Dream City: Creation, Destruction, and Reinvention in Downtown Detroit

457 Pages·2019·11.174 MB·English

by  Conrad Kickert

DREAM CITY

DREAM CITY
CREATION, DESTRUCTION,
AND REINVENTION
IN DOWNTOWN DETROIT
CONRAD KICKERT
THE MIT PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND
© 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means
(including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from
the publisher.
Illustrations in this book were funded in part or in whole by a grant from the SAH/Mellon Author Awards
of the Society of Architectural Historians. Color reproduction of this book was supported by the University of
Cincinnati, School of Planning, Orville Simpson II Endowment Fund.
school of planning
This book was set in Minion and Trade Gothic by The MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States
of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kickert, Conrad, author.
Title: Dream city : creation, destruction, and reinvention in downtown Detroit / Conrad Kickert.
Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018019052 | ISBN 9780262039345 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Central business districts--Michigan--Detroit--History. | Detroit (Mich.)--History. | Detroit
(Mich.)--Economic conditions | Urban renewal--Michigan--Detroit--History.
Classification: LCC F574.D46 D665 2018 | DDC 977.4/34--dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019052
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS
Preface viii
Introduction 1
I SPRING
1 From Outpost to Downtown: 1805–1884 8
2 Going Up and Out: 1884–1911 32
II SUMMER
3 Downtown in Transition: 1911–1921 52
4 Growing Pains: 1921–1929 76
III FALL
5 Early Erosion: 1929–1937 106
6 Battling Blight: 1937–1951 120
7 The City of Tomorrow: 1951–1961 146
8 Boiling Point: 1961–1967 172
IV WINTER
9 The End of Urban Renewal: 1967–1977 188
10 Renaissance among Ruins: 1977–1988 208
11 The Leisure City: 1988–2001 230
12 A Roaring End: 2001–2011 248
13 A New Beginning: The Past as Future 256
14 Conclusion 268
Notes 288
Index 432
PREFACE
We Europeans change within changeless cities, and
our houses and neighborhoods outlive us; American
cities change faster than their inhabitants do, and it
is the inhabitants who outlive the cities. … For us a
city is, above all, a past; for them it is mainly a future;
what they like in the city is everything it has not yet
become and everything it can be.
Jean-Paul Sartre1
[Missing P_STYLE: Image]
Figure
This is a book about an anomaly. In a city known for discarding anything it deems
obsolete, from last year’s car model to entire neighborhoods, downtown Detroit has
always stood out as an unavoidable reminder of the past. Downtown is different—it’s
slower. Perhaps that’s why it piqued my fascination as a young European urbanist over a
decade ago. Downtown Detroit challenged my Dutch upbringing that hinged on view-
ing the past as an asset and public authority as benevolent and inevitable. Downtown
Detroit’s tangible failure to embrace the past and the public became the starting point of
the journey that has led to this book—a journey that would soon challenge my notion
of the American urban condition.
This work would not have been possible without the support of the countless archi-
vists that hold the key to Detroit’s past, most notably the staff at the Burton Historical
Collection at the Detroit Public Library, the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State
University, the University of Michigan Clark and William L. Clements Libraries, and
the United States Library of Congress. I would also like to thank my dissertation com-
mittee members Robert Fishman, Linda Groat, June M. Thomas, and Henco Bekkering
for helping me lay the groundwork for this book. In Detroit, I am very grateful to Keith
Harder Cavazos, Paul Szewczyk, Dan Austin, Mark Nickita, Dorian Moore, Michael
Hauser, and John Gallagher for their input. I would like to thank my colleagues at the
University of Cincinnati for giving me feedback, space, and resources to pull this off.
And I would like to thank my graduate assistants for helping with graphics and man-
agement. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family and friends for their moral
support, most notably my parents for encouraging me to keep asking questions, and
Kelly Gregg for tolerating my spiritual absence in writing this book.