Dates and Addresses
(Below,The wall at Eight Mile)
It was about six hundred miles to the village by the Bay, give or take, and in the gray, every one of them seemed to be the same.
I didn’t much to do except twist periodically on the steering wheel of the big Lincoln as it pointed its nose west and north across Ohio. The Marine was home for good, and I was headed toward the great east-west corridor that marked the next migration.
When the war ended, the Marine headed back to Ohio to marry my Aunt. Mom stayed in New York. The end of the conflict had been an intoxicating time in the Big Apple. Dad had turned down an opportunity to stay in the Navy, and left Pensacola to return to New Jersey. Mom was in Manhattan, in the Village, and got a chance to see some of the Valley boys who were coming back from Europe.
I still have a Hitler Youth flag that one of them had liberated, still with the original tags on it. He gave it her, flush with enthusiasm and a hope for something more that he did not get. Many of them were headed back to the Valley.
Not her.
On a blind date in 1946 she met a striking young Naval Aviator named Bill, and in 1947 they married and moved into a little place at 123 St. James Place in Brooklyn were Bill was studying at Pratt Institute’s Clinton Hill campus. The electricity in the building would go out when all the young couples would try to cook all at once in the evening, but that was just the way things were, after the war.
They moved to 294 Cumberland Street where the power was a little more reliable, also in Brooklyn, until 1949. Dad almost completed his degree, but the lure of big money was too much.
That was the magnet of Detroit, the arsenal of democracy whose rise closed the books on the Great Depression, and beckoned the agricultural workers of the southland to head north, even as I was that gray afternoon. Rolling up I-77 Massillon beckoned to the west, it was the little town where Grandma lived after marrying again and escaping Bellaire. The green signs slid by, and I wondered if the little house with the chocolate-colored tile driveway still slumbered there near the Women’s Club Akron slid abeam and astern, and then the long straight-away across the flatland painted with salt-white gray tones south of Cleveland.
This would have been the way the folks migrated, when the auto companies in Detroit were hiring, and Dad got a line on a job with the Ford Motor Company in the styling shop. He had not completely finished his course work at Pratt Institute on the GI Bill, but it was time to move on. The Ohio Turnpike was under construction that year, and I remember for years afterward riding in the back of the Ramblers as the four-lane snake finally reached all the way to Pennsylvania.
They took the Big Chance, when the Ford Motor Company really got rolling with the first sleek post-war designs and started to hire bright young men to design the future.
They got word about jobs in Detroit, and they pulled up stakes and headed for the Mid-west, and the pre-war Ford Model A would have come right across the grandfather of the cement I was crossing. They started out in suburban Ferndale, just a mile or so from the city limits. Housing was a challenge, but not as much for them as the African-Americans in the Motor City.
The flood of them had come North to work in the War Plants needed places to live, and to accommodate the demand, the real estate sharpies started block-busting the Detroit neighborhoods. They would move an African American family in on the block to panic the white residents, who would sell low to get out.
The War had the pivot point for the Motor City. Mobilization required labor, and with every set of hands at a premium, the system did not care overmuch what color they happened to be. At its peak, you could pull one of the long Great Lakes ore freighters and dump the raw material off at one end of the Ford Rouge Complex and drive a new Mustang Convertible out the other. That is what Dad came to be a part of, the great conversion of the war machine to the production of the rolling American Dream.
Of course, that is where things began to go awry right at the start. Cars and houses, the postwar meant you had to have the one to live in the other. We whine about the houses now- or at least I do. But if you wanted to pin a rose on what began the housing bubble you would have to tag the Roosevelt Administration.
FDR established federal agencies to increase funds available for mortgages, and more of them to guarantee them. The Home Owners Loan Corporation was part of it. The HOLC created a national system of urban maps indicating the credit worthiness of neighborhoods. As such, the quasi-federal entity is tagged as the originator of marking where the houses were well kept, and “redlining” the areas where they were not. Recent research suggests that it only accepted what local Realtors told it, but there was Federal acceptance of what existed in the officially segregated south, and fiscally restrictive North.
Neighborhoods in which the risk of diversity was thought to be great were redlined as a matter of course, regardless of the quality of the homes, since it was expected that home values would plummet once undesirable minorities moved there.
I turned north at Toledo, where Willies Overland built the legendary Jeep for the Army and crossed into Michigan near Temperance as the light began to lower to the west. They drive fast in Michigan, regardless of the economy and the cost of fuel.
