Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [55]
Three years after the turbine car, the tragedy of Detroit was burned on to the world's conscience. It's been there ever since.
As we wait at the lights on Woodward, a beat-up '70s Chevy Camaro pulls alongside, engine throbbing. Green comes suddenly on American traffic lights, and as it does the Chevy's rust-ravaged bootlid squats and, with a squeal of rubber and a whiff of burned oil, it lunges for the next junction, just up the road. All the lights are red. He does it every time.
This sort of behaviour is not without precedent. In the '50s, Detroit's streets were the amateur drag-racing centre of the world, where young men in modified V8-engined cars wowed the crowd, often with the clandestine help of GM engineers keen to test engine developments in the white heat of downtown competition.
After a while I'm tempted, and the Seville STS's Northstar V8 burbles encouragingly. As the light changes I slam the pedal down, the exhaust note hardens and, whooping deliriously, we touch 80mph on the short drag to the next red before bringing the whole pointless, gas-guzzling charade to an ABS-assisted halt. We've beaten him by about 0.25 seconds.
Childish? Certainly, and pretty unfair given the 20 years that separate the cars. But hardly dangerous. This is downtown Detroit on a Wednesday afternoon and the pavements are deserted. Given that this is the epicentre of the world motor industry, the roads, too, are suspiciously free of cars.
'Donut development', as the Americans call and spell it, is not a phenomenon unique to Detroit. Happens in England too, that people move out to the suburbs and the shops and services follow. What we call the inner city ends up poor, underfunded, problematic. But Detroit is something else.
Turning from the main road to a deathly silent side street, we find rows of magnificent turn-of-the-century houses where once the captains of industry and commerce dwelt, and elegant '30s apartment blocks. All are derelict, some burned out. It is the occasional intact house that looks incongruous here. An abandoned wind chime sounds eerily from some long-ruined garden. The destruction, once you look, is everywhere – cinemas, shops, commercial premises. Even Hudson's department store in the town centre, remembered by every old person we spoke to as the hub of the city's good feeling, stands as a multi-storey testament to Detroit's decay. The new shop is in the suburbs too. 'They couldn't lease that place for one dollar,' says a scarred Vietnam veteran I met in its shadows, who, tragically, is living on the street.
Postwar affluence has something to do with it. The GI Bill gave returning soldiers cheap loans to build new houses, and they did it in the suburbs. The car industry was wealthy, and wealth migrates outward, too. The very product that made the city, the car, allowed people to commute from afar. The suburbs are thriving still. Drive north to the inappropriately named Birmingham and you find an attractive and prosperous town of its own. Drive – there's no bus – east to Grosse Pointe and see fabulous mansions. Edsel Ford built one of them.
But the summer of 1967 was the turning point. Legend has it the famous riot started in an after-hours drinking den near the old Tiger Stadium, with a slanging match between aggrieved blacks and the predominantly white police force. 'It was a feeling that kinda burst out,' says one who, returning to the city that evening, couldn't even get to his street. 'It was a hot, sticky day. The sort of day when you might want to riot.' Inevitably, the rioters ended up destroying their own neighbourhoods. By the end of it 43 were dead, Detroit's 'nicely integrated' social fabric had come unstuck and age-old racial tensions were unfettered. On the streets you can canvass opinions from people of all parties, but their views are predictable and not worth