[originally posted 3/5/18]
For years, it was a habit of mine to take long bike rides through Detroit. Typically, I went between 30 and 40 miles – occasionally, if the weather was fine, 50 or 60. I always started just after dawn, and usually finished before lunch. My steed was a cheap but reliable Vilano, switched out for a mountain bike in snow.
In terms of topography and traffic, Detroit is ideal for cycling. The landscape is almost completely flat. Four angled boulevards and a series of broad avenues run over the level terrain, connecting downtown with the gridded streets of the neighborhoods. Most of these boulevards and avenues, designed when Detroit had nearly two million residents, have lanes to spare now that the population has fallen under 700,000.
Parts of Detroit, however, pose unique challenges for cyclists. Many side streets feature foot-deep potholes. Thanks to relentless scrapping, some are also missing their sewer grates. Outside downtown and the nicer residential areas, shoulders and sidewalks are invariably carpeted with broken glass and other tire-shredding debris. Illegal dumping is rampant along, and sometimes on, streets.
And there are hundreds of feral dogs. Several times, when riding in some depopulated neighborhood, I rounded a corner to find a pack of six or eight on the street a few yards away. Although the dogs typically kept their distance, I once managed to nearly get pulled off my bike by a Rottweiler that materialized from a vacant lot.
I braved the dogs and glass and potholes because the Detroit cityscape fascinated me. By virtue of its rapid expansion between 1910 and 1930, Detroit boasts probably the best collection of early twentieth-century residential architecture anywhere in the country. Today, of course, tens of thousands of these fascinating buildings are abandoned, leaving many neighborhoods with a post-apocalyptic look.
In Detroit, sadly, vacant structures are never left to decay naturally. Architectural thieves relieve the older and grander buildings of their trim, mantelpieces, and any other saleable detail. Teams of men strip brick from exterior walls. And the ubiquitous scrappers gut interiors in their hunt for metal – copper first, then aluminum, and finally iron. I sometimes encountered them at work, tearing at vinyl siding or copper flashing.
As blocks empty and their houses are cleared, nature creeps back in. Lawns grow waist-high, sidewalks disappear, and thickets of ailanthus – “ghetto palm” – shoot skyward. Vacant buildings become part of the landscape, sprouting trees from roofs and gutters before finally sinking, in a rain of embers or avalanche of rotted wood, to fertilize the newborn wilderness.
I often began or ended my rides downtown. Though far from the weekend wasteland it was fifteen or twenty years ago, downtown Detroit is still very quiet on a Sunday morning; and with little traffic to worry about, I could cruise at my leisure, admiring the city’s superb collection of pre-Depression skyscrapers. I especially liked the Guardian Building, an Art Deco masterpiece that seems to glow when struck by the sun.
Before a massive surge of development transformed the area, I spent a fair amount of time riding through the northern outskirts of downtown. I was particularly fond of the James Scott Mansion, reduced to a picturesque shell by forty years of vacancy.
If it made sense to swing through Corktown, I often detoured to pass Michigan Central Station, Detroit’s most notorious (or at least most photographed) abandoned structure. It was hard for me to resist any building so reminiscent of a Roman ruin – right down to the graffiti and buzzing traffic. If I happened to be passing in the afternoon, Slow’s BBQ, right across Michigan Avenue, was an equally powerful draw.
Most of my riding, however, took place much farther out. My usual baseline was Grand Boulevard, a broad street circling downtown at a distance of about three miles. Laid out on what was the city’s suburban fringe at the end of the nineteenth century, it was originally lined by upper and upper-middle class homes. In the boom years, as corporate headquarters and auto plants sprang up along it, the Boulevard hummed with activity. But traffic dwindled as people and industry left Detroit, and much of the old suburban quiet has returned.
For me, the Boulevard was epitomized by the Lee Plaza. When completed in 1927, this 17-story apartment building offered all the services of a first-rate hotel, and was one of Detroit’s most fashionable addresses. As the surrounding area declined, however, it became a residence for low-income seniors, and finally went vacant in the early nineties. Scrappers and architectural thieves swiftly reduced the building to a shell. Yet even stripped and gaunt, the Lee Plaza remains a magnificent architectural statement. Although I came to know the building fairly well – over the years, I photographed it from every angle and explored the interior several times – I never ceased to be impressed by its fine Art Deco profile, visible for more than a mile along the Boulevard.
From Grand Boulevard, I typically made one or two 10-15 mile loops, trying to visit a new part of the city and/or inner suburbs with each ride. I often went west or southwest, drawn by the light traffic and relatively glass-free shoulders of Fort Street and Michigan Avenue. I spent quite a bit of time in Delray. The streets were empty and most of the houses were abandoned; but I liked to ride by the neighborhood’s beautiful old churches.
Northwest, I followed Grand River and adjacent streets through a long series of sadly deteriorated neighborhoods, where the broken windows of Art Deco apartment buildings overlooked rows of vacant and gutted homes.
I periodically rode up Woodward to 8 Mile. Along the way, I cruised the beautifully landscaped boulevards of Boston-Edison and Palmer Woods, where auto barons built their mansions in the boom years before the Depression, and Woodlawn Cemetery, where the same auto barons repose in opulent mausoleums. Between, I wound through the impoverished enclave of Highland Park.
I often passed through the blighted neighborhoods along Gratiot – the boulevard radiating northeast from downtown – on the eastern leg of a 40-mile loop bounded by Van Dyke and McNichols. Most of my eastside riding, however, took place closer to the River. I especially liked the beautiful houses of Indian Village and their faded cousins on Cadillac Boulevard.
Season to season and year to year, I noticed changes in parts of the city. Some were negative: houses scrapped or burned, new piles of debris along the streets. But most were improvements. Besides the development downtown and along the Woodward corridor, the most visible additions were the thousands of new streetlights installed in 2015 and 2016. The subtractions were equally dramatic: the city has leveled thousands of abandoned buildings every year since 2014. Strangest and most wonderful of all, bike lanes began to appear on some of the major streets. They promptly filled with broken glass, of course; but it was a moral victory all the same.
Although I still spend a fair amount of time in Detroit – I work part-time at Wayne State – my days of cycling in the city are more or less behind me. Yet as I went through my pictures to prepare for this post, I found myself growing a bit nostalgic. Moments came drifting back: riding down Fort Street on a beautiful Fall afternoon, downtown sharp against a cloudless sky; rounding snowy Belle Isle as a lake freighter charged through ice floes a few hundred feet away; cruising down an empty street on a summer afternoon, cicadas chirping in the urban prairie on either side.
I remember with particular vividness a rainy morning in early March a few years ago, when I happened to be riding past the Packard Plant. On an impulse, I locked my bike to a convenient tree and jogged up to the fifth floor of the southernmost building in the complex. The rest of the nearly mile-long plant, gutted by scrappers and vandals, stretched away into the mist.
The view I came up for, however, was off to the west. I clambered over to a place where strands of rebar haloed the skyline, and took my picture. Downtown looked gray and lifeless. But birds were chirping among the shattered columns, and the grass in the cemetery below showed the first green of spring.
