Vic Socotra

20 May 2008

The Manoogian Mansion

The Manoogian Mansion, Dwight Street, Detroit 2007

The northern part of the mitten of Michigan is coming alive again after five months in the freezer. Dad said it was one of the toughest winters in years, and he is fed up with it. My folks winter-over in the city by the Bay, members of the hard-corps who are continuous residents.

Since the ice has so recently departed, Dad sees nothing unusual about the Red Wings returning to the Stanley Cup championships. They trounced the Dallas Stars last night in an arena in Texas, where water never freezes of its own volition.

The Wings are a model of stability in the professional hockey world, and will be making their fourth appearance in the Stanley Cup final in the past 11 years.

It is going to be an epic battle against the youthful Pittsburg Penguins, another team from a battered rust-belt town. I will never forget the first Wings game that Dad took me to. It was at the venerable Olympia Stadium, and massive old pile of brick and vertical seating, filled to the rafters with smoke from the cigars and cigarettes of the fans, and flying octopi, which were incongruously thrown onto the ice.

Gordy Howe and Bill Gadsby were in the line-up, and Terry Sawchuck, the man whose face was scarred like the moon from the impact of flying pucks might have been in goal, though I don’t remember specifically.

May is the month that the population begins to double as the snow-birds start to return from their winter refuges in Florida and Arizona. The summer golf leagues of golf will be starting up, and the merchants are ready for the first flush of tourists and cabin-owners who will return with the Memorial Day weekend, though everyone is a little nervous about what the cost of gasoline will do to trade, and the general down-turn in the auto industry that has left the state reeling.

The annual renewal of hockey and the tourist season is a welcome distraction Up North, since the news has been dominated by the tragicomic soap opera that continues down south. Corruption continues to ooze out of the Manoogian Mansion, the official residence of the Mayor of Detroit.

Mom takes the stories a little personally, since she has always been of the Good Government school of civic life, and expects people to do the right thing. She and Dad arrived in the Motor City when the place was still something, and the rot that would bring it low was barely noticeable.

The Mansion is a metaphor. It is a magnificent old Spanish Colonial pile on Dwight street on the East side, located on a lot that backs up to the River. The views are said to be spectacular, though I have never been invited to see them. The mansion was built in 1928 for $300,000 when that was a lot of money. The first owner lost it in the Crash in ’29, and it passed to an Armenian immigrant named Alex Manoogian, who made a fortune in the home fixtures business.

He donated the place to the City of Detroit in 1966 in a gesture of gratitude for the good fortune he had found. He would know; he had been born in Smyrna, in Turkey, and been forced out in the great ethnic cleansing.

He was probably not surprised by what happened to his adopted home, since 1966 was the tipping point for a lot of things in America’s industrial home town. When I was born, Detroit was the fourth largest city in the United States, trailing only New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.

That was the high-water mark, and the city has been shrinking ever since. The great war had transformed the working class of Detroit, Once made up of Poles and Germans and Hungarians, thousands of African Americans had migrated north for decent factory jobs and a chance to get away from the cloying Jim Crow laws of the south.

In 1967, the year of the Twelfth Street Riots, the city had the highest black home-ownership of any city in the country. The devotion to the autombile carried the seeds of doom, though. Restrictive real estate practices had confined African American residences to places like Paradise Valley, also known as Black Bottom, on the near-east side. That was just where the freeways were going to go, and that forced the block-busting that broke up formerly all-white neighborhoods like the one we lived on Kentucky Street, near Six Mile and McNichols.

We were part of the white flight that began with the coming of the freeways, and drove us out Woodward Avenue, past Highland Park and Ferndale all the way to placid Birmingham.

Back downtown, Jerry Cavanagh was in trouble. White flight and the freeways were eroding the tax base. He confronted a thirty-million dollar deficit when he came to office, and to pay for the visionary programs he thought would save his fine town, he drove new tax laws that boosted income taxes and imposed a commuter tax.

We did not understand public policy very well in those days, and could not have conceived that we would turn our backs on one of America’s finest cities.

We did, though, and the riots accelerated the process. Cavanagh left office on the ashes of a city in 1969, and was replaced by the no-nonsense Wayne County Sheriff Roman Gribbs, the last white mayor of the city.

He declined to run again in 1973, the fuel crisis further stretching the cities budget crisis. I think that was the year they stopped cutting the grass on the sunken freeways that had sliced the city to pieces. Detroit Police Chief John Nichols lost a narrow election to a former Tuskegee Airman and civil rights activist named Coleman Young, and the transition from American Icon to embarrassment went into hyperdrive.

The current occupant of the Manoogian Mansion is Kwame Kilpatrick. He has the distinction of having the most felony charges (8) lodged against any sitting mayor. In addition to the famous affair with his Chief of Staff, Christine Beatty, there are reports of a party at the mansion that featured exotic dancers, one of whom was subsequently murdered.

They have been saying the town was dead ever since Mayor Young took over, but the spirit of Detroit is a hardy thing. It may even survive the current mayor. But the smart money was long gone, moving out to the northwest, to the stylish tree-lined streets of places like Birmingham, or the even more posh Bloomfield Hills.

That is where Cranbrook was, and even as the great city was tipping into decline, the future was being born right there.

More on that tomorrow.

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