Resurget Cineribus

It Shall Arise From The Ashes

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.

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.

Detroit, the Third-World City?

This post is something I have wanted to write for a long time.  I have taken nearly a week off from the blog preparing for it, or more so hesitating to write it, but the last few weeks have seen some, well, aggravating developments in a long line of blunders made by the Detroit City Council, coupled by yet more media attention lavished upon former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.  

In 1701, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac was travelling up the Detroit river when he cast his eyes upon a length of short bluffs on the west bank of the river.  They were covered in towering beech-maple forests pierced by even grander White Pines and were surrounded by ash swamps absolutely loaded with beaver.  A defensible location approximately halfway into the Great Lakes teeming with fur bearing mammals featuring much milder winters than anything back in Quebec proper must have seemed like paradise to any resident of New France.  Cadillac thought so, for he founded a city here.  Fifty years later, it was to rival Montreal and New Orleans, the other two great cities of New France, in size.  In 1760 she changed hands, but not cultures.  Detroit remained a French-Canadian city into the early 19th century, and many residents in the metropolitan area still bear French last names, as do the city street names and grid pattern up and down the river on both banks.  Though not as immediately recognizable as a heart of Franco-North American heritage, Detroit has every right to lay claim to being a part of this history.  

Time and people have marched on.  Lured by the same promise of free land that attracted the first Canadians here, Americans came to the region, if not in the same great numbers that they flocked to newly minted Chicago.  Perhaps this was because Detroit and Michigan were north of the beaten path, and a little too close to Upper Canada for comfort.  Still, immigrants and escaped, later freed African Americans came to settle here throughout the 19th century.  Detroit was heard of a destination even in Mexico, and the city boasts one of the oldest Mexican communities in the northern United States, established now for over a century.  While she grew alongside the other great old cities of the Northeast and Great Lakes, she positively exploded when Henry Ford and other industrial innovators set up shop here in the early 20th century.  Ford and the other industrialists offered incredible opportunities, including high wages for even entrance-level factory workers and hiring policies that dismissed any notion of racial segregation.  

Even as the mansions of the wealthy sprang up to rival the finest estates in New England and New York, even as skyscrapers and a cityscape to rival New York and Chicago rose from the lit, paved streets laid out in a Parisian pattern, the ordinary Detroiters saw a piece of the pie and could afford comfortable lives of their own.  Relations with Canada had significantly warmed by the turn of the century, and while Detroit had once been off the beaten path, it was now an international gateway, one made even more prestigious by proximity to alcohol-loaded Ontario during a rather dry time in the United States.  Best of all, Detroit was, and remains, on a powerful corridor running from Chicago to Montreal, a corridor which is every bit as urban, wealthy, and sophisticated as the east coast of the United States.   By the second world war, she was the fourth largest city in the United States, and among the wealthiest.  48302, the zip code for Bloomfield, MI, in fact, is the second richest zip code in the country after 90210, made so not by celebrity but by the automobile.  

So what happened?

Why do people now associate Detroit with something far more grim?  Why do photographers come here only to take shots of urban decay and abandoned buildings that look as if they would have once been palaces and theatres to rival the sights in Vienna and Paris?  Why do people associate the name Detroit only with what is wrong in America?  When people think of the word they sometimes re-arrange the last two vowels to spell "riot".  Well, Detroit sure did have a riot to end all riots.

Black Day in July

It's a good video, so I thought I would provide a bigger link for it here than just a line leading to YouTube.  Gordon Lightfoot is a folk singer from central Ontario, a major influence on none other than Bob Dylan, and perhaps one of the finest bards on matters relating to the Great Lakes region.  

Detroit might have been a northern city of a great dream of economic and racial equality, but it was still paralyzed by racial tension that gripped far more than just the southern United States.  These days, the city has turned from a diverse population into one that is vastly Black, even as the ever-expanding suburbs have taken in that former diversity.  Non-institutional segregation has given way to a seeming exclusivity, but this is not the sole reason why Detroit has changed so much, no matter how many people want to blame a race for the downward slope of a once great city.  The wealth, power, development, and greatness just got so dispersed in the ever-expanding donut of the suburbs that it faded from view.  Who cares about a suburb, after all, if the city it satellites is a second string attraction?   Anyway...

What was that about race?  Better yet, what was that about racism?  Oh, and not just White on Black.  Black on White.  Everyone on everyone else.  We have had so much racial tension here since the 1920's that it is hard to posit a place where the madness began, but I am going to say that two people encapsulate just how divided and exclusionary the lifeblood of Detroit has become:

Coleman Young, first black mayor of Detroit and an emblem of reverse-racism.

