson ave. in Detroit. To most Americans, Detroit might symbolize decay and corruption, but to people from the rest of the world it symbolizes diversity and opportunity. When I lived over in London in 2003, most of the people I met in that extremely cosmopolitan world city saw Detroit as a point of racial and national encounter. Violent, perhaps at times, but for the most part a different view of the country and continent at large.
To these same people, a place like New York was more of a melting pot where cultural assimilation and absorption takes place. Everyone picks up the habits and customs and tastes of everyone else and the country is enriched the more so even while the newcomers also become more American. In Detroit, the process is a bit slower, and differences become far more apparent. The movie 8 Mile was often pointed out to me as an artistic representation of this encounter between different worlds. In reality, 8 Mile road is very much the boundary between the suburban and urban worlds here, and as the movie illustrated all too well, it can be a very messy border indeed. As noted, though, encounters do not necessarily mean confrontation, just more so a lot of transmission without dilution. Case in point, we have amazing musical talent here that has benefited from cultural fault-lines. We also have the most diverse regional cuisine in, well, North America. If you wanted to, you could gorge on a day of restaurant binges and get stuffed full of authentic Mexican, Italian-American, Polish, Arabic, Greek, Soul, and even Coney Island food. Best of all, poutine has recently made a dramatic entrance here, and this gets us back to one of our two main events.
What is Detroit good for? Being plain exciting and having what is possibly the most potential of any city in North America. If we can rely more so on the strengths of our racial differences than the bigotry that can exist between them, we can easily, along with what I envision to be our ideal sister city of Toronto, become one of the new prime destination cities of the country. Recent plans to reintroduce efficient high-speed rail service to the United States incorporates Chicago as the primary central hub of connections, one of which is as the terminus of a corridor stretching to Montreal, through Detroit and Toronto, the true lifeblood of this circuit. We already have a second major international crossing on the way to help facilitate commercial traffic, and Canada already has the high speed lines built on their end. We also have the wealth here to reinvigorate what treasures do remain in our city, which we see in the next post on what Detroit has to offer to the world.
For now, we have soul, and we sure do have hope.
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| The best way to illustrate this post would be an early morning shot of the city, taken just as the sun is making its way up. We sure do have a tree-filled city! |
We have this virtue not in the memory of a glorious past or in spite of rampant corruption and decay, but because of an energy which never did get dissipated during so many rough times, it just got either redirected or channeled into different values for a different age. Again, come by next post to see what we have accomplished.
And oh yes, I am a proud Michontarian, a word I predict will have a much wider usage in the coming decades.
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