"You are about to witness the very exciting story of a city and its people." "It will be an adventure that will open new sights in familiar surroundings." "That city is Detroit, home of nearly two million people." "Back in 1701, long before this land became a nation," "Cadillac planted the colours of France on Detroit's shore." "And thus began a rich and inspiring history which has brought Detroit to its finest hour, the today of which we are a part." "I am honoured to be serving as Mayor at this most eventful and productive period in Detroit's history." "And I'm honoured to be a participant in the Detroit story." "Detroit is the city of champions." "The whole world knows that Detroit is the American city whose products have revolutionised our way of living." "Today we're going to show you the Detroit you've never met." "# You better lose yourself in the music, the moment" "# You own it, you better never let it go" "# You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow" "# This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo" "# You better lose yourself in the music, the moment" "# You own it, you better never let it go" "# You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow" "# This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, you better... #" "Now I'll take you guys for a tour around some of Detroit's best ruins, stuff you won't see anywhere else in the world, only in Detroit." "Rome's got ruins, Athens has got ruins, ours are bigger." "'Look on my works ye mighty and despair.'" "The Packard plant was the biggest building in the world at the time it was built, it's roughly three million square feet." "Right now it is the largest abandonment in the North American continent." "You can ride around Detroit for hours and just see scenes of devastation." "It's just like there was a war and they didn't do any rebuilding, they didn't clean out the carnage." "Oh, it's a mess, man." "Welcome to Detroit, man." "It's a slow-motion Katrina." "You look at the World Trade Center, all the sympathy, the outpouring, the federal dollars, they pour in." "They got 3,000 people." "Here we've probably had, in the last 30 years with the crime and everything, probably had 20,000 people killed." "We've had thousands of houses destroyed, thousands of businesses destroyed." "Where's our sympathy?" "No wonder everybody leaves." "Detroit is a place that was built for more than twice as many people as now live there." "It was built for two million people, now there's maybe 800,000 people." "# Oh After I've been true to you" "# Oh So deep in love with you" "# Baby, baby, baby... #" "Coming from the 60s to today they would say first of all this is a ghost town." "There is no rush hour, there's not enough people on the road." "First impressions would be, "What happened?" "How could this happen?" ""Why did this happen?" "How can we fix it?"" "# This is a state of emergency" "# State of emergency" "# Say this is a state of emergency... #" "There's so much of it, so many areas that look like a war zone." "It would seem as though at some point there was a mass exodus, as if a phone call was made, a warning was thrown out, and everyone left what they were doing that moment and walked away for good." "Not since the last days of the Maya have the Americas witnessed a transformation as traumatic as that which has befallen the Motor City." "Here, time seems to be running backwards." "What was once the frontier city of the American dream, the Paris of the Midwest, is now in its strange beauty, the first post-American city." "It's a darkly cautionary tale for the entire industrialised world." "But as you listen to the buzz of cicadas amongst the wild flowers and prairie that have reclaimed one third of the city, it is possible to feel you've travelled into the future, and that amongst the ruins of Detroit lies a first pioneer's map" "to the post-industrial future which awaits us all." "What's the best city of the world?" "Generosity." "Detroit's a city of islands." "If you know where the islands are you're in the safest and friendliest place in the world." "If you don't, take your chances." "I know this neighbourhood real well so I feel totally comfortable here." "Somebody else would come here they would be shaking in their boots." "The crime rate, yeah, it's high, but, you know It's only high when it happens to you." "A hundred years ago the birth of the automobile in Detroit heralded a second American revolution." "Unleashing forces of mass production which shaped the 20th Century, and powered the wheels of American success." "The car went on to revolutionise the geography not just of Detroit but cities around the world, transform the way we imagine ourselves, and jump-start the American dream." "# Rolling, rolling, rolling" "# Rolling, rolling, rolling, Rawhide... #" "Early on in the history of the United States, the ability to move on meant the chance to move up, and the automobile took over that meaning in the 20th Century." "Detroit fell in love with the