Orville Hubbard, segregationist mayor of Dearborn and an emblem of overt racism. 

Young was the mayor of Detroit from 1974 to 1993, while Hubbard was the mayor of Dearborn from 1942 to 1978.  On first glance, why yes, these times are far, far too long to be dominating the politics of any governing body.  During Young's time as mayor, Detroit shrank in population by well over half, became known as the murder and arson capital of the United States, and presided over city-councils dominated by pro-Black segregationists and some of the most corrupt civic leaders, well, anywhere in the world.  He personally fought to racially integrate the city's civil services and was committed to a crusade against racism, at least as he defined it.  Most baby-boomers and older residents of the metro area consider him to be the worst thing to ever happen to Detroit.  More neutral viewers of history consider him to be a man who did not try to veil his opinions and could hardly be blamed for just how volatile and dangerous the situation of the city became during his time in office.  His motto might best be summed up as "integration and social-equality at all costs, <expletive>".

Hubbard, on the other hand, was determined to keep his neighboring city of Dearborn out of the hands of what he deemed to be forces that were killing Detroit, and yes, he very much disliked integration of Whites and Blacks.  Ironically, Dearborn has since become a largely Arab-American city and largely added to the multiculturalism of the metro area.  Whereas Young's intentions might at least be debatable, Hubbard's were never in question; he openly detested anyone who was Black.  His motto might best be summed up as "keep your Black <expletive> out of my city."

So who do you think is talked about more when thinking about the history of the metro area?  Young.  Hubbard hardly even gets a mention, which is pretty sad.  When suburbanites see abandoned neighborhoods, long deceased businesses and factories, crumbling churches and overgrown parks, they decry the remaining residents of the city rather than think back on what might have been had they, you know, stayed and worked things out.  When city residents look out at the suburbs and look around again at their own neighborhoods, and I say this from personal experience in working in the city of Detroit, I have seen many look at the situation as if it were inevitable, and even inescapable because of race, rather than, you know, try to make a better city.  It does not help when much of the city and county leadership is corrupt beyond the dictionary definition of the word.

I simply tell all of these "historians" the same message.  It has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with attitude.  Race is simply an excuse.  A powerful excuse, if the history of the world has anything to say about it, but an excuse.  Detroit is no longer French-Canadian.  Do I blame my own race for this downfall?  No.  Does this seem ludicrous to us now?  Indeed it does.  Back in the 18th century though, it would have been the talk of the town.  The change in power and hands of one group into another would have been discussed as "only natural, seeing as how Catholics and Frenchmen at that hate liberty, modern advancement, and true, English (or later, American) civilization".  

So what about the title?  Is Detroit simply a third-world city and a scary place full of "those people"?  Take a look at the scene below and tell me this is a slum and not a modern North American city:

No.  Detroit has gone through some rough patches, and (especially in our older generations) is still a bit overburdened by racial tension, or more so, the racial excuse.  There are some rather scary areas, but then there are scary areas in Los Angeles and New York as well.  We also have so many amazing things about us  too.  Come by next post for a better look on what Detroit actually is, and even better, what it can become.

A Different Detroit

If you follow the media and pop-culture produced anywhere outside of the Detroit area, you probably have a rather bleak view of a city that conjures up images of war torn streets, abandoned buildings and fields taking up the space of where healthy neighborhoods should be, and blight in general.  You know, something that pretty much every city in the world has at least a few bad places of!  '

You probably would not imagine a scene of skyscrapers rising above a very tree dense urban landscape, something almost akin to a morning scene in one of the more quiet corners of Central Park.

This sort of scene is not a carefully orchestrated illusion, but just a casual shot taken from the forth floor of Sacred Heart Major Seminary, looking out to downtown while lies four miles distant, as the crow flies.  What you see is a lovely sunrise obscured in fog and mist, not pollution.  Los Angeles and New York cannot say the same for their mornings a good deal of the time, and yet more people can relate good times and great stories about such places.  Perspective is everything, and the important part to remember about taking a fresh look at our continent's "different" places is that the negatives always seem to outweigh the positives.  Next time, instead of looking at a news report on the "worst cities", try asking someone from Detroit what they love about the area.  The same goes for any place out there you might have thought was undesirable.

The Future of North American Commerce

The blog took a day off yesterday to celebrate the final day of the first International Cactus Weekend, but worry not, we have plenty of places left to go and many to revisit.