I wondered what my folks had thought about the flat brown fields here, with Canada so near. They found the place at 1514 Pinecrest in Ferndale before moving into town to be closer to Dad's job at Ford's. They were at 14987 Sussex St when I was born in 1951, and later, the first place I remember at 14230 Kentucky Street.
They were not far from the Wall at Eight Mile. In 1940, this section of Detroit was ripe for development. Water and sewer lines had just been extended, but there was a problem. Some Negro citizens had moved into the area when it was fallow and had built modest homes.
With the coming of World War II, a developer sought to construct houses for middle-class whites, just across the city limit at Eight Mile. He began his development but was dismayed to discover that his prime location had a problem: the FHA would not back loans there since the HOLC had coded the area in red. To overcome this challenge, he built a concrete wall, 6 feet in height and one-half mile long from the western boundary of what is now the Alfonso Wells Memorial Playground north from Eight Mile Road to the intersection at Wyoming Boulevard.
I doubt that Mom and Dad knew anything about Detroit's version of the Berlin Wall, since they were renters and took what was on the market. The Wall served its purpose. Loans were made, and the houses went up.
There was choice about where to live, and no one wanted to live in a red-lined neighborhood, white or black. The developers had an angle- as we have come to find out, they always do. The Realtors would buy a home in a green area, and move in an African American family. It drove the white families out in a panic, seeing the prospects of their green homes turning crimson on a banker’s map, and the real estate peopled pocketed the cash they made in changing the composition of the city.
When the John C. Lodge Expressway was slashed along the course of Woodward Avenue, it became easy to get way from the city. Later, when the north-south artery of I-75 was bulldozed through the old Paradise Valley/Black Bottom neighborhood, the main African-American neighborhood was paved over. With the demand for housing being what it was, the African American families were willing to pay a premium to get it.
With the coming of the new mega-roads, the auto companies began to disperse their manufacturing operations away from the city proper, and the seniority system ensured that the last-hired were first-fired. The industry that had acted as a magnet to employ African-Americans from the South began to shed young men. It was the beginning of a permanent underclass in the city, a large pool of unemployed and unemployable men and women.
In 1967, life was pretty good out in the suburbs. I remember it well. The family had decamped to the cottage on the lake Up North, and I was stuck in town for Hell Week at the high school football program. I had an ill-advised party at the house 185 Hawthorn Street on Saturday night, the lavish place that had replaced the modest one at 688 Chester. My joints were aching from two-a-day practice and head hurting from beer, and was frantically trying to clean up the damage when the radio reports started Sunday morning.
Apparently the cops had done their thing, rousting a Blind Pig after-hours bar down on Twelfth Street, near the intersection at Clairmount Avenue. They were expecting to round up a few patrons with a couple four-man Tac Force squads, but instead ran into a buzz saw. There were more than eighty people inside, holding a party for two returning Vietnam veterans. The cops tried to arrest everyone, and called for back-up to transport the arrestees. A crowd gathered to protest- it was hot that night and there were a lot of people still in the streets.
After the last police car left, quiet should have returned, but it was a warm night and it did not. A small group of men who had nothing better to do and no place to go lifted up the security bars of a clothing store nearby and broke the windows.
From this point of origin, looting and arson spread through the Northwest side of Detroit, then crossed over to the East Side. Within 48 hours Governor George Romney had called out the National Guard. Romney had been Dad’s boss at American Motors, and was a family icon. The party debris did not get me in a lot of trouble, since there were other fish in the fire.
President Johnson supported a return to order, and dispatched the 82nd Airborne on the riot’s fourth day. At the conclusion of five days of rioting, 43 people were dead, most though not all African American, and 1189 were injured and over 7000 people had been arrested.
Thus began the long slide that killed off the center city, though if you were to engrave a date of death on the tombstone, it would the one that the Blind Pig was shut down: 23 July 1967.
I still remember the phone number of the place they bought in 1954 in the fashionable suburb of Birmingham- MIdwest 6-4890. I think the little house cost $18,500. Even with the collapse in real estate prices, it must be worth twenty or thirty times that now.
I thought about that, driving through the suburbs of what had once been a great city with the night coming on. A lot of it has been burned since then, and all the money moved to Oakland County, seven miles north of Eight Mile Road I was just crossing under the Eight Mile overpass when the last sunlight faded and I was surrounded by the hellish blue of modern halogen headlights.
There miles to go before I slept. Ahead were the glittering spires of Troy. I remembered the old signs that advertised it as “The City of Tomorrow, Today!”
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com