wealth produced by this single industry, a seemingly inexhaustible golden goose, which determined the Motor City's explosive growth, and so the destinies of Detroit and the car were fatally entwined." "Together they set off on the highway of the future and drove to the end of the line." "Early one morning a man named Henry Ford, who had been building a horseless carriage in a shed back of his home, right where the Michigan Theatre now stands, started it up." "The echoes of that two-cylinder motor have never died, and they never will." "And when he'd finished he hadn't thought about how he was going to get it out of the shed." "The door was too small and they had to take off the front of the building." "They weren't thinking ahead too far." "Yeah, the Michigan Theatre to me is like the, the classic story of it all, I mean, that's where Henry Ford built his first car and his wealth creates this building with this magnificent theatre." "And then the theatre dies." "Why?" "No parking." "And then the building's gonna die, so what do they do?" "They gut the theatre to make a parking lot out of it and save the building." "And, you know, that's Henry Ford's legacy right in a nutshell in one building." "Ford was a very creative, very inventive man, and I think we have to realise that he helped create the consumer society." "We're heading up into Highland Park now and I'm going to take you to Piquette Avenue where a lot of automobile companies started." "Here on the left is the Ford Piquette Plant, which was Henry Ford's kind of first big factory, and it was where the Model T itself was designed, and the first maybe 2-10,000 copies were created." "# Now, Mr Ford, he's a millionaire... #" "These are the stairs where Henry Ford would have been coming in and going out every day here in Highland Park." "So this right here is the world's first automated assembly line, built in 1913." "The assembly line is the key to mass production." "Here, workers join the thousands of big and small parts to make the whole." "One man, one function, the fundamental principle of mass production." "Build a product faster, with specialised tools and teams of unskilled workers, and you build it at less cost." "# See my people, well here's my theory" "# Of what this country is moving toward" "# Every worker, a cog in motion, well that's the notion of Henry Ford" "# Hallelujah, praise the maker of the Model T" "# Speed up the belt, speed up the belt... #" "This is the factory that changed the world." "The birth of the modern arguably takes place here." "Today the building has been less than kept up." "Everything is all bad, that's all I can say." "All bad." "When Ford introduced the first assembly lines he found that many workers would not or could not produce as fast as he wanted them to produce." "Some people would just come and look at the job, and turn around and walk out." "# One man tightens, and one man ratchets" "# And one man reaches to pull one cord" "# Car keeps moving in one direction, a genuflection to Henry Ford" "# Speed up the belt, speed up the belt, Sam" "# Speed up the belt, speed up the belt, Sam" "# Speed up the, speed up the, speed up the, speed up the belt... #" "The biggest sin in Detroit was to stop the line." "I worked in a factory once, you know what I mean, it's just you do the same thing over and over again every day, it's like doing time." "I did that too." "My first job was at Ford Motor Company working on the line." "I felt like a robot." "There was no thinking that went into it, and I just knew that I wanted more." "If you had something on your mind, you could let your mind be free while physically you were tied to this task, you know?" "The musicians said they would be working on the line and they could think and they could write music." "I was always thinking about my art." "I was always thinking about it." "The Model T plant was outside Detroit, and in 1918," "Henry Ford set up Highland Park as a separate city, the first of many autonomous suburbs." "The big three did in fact rule Detroit, a lot of what you see around you is the result of their economic decisions if you will." "By redrawing the map of the rapidly expanding city, the auto barons were able to siphon the wealth out of Detroit, and pay taxes into the coffers of their own private fiefdoms." "This wasn't thinking in human terms, it wasn't thinking in terms of what's good for the general population, it was only thinking in terms of what's good for the stockholders." "And of course that's the story of Detroit now." "A lot of people are leaving, so, you know." "They're leaving out of town, different states." "I plan on leaving myself." "Georgia." "Highland Park had a population of probably 55, 000 at peak, it's probably around 12, 000 now." "We had this beautiful library, the McGregor Library over here, it was donated by Ford money." "It's shut down now, it's boarded up, but you can see this was a very upscale neighbourhood in its day." "These were your top-dollar residences." "A lot of them