We have a very crucial issue to visit today, that of more unfortunate attempts to block a MUCH NEEDED AND CRUCIAL BRIDGE from being completed.  I wrote about this issue, regarding the new international crossing, in this post.  If you are unaware of the significance that Detroit has a trade corridor between not only Canada and the United States but also between Canada and Mexico, please take a look at that post.

Sadly, it seems that the Moroun family, the very same family that has been stalling completion of their contracted project to better link the Ambassador Bridge to Interstates 96 and 75, has managed to collect enough signatures to mount a petition against the progress made in making the second crossing a reality.  Some people have already claimed that such signatures have been purchased:

http://buildthedricnow.com/2012/07/10/ambassador-bridge-owners-paid-millions-for-signatures-to-put-their-monopoly-protecting-proposal-on-the-ballot/

My opinion?  This is not an unreasonable hypothesis.  More trade passes on Detroit's Ambassador Bridge every year than does between the United States and nations such as Japan.  It should therefore not come as a shock to us that Manuel Moroun would want to keep controlling as much of this trade as possible and try to force the issue.

We need this bridge.  This bridge will enhance the local economy even further than the existing span already does.  This bridge will cost American taxpayers nothing.  This bridge is a joint effort between two very old allies, the United States and Canada, the latter of which, by the way, is not just some "foreign power" akin to Iran.  Do not be fed by his misinformation.

The Detroit Bottleneck

Much has been in the news lately about the building, or rather delays in building a new international crossing over the Detroit river between Michigan and Ontario.  The governments on both sides have agreed that the heavy amounts of commercial traffic over the existing crossing, the Ambassador Bridge, have necessitated the building of a second bridge to handle this traffic.  The Canadian government, in fact, has pledged 550 million dollars (at the nearly even present exchange rates) to make this happen.

Unfortunately, things have been slow in coming to fruition regarding this expansion.  At the forefront of the debate is one Manuel Maroun, who has launched an incredible campaign to make sure his proposed vision of the new crossing, a bridge parallel to the Ambassador, which he also owns.  He has repeatedly stalled projects which he is bound by contract to have completed by now for the state of Michigan, including the connection complex that links the bridge to Interstates 96 and 75.  He has released many advertisements compelling local voters to write in to their representatives back in Lansing to put an end to the Canadian plan for a new bridge under their financial control, claiming it a waste of taxpayer money, despite, uh, Canada putting up the money for it in the first place.  Mr. Maroun has actually been brought to court over the matter, but still insists on his double span as being the only acceptable plan to move forward with.  Canada has insisted that it needs a new bridge that can form links directly to limited-access highways and not onto the same surface streets that the Ambassador bridge currently empties onto.

So is a new bridge under the financial control of those pesky Canadians (who have a right to collect tolls to re-coup the cost of the bridge) really necessary?  Yes.  Absolutely.  The amount of U.S.-Canada trade that funnels through the Ambassador alone is equal to the total volume of trade engaged in between the United States and various countries, including high-volume partners like Japan.  Why is this the case?  A good percentage of Canadian population, industry, and commerce is concentrated in the corridor stretching from Windsor to Quebec City.  The St. Lawrence and lower Great Lakes valley are essentially the Canadian equivalent of the east coast megalopolis that stretches from Boston to Washington, D.C.  On top of this, the cities of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Hamilton, Toronto, and downstream are notable for being inland sea ports capable of sending and receiving shipping from oceanic trade routes, while also serving as trade hubs within the North American continent.  That lovely Detroit River you see above might be freshwater and hundreds of miles inland, but it can function as well for shipping as New York Harbor or San Francisco Bay.  The fact of the matter is that Detroit is just too important of a trade corridor to be monopolized by one man.  Just take a look at this map.

Courtesy of Estafeta

It is an image of important trade corridors in U.S.-Mexico trade, and it still includes Toronto, despite being off the scope of the map.  Detroit not only funnels commercial traffic between the United States and Canada, but also Mexico!  Chicago might have won the historical battle to serve as the hub of travel between the great cities of the northeast and the interior, but Detroit has the advantage of sitting right at the gates between not two or even three but potentially dozens of nations.  For the moment, it has only a single rail tunnel and a very, very choked bridge which often has a solid line of trucks sitting on its span.  This is one bottleneck that needs to be widened, to the advantage of a little bit more than just the needs of one extremely wealthy man.

Sunday Afternoon Post: The Incredible Diversity of the Great Lakes

On Belle Isle in the Detroit River is a museum dedicated to the exploration of the local flora and fauna.  While nothing extravagant, the museum does a decent job showcasing how rich in biodiversity the Detroit River and surrounding parts of the Great Lakes are.  One particular exhibit displays specimens of fresh-water mussels.