were done in this sort of Moorish-influenced style." "The one they just tore down was absolutely spectacular in terms of Moorish design, this is kind of more later, later modernist." "Highland Park is bankrupt, and they don't have the money even to tear them down." "# Say it's a state of emergency..." "It's a state of emergency" "# Say it's a state of emergency State of emergency... #" "Ford was, I mean, he was not a good man." "In a sense he was a horrible man, but he was a very intelligent man, so he paid decent wages." "January 14th 1914." "Ford increased the average worker's wage to $5, which was nearly doubling it overnight." "10, 000 people showed up here in the winter on this street out here, and they finally brought the police who fire hosed them, as it got out of control." "# We're in the money" "# We're in the money" "# We've got a lot of what it takes to get along. #" "Ford wasn't looking to make his workers into consumers, but unintentionally that's what he did." "He began to pay wages high enough that the average working man could buy a car." "# Well it seems your contribution to man" "# To say the least got a little out of hand" "# Lord, Mr Ford, what have you done?" "#" "If you give up everything, in terms of going and doing this eight hours a day every day for 30 years, we'll give you a nice big car." "Works for most of them." "Some of us don't, don't want that, but most of them do." "They love it." "Ford recognised that unless you paid people money they couldn't consume." "But in that sense he's also responsible for a lot of the things that have happened to us as human beings, that we've become so consumerist and that we are, you know, devastating the planet." "It was good money and people could come to Detroit, they could ascend to the middle class." "# I'm going to Detroit, get myself a good job... #" "Well, there was a huge migration from the South because the plants had been opened up for blacks to work in them for the first time." "My uncles and everything worked in Ford and Chrysler." "That's how we got to come to Detroit from Alabama." "They got the jobs and they sent for all the relatives." "We lived in the one house with maybe three bedrooms and with four families." "My husband was born in a little town called Marion Junction in Alabama, where there were probably more cows than people, and practically the whole town moved up here." "My granddad, who grew up in the South, him and I would sit on this porch here of the polka-dotted house and he would share with me these great stories." "# Southern trees" "# Bear strange fruit" "# Blood on the leaves... #" "That's one of the reasons why I created this art piece here, it's called Souls Of The Most High." "Because, as a kid, and he was born in 1897, before they had aeroplanes, he said that he witnessed, he saw this, people being lynched and hanging from trees." "And I said to him, "what did you actually see?"." "And he said to me that he saw the souls, souls of the people moving, swaying with the wind." "That got my attention in a big way." "During the time when so much lynching was going on, little boys, you'd look up, all you could see was the soles of the shoes." "From the beginning, the automakers imported the prejudices of the South into Detroit, dividing everything along racial lines." "A policy of virtual apartheid that would eventually tear apart the very fabric of the city." "Henry Ford was a guy who had the black workers here and he created a little town for them to live in called Inkster." "And then he had the town for the white workers living called Dearborn." "Well, Dearborn was a very unique city, very racial city, whites only." "If a black person or family moved in they were absolutely trashed, their house was trashed, windows were broken." "They didn't last a week." "So they never came." "In 1925, 20, 000 Klan members celebrated their race hatred on the steps of Detroit City Hall." "And there was nothing more important to white people in Detroit than staying away from niggers." "They don't like them." "Never did, never will." "Motherfucker." "So that building's strange too to see it kind of like it's gutted." "That was an upscale hotel." "The Lee Plaza was a hotel for black entertainers, musicians." "They could not stay downtown." "They were segregated and this is where blacks stayed." "It was a pretty opulent hotel back in the day, but, since about the 70s I think it's been abandoned." "It's hard to imagine now, but musicians like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong used to play here." "Four years ago the roof was entirely made of copper, and the scrappers went in and they set it on fire copper and knock it off the roof and let it fall to the street below." "But I talked to the cops that were standing around, and they said they didn't have the power to do anything about it." "A lot of people just do this because they're laid off work." "If you can make $200 to $500 a day, why not?" "LOUIS ARMSTRONG: # Hold me close and hold me fast" "# The magic spells you cast" "# This is La Vie En Rose... #" "So what are they doing on the top floor, do you think?" "From the sounds of it, it looks like they're about to bring down some pipes." "They've probably cut 20-foot sections of steel pipe up there and they're probably going to drop them down the old elevator shaft or try to bring them down the stairwell." "But they tend to like to drop them down the elevator, it's a lot easier." "Bet that sounds good!" "Yeah." "Sounds like the world's in there." "20 floors up." "The mid '20s saw a clash of automotive giants pitting GM's new ideas of style against Ford's tried and tested notions of no frills utility." "The outcome of this epic battle would determine the course of the American Dream and go on to transform the geography of America's cities." "Driving a car, at first, was distinctive, no matter what kind of car you drove." "But when more and more people got cars, and more and more of them were mass-produced Model T's, cars weren't as individual as they once were." "GM took advantage of that situation, and Alfred Sloan's genius was to say, "I can beat Ford by offering a constantly changing variety of cars. "" "He arranged General Motors makes in a price hierarchy, from Cadillac at the top to Chevrolet at the bottom, and therefore, he said, as people increase in income, they'll be able to buy higher in the model hierarchy and feel like their lives are improving." "He also introduced the annual model change." "By changing the style, a car two or three years old just looked out of date." "They were motivating consumers to buy a new car more often, and actually... it worked." "Design fuelled GM's success, allowing it to overtake Ford and dominate the market." "Its must-have range of latest models drove the explosive consumer boom of the late '20s." "All the way down the boulevard there, that's the old GM Headquarters, those four big tall buildings." "That's where they were headquartered when some president said," ""As GM goes, so goes the world,"" "so let's hope that's not true today." "So what do you do with a huge building like that?" "It's empty now, you know?" "In the 1920s, Detroit was fabulously wealthy, not only for the auto wealth but 75% of the illegal liquor was coming from Canada through Detroit, so we had it all back then." "This area here is called the New Center, and in the 1920s, when downtown was just exploding and there were skyscrapers going up, it was so crowded they started a new centre down here, and that's when they built the Fisher Building, the GM Building." "The Fisher Building was going to be four towers, like that one right there, but then 1929 came and that was the end of that." "The Depression dealt the auto industry a devastating blow, with production dropping from 5.6 million cars and trucks in 1929, to 1.4 million in 1932." "Overnight, Detroit's economy collapsed." "I don't think the city ever recovered from the massive upheaval from 1910 to 1930, the doubling of the population." "It was explosive and then, just as quickly as it went up, the balloon decompressed." "They're not selling the cars, so they've had to let people go by the thousands." "We have the highest unemployment rate in the country." "They tell us a number like 20%, but when you go out here in Jefferson, you know it's a whole lot more." "It's more like 25-30%, and that is unprecedented." "In Detroit, the recession lingered on through the 1930s, plunging auto workers below the poverty line." "# My children need three square meals a day... #" "With the despair of joblessness came the determination to organise." "Their struggle for union representation and a living wage drew them into inevitable conflict with the Big Three." "The major start for the UAW was the sit-down strike at the GM plant in Flint." "The workers took over the plant and locked themselves in." "'It's January 1937, and idle Flint Michigan auto workers 'have occupied this truck plant for six days." "'Workers prepare to oppose National Guard guns with this ammunition of their own." "'Pickets 20, 000 strong join the locked-in workers' cause. '" "# Now General Motors and Fisher too" "# They sent down their boys in blue" "# But not a scab is going to get through - make way... #" "These people had families, you know." "They wanted to feed them and they wanted a decent living wage." "And so Detroit rallied round that and it became a sort of a union town." "GM and Chrysler were kind of hand in glove." "One did and, within 24 hours, the next one recognised the UAW." "'United Action brings victory." "The people have won again. '" "Henry Ford was not happy." "Henry Ford did not want the unions and fought vigorously to oppose it." "There was a large incidence where the unions ran into Henry Ford's goon squad on the Rouge overpass." "Henry Ford fought it and fought it and fought it, and he had gangsters literally throw people off overpasses to stop the union." "They opened fire with machine guns on the crowd and several people were killed." "Some of the wives