There are many coastal areas of the oceans that do not have claim to this many species of mussels, let alone other lakes.  

Neo-Gothic Churches in North America: A Little Bit of the Old Country in a New Home.

In the middle and late 19th century, the United States, and to a lesser extent, Canada, saw an increase in immigration among German and other northern European peoples.  Such peoples made their way inland and to this day their descendants continue to populate the areas shown on the U.S. Census map below.

A great deal of these immigrants were Roman Catholics, and quite proud of their heritage.  The villages and cities that they left behind often had grand monastic or cathedral parishes, and they wanted to re-create something of that world of majesty in the new lands that they would settle.  Coinciding with this desire to establish a little bit of Europe in North America was a Victorian penchant for romanticizing the medieval past, while also elaborating on it with gilded ribbed vaulting and dark, rich wooden interiors.  The new styles caught on amongst the immigrant populations, perhaps in part because some types of wood were still relatively inexpensive and readily obtainable.  The result was a vigorous building of grand parish churches that beautified a somewhat bleak industrial era urban landscape.  On the Plains, in some of the smaller towns, these churches tend to really stand out.

Kansas, somewhere off of I-70

Then, in the cities, we have places like St. Patrick's Cathedral, which, while dwarfed to some degree by modern structures, adds a presence of soul and lasting culture to an otherwise heavily commercialized street like Fifth avenue.  St. Patrick's was a bit of a different story from many of the other Neo-Gothic churches built further inland, however.  For the most part, it was a project endorsed by the ruling ecclesiastical authorities (Archbishop Hughes came up with the concept in the first place), and it had ample funding from rich donors and poor parishioners alike.  Non-Irish communities were usually not as fortunate, and sometimes German, Polish, and other ethnic communities had to fight with the predominately Irish bishops just to get the rights to form a parish in the first place.  That, however, is a story for another post.  Let's take a look at one of the German parishes.

This is St. Joseph's, built between 1870 and 1896.  She is still an operating parish, and one that offers everything from your typical Sunday Mass to traditional Latin Masses and the odd Mass now and then in German.  Like many parishes in urban cores throughout the United States, its membership has dwindled somewhat in recent decades because of demographic shifts, but it still serves the neighborhood, and its setting and architecture draw visitors from far and wide.  Want to take a look inside?

While it is something of a misnomer to label her a "typical" American immigrant Neo-Gothic parish church, what you see above is generally what one will see in such churches.  Overall, St. Joseph's has a majestic simplicity to it.  Not every edge is painted, not every window is as grand and detailed as the next (funding situations often resulted in windows being installed in stages, and thus not all turned out the same, or were even completed as desired), but the place is clearly beautiful.  All three nave stretches are equal in height, which was apparently inspired by southern German "hall church" styles.  Much of the structure was raised by parishioners, and many of the windows and other decorations were locally produced in Detroit.  When the community had to stretch the budget, they did, but in general, they wanted to leave a lasting monument to their perseverance and faith, and thus spared no expense.  Instead of using plaster, carvings in the church were made from wood.  The window below, imported from Innsbruck, Austria, is more evidence enough of a desire to build a truly majestic monument and temple.

The scene depicted is the death of St. Joseph.  Now, this is one of those photographs that does not do the window justice.  The colors are absolutely brilliant, and I could only image what the Church would look like if the rest of the windows were produced by the same people from Austria.  Of course, the other windows are just as lovely, and by no means should my admiration for this piece be a sign that the Detroit artists were inferior.  Costs aside, the parishioners could have probably imported more art from the old country, but they chose not to.  This was Detroit, this was their new home.  The local artists poured their hearts and souls into a true labor of love, unashamed to be compared and seen next to foreign talent.  In fact, some of the earliest use of American architect firms in producing stained-glass design is found in the other windows, which can all be seen on the parish website, linked above.

St. Joseph's is one of the many churches in Detroit that is worth a visit.  The history of a hard-working and determined immigrant community can be seen quite visibly here.

Detroit Before Detroit

Many of the larger cities of the world share one trait in common, that they look nothing like the original landscape on which they are built.  While London and Manhattan stand out as prime examples of the results of urban development, even smaller cities, such as Detroit, are so heavily altered that one is hard pressed to find a surviving place that looks anything like its natural landscape once did.  What is natural Detroit now?

Detroit is heavily developed, to the same degree that Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago, etc. are, meaning you are just as likely to find concrete as you are soil in a given space.

Detroit has an abundance of small neighborhood parks, but lacks a large body of central urban parks like Buffalo's Delaware Park or Manhattan's Central Park.  There are two parks on the periphery of the city, Belle Isle and Hines Drive, both created over river land difficult to build on.  Park design has been largely based on a recreational initiative, rather than a preservation initiative.