of some of the union members were killed also." "# Oh, why does a vigilante man" "# Carry that sawed-off shotgun in his hand?" "# Would he shoot his brother and sister down?" "#" "It took the outbreak of war to rescue Detroit from depression." "As American troops went into battle overseas, Henry Ford finally recognised the UAW." "'This is Detroit, Michigan, in case you don't know." "'They call it the automobile centre of the world." "'Five million of them last year." "Makes a lot of noise. '" "'But not so much noise that we didn't hear those bombs when they fell on Pearl Harbor." "'So we stopped the line. '" "They literally stopped producing cars and trucks and started producing items for the war effort." "'That's just three days' work standing there." "'Makes you feel good, doesn't it?" "'" "During World War II, Detroit was the centre of all manufacturing." "This was the arsenal of democracy, as they called it." "Hundreds of thousands of people flooded into the city to work here." "# You can catch that Detroit Special" "# You can ride most anywhere... #" "And the housing was very short." "Many places people would have to sleep their shifts and one bed would be used by three people - the morning shift, the afternoon shift and the midnight shift." "This second massive wave of migration from the South created a pressure-cooker situation in the city, causing the racial fault line on which Detroit was built to split asunder." "People came up from down South." "They were slower, it was hotter, and they weren't used to our ways." "Not only had black workers come from the South, but white workers had come from the South." "And they would refuse to use the same toilet, they threatened to strike, and so you had a whole new situation developing in the city." "You would think people would be living together more and not have a riot when everybody's got one thing, that's to defeat Nazism." "But apparently they had a race riot." "They were fighting - that was a real race riot." "# Fight the power... #" "I had never lived in a city where racial tensions were so sharp." "I remember this area, which is called Black Bottom, not too far from here, old Paradise Valley." "And it was the black entertainment and business district." "I went to school in Black Bottom." "I loved my teachers, I loved them." "Miss Emily Wagstaff chose me out of the rest of the girls and she taught me this song that I'll never forget, This Is My Country." "# Praise them and the souls so dead who never to himself has said" "# This is my home, my native land" "# This is my native land" "# This is my country Land of my birth... #" "And before then, I didn't know I had a country." "I was from the South" " I never even felt like I belonged in the United States." "# Hastings Street... #" "I think we're on Hastings Street here, I believe." "It used to be a very lively street." "# Boom boom boom boom... #" "# I'm gonna shoot you right down" "# Right off of your feet" "# Take you home with me... #" "There were a lot of bars, there were hookers of course and there was all that nightlife, but it was community." "# I like it like that... #" "I didn't go to their clubs, but I went to other clubs." "I went dancing with my husband, and we would meet under the Kern's Clock." "Women were dressed." "Men were dressed." "The bars, the restaurants, the Book Cadillac Hotel was..." "visitors from all over." "JL Hudson's was something else - a large department store, 15 floors." "This is where Hudson's was." "Hudson's WAS the town." "That was the place to be." "The 7th floor was the Woodward Shop." "It was a very elegant shop with furs and upper-priced clothing for women." "It was beautiful." "It was a different city then, bustling and places you went you never worried about crime or being mugged" "In the neighbourhoods, the kids went out and played till dark and had to be home when the street lights came on." "Thanksgiving Day Parade, Woodward Avenue was lined up with families on both sides, because Santa's coming to town on his sleigh." "BING CROSBY: # Santa Claus is comin' to town... #" "For about 15 to 20 straight years, Santa Claus would come up over here, that's where he made his thing, and this was the corner, and right there's where the daughters were and the family, and, rain or shine, we were there." "They painted the Woodward Avenue gold - this street - for the 50th anniversary of the automobile here in Detroit in the '40s." "# There's a city that's famous for makin' cars... #" "The cars were the star." "#..." "They do the motorcade boogie... #" "That was the boom time for American cars." "That's when cars got bigger and bigger and flashier and flashier, and certainly the city of Detroit was phenomenally wealthy during that period." "This was called the jewel of the Midwest." "Something's fallen off that thing!" "And it was a beautiful city, it was a jewel city, really." "The future looked good." "GM entered its high rococo period of design under the guidance of GM's head stylist, the extravagant Harley Earl." "Harley Earl designed this car that we're sitting in." "He initially worked in Hollywood, building cars for the movies and for the movie stars." "He looked at cars not as transportation but as entertainment." "He made the General Motors cars that kept the same basic standardised parts from year to year to year, but he made them look different." "He also put chrome brightwork on." "He thought chrome caught the eye of anyone that was viewing a car." "He wanted them to shine directly into a consumer's eye." "This is the Fisher Building where they built the bodies that Harley Earl designed." "FRANK SINATRA:" "#..." "For a ride uptown... #" "Well, we're going to sneak around this, this is one way, don't tell anybody." "It's very interesting to go in there, cos of all these stalactites from the drippings going on in it." "We're going to take a tour of the old Fisher Body 21 room." "The whole building was production floor, Cadillac assembly line." "They had a bunch of chemicals in here that they had to remove to get this building up to a safe standard." "It's still not environmentally sound - we've had a collapse right here since the last time I've been in." "Harley Earl saw the car not so much as a practical form of transportation for getting from one place to another, but as a dream machine to give substitute satisfactions that people couldn't find in other parts of their lives." "He seemed to have tapped the American automotive unconscious and turned these unconscious desires into sheet metal." "What's good for GM became what's good for America." "Increasingly, the rhythm of American life was set by the cycle of artificial obsolescence engineered in Detroit, which would transport America to a new consumer utopia, where a buyer's dreams could be turned into cash." "# There's a land where golden chariots" "# Are moulded out of dreams" "# Detroit!" "For a long time, Detroit ruled, but it had already started its decline right after the Second World War, really." "Everything was based around cars and the success or failure of cars." "Detroit had become a one-trick pony." "After the war, Detroit became the fourth largest city in the United States, but even as the population reached its peak and these endless golden chariots kept on rolling off the line, the seeds of the Motor City's demise had already been sown." "I look back and I see my city under construction." "I look back and I see my city under construction with the locusts..." "Wanna suffocate my city and trying to..." "Choke us..." "Ravaging and making..." "The situation hopeless." "But we're stay..." "Focused..." "Never let the locusts..." "Approach us." "Are you from Detroit?" "Yeah, born and raised." "What's going on here?" "I have no idea, I just woke up." "So where we're going we have to crawl through a hole over here, there's no other way to really get over there." "So the Packard Plant used to be the manufacturer of the finest luxury automobiles in Detroit." "A year ago this was an intact section of the Packard and now you can barely walk through, it's too dangerous." "Some of these pillars have been scrapped by the numerous gangs of scrap thieves that come through here and they've already started to cut at this pillar." "They've cut through it here and they've cut through it here." "That means they're planning on taking it and haven't knocked it out yet." "You could probably give this a good whack with a sledgehammer, and this thing would collapse." "So this is a really, really weak section of the building that... it would not be a good idea to hang out here very long." "These large metal things used to be air conditioners." "A couple of years ago, I found a man sleeping in one." "He'd made his home inside of it." "It was a real realisation to me that there are people living amongst the ruins of Detroit." "The post-war period saw Detroit pioneer the great American escape from the cities to suburbia, but to get there, Detroiters needed cars and roads to drive them on." "The construction and auto lobbies made sure they got them." "The creation of the freeway system right into the centre of the city ripped apart neighbourhoods." "Like Black Bottom - Paradise Valley - was literally ripped out to make the Chrysler Freeway." "But when you rip that apart and just shred it, then people are dislocated - both emotionally and physically." "Was there pressure by the auto industry to create the freeways?" "I think there was." "General Motors played a large part in the dismantling of the street railway system." "This is the Davison Freeway." "This was actually the first freeway built in America." "In my day, this would have been all jammed here with traffic, so that was one of the reasons" "I said I'm not going to go live in Detroit any more and make this drive in all this traffic." "White people started to move to the suburbs." "We have almost 40 suburbs, I think, in Detroit." "You had the withdrawal of all the tax base from the city, what they used to call white flight." "These guys went and fought in the war, then came home, and they thought they'd still have a nice house in a safe neighbourhood, and good schools and shopping nearby, and they created these artificial communities." "It was all built on bribing local zoning boards." "'We moved out to Thirteen Mile and we built our house,' we picked out a lot, and we watched a hole being dug for our basement." "And we watched the timbers going up, and the cement being poured." "We watched a roof rising on this house." "My husband carried me over the threshold." "It was a wonderful feeling." "And you had to get in the car to go to a store, whereas usually when you lived in the city you could walk, and usually, people that lived in the city in the '40s, families had one automobile," "and then when you moved to the suburbs, the wife was stranded if she didn't have a car." "And then eventually the kids grew up and they wanted a car too." "This town, and the people that ruled this town made sure that everybody had to own a car if they wanted to get anywhere." "If you're in the suburbs, they've set it up so you have to have a car." "They create the illusion that you want to have one." "The fact is you have to have one." "The only way, literally, you can get in and out of them, is by a car." "#... with brutality Sister" "# Talk to me Sister" "# So you can see Sister" "# Oh, what's going on What's going on... #" "You'd starve to death if you didn't, you'd be like a quadriplegic in some ways, because the only way you can get out to a food store is by car." "Northland was the first shopping mall in the whole United States." "It's on Eight Mile, and you stayed there, shopped in Northland, you didn't come down to Hudson's much, except Christmas." "That was the decline of downtown, because people then moved to the suburbs, you moved out of Detroit." "Now that everyone needed a car to get anywhere, the big three fought tooth and nail to corner the market, with bigger, longer, lower and ever more outrageous jukeboxes on wheels, with the same out-of-date engine beneath the riot of chrome." "You're now under automatic control." "Co-opting Cold War pride in America's military might, the big three incorporated jet-age airplanes, and rocket technology into the latest designs." "They came up with a fin coming up, hopefully you know what I'm saying." "# Drive!" "# Drive!" "# My baby rolled up in a brand new Cadillac... #" "Every year there was a new car." "You always want to keep up with the Jones', so if someone had one of the new ones, because it changed every year, you'd say, "he's got a new one. "" "# I ain't ever coming back!" "#" "And when you bought a car in those days it was a big deal, and you just loved the smell, and all that stuff." "My dad was kind of cheap so he never bought the up-options, and us two boys always wanted the up-options, and we never got them." "All was not well in the fantasy world of American consumers." "Riding in their Cold War rocket ships and chrome bathtubs along ever more congested freeways as they rushed between homes in the suburbs and jobs in the still booming car plants, commuters began to lose touch with the nightmarish reality" "of the decaying inner city they had left behind." "When I went to work, back and forth, I can watch the houses like that house, and over a period of six years, you'd start to see a decline." "At one time I came back from the lake and I decided rather than take the expressway, I would take Woodward, and I was sad, because Woodward wasn't Woodward downtown, it was terrible, boarded up buildings and whatever." "The neighbourhood began to seem like it was just starting to go down." "People lost hope in the community." "The car industry, though, was doing booming times." "# How can I fight a love That shouldn't be?" "#" "Motown, this is exactly the period of the ascendancy of Motown Records, which put Detroit on the map internationally in a way that nothing else ever has." "Berry Gordy had his ideas about producing records from working on the Ford assembly line." ""This guy will write the song, this guy will sing, these girls will sing behind him. "" "And he thought this would be a way to produce the music that would be efficient." "It was an assembly line, cos he had so many artists, he had to keep it going." "One of our first videos was of us getting on and off a car singing Nowhere To Run, as they built a Mustang underneath us." "# Nowhere to run Nowhere to hide... #" "Those guys looked at us and said, "hey, get those women out of here, we're trying to work. "" "They were pissed off, they didn't want us there, nobody's allowed there, and they were actually working." "One of the guys cursed a couple of times, "get out of here!"" "And these kids were coming out of the schools in the ghetto neighbourhoods, and they were emerging onto the world stage." "The first group I ever sang in, I was the only white guy in the group." "There didn't seem to be any racist tendencies towards me from our black audiences." "Most of the trouble we ran into was from the