Detroit is extremely flat, with no noticeable hills or valleys (most creeks that would have had such are now underground or simply gone).  The highest point in Detroit, all 675 feet of it, lies near the corner of Wyoming avenue and Outer Drive.  The Detroit river remains the lowest point, with the average water level resting at around 571 feet.  The level elevation gradient is a result of much of the area being the former lake bed of Lake Maumee, which was also partially responsible for forming its soil.

Detroit has soils consisting largely of sand, clay, and some remaining muck soil rich in humus.  While not overly rocky, the soil contains a good assortment of rocks and minerals left by past glaciation.  A good dig through a backyard might even produce some of the same stones you can find on beaches throughout the Great Lakes.

Detroit landscaping often makes use of non-native vegetation.  Even native trees and flowers are usually planted outside of their normal conditions; the lovely maples and oaks might not have been there before.  Lots that remain untended to after human alteration are often taken over by the invasive and destructive tree of heaven.

The east side of Detroit is still somewhat flood prone, not only because of an aging sewer system, but also because some of the area lies in a broad flood plain.

Now, what is true about what pre-settlement Detroit used to be like, and where can remnants be seen?

Much of south east Michigan used to be swampy bottomlands, including the lower areas of Detroit.  In fact, the east side neighborhood known as "Black Bottom" was so called because of its original landscape.  There would have been creeks that pooled a bit in places, but were otherwise extremely wide and maybe only an inch deep where they had standing surface water, sort of like the Everglades. Very little of this remains, and most of it is on Belle Isle in the forested section.

The grasses you see in the background are actually invasive.  Now, to be fair, there would not always be standing water like this, but the soil would have been very spongy otherwise.   The area, after all, was not a true swamp.  The ground I was standing on was fairly solid, and there were slight rises of half a foot here and there which were dry.  Here, and probably in much of the lower portions of Detroit, Black ash was the dominant tree.  There would also be many cottonwoods, and in a few places, you can find old survivors.

In cases like these, the trees were most likely just thought to be lovely and built around.  Now, when the land would rise as little as a foot or so, drainage improved.  Creeks could also form and help clear out water faster, and oaks, hickories, and White ash would start appearing.  On some locations, particularly with sandy soils, White oak would grow in small pockets of prairie, maintained both by the relative aridity of the location, along with fires that could spread easier than in the wet low lying areas.  Dramatic examples of this type of landscape can no longer be found in Detroit proper, although the Oak Openings Preserve of Toledo and Ojibway Prairie Provincial Nature Reserve in Windsor are remnants that can be found nearby.

Woodward avenue and much of the immediate surrounding area downtown are about 40 feet higher than the lower east side and the areas southward leading up to the Rouge river mouth.  Records of the original French settlements on both banks of the river indicate that the area that Cadillac founded the city on in 1703 featured a somewhat prominent sandy bluff that tended to be a bit more hospitable than nearby areas (and provided the most strategic viewpoint).  Despite the waterlogged appearance of the lower areas of the city, conditions must not have been too bad; people settled here, drained what they could, and made use of the muckland for agriculture.  Some of the landscape today even retains land use patterns which began under the Seigneurial system of French settlement.  The most prominent examples remain south of Windsor, though the city grid of the east side of Detroit retains the pattern as well.  As you can see, the straight lines that form blocks of land parcels stand in contrast to the relatively ordered farm squares further inland which were plotted much later.

Also of note in the river front portion of the east side are the numerous canals and harbor indentations which creep in from the river and Lake St. Clair.  Many of these were formerly creeks, including Connor creek.  As noted, nearly all of the water courses in Detroit proper have long since been buried.  Plans are currently underway by both government and private interest groups (such as The Greenway Collaborative) to unearth these streams and recreate them as greenbelts and strip parks.

The land gradually slopes, at a rate of 10 feet per mile or less in places, as it heads toward the north west corner of the city.  In the area of Old Redford, one would most likely see a few more oaks and hickories, and perhaps even the occasional Eastern White pine or Eastern hemlock sticking up through the canopy, provided the soil was drained enough.  The land would look somewhat similar until one would notice that the slope of the terrain was getting a bit more definable, where it would meet the glacial lobe that ran from Adrian, MI up to about Port Huron.  Here, the ashes and their accent oaks and hickories would meet the beech and maple forests of the rest of upland lower Michigan.  Detroit itself, however, would remain the dominion of a relatively lush wet forest.  Think about that the next time you complain about having to water the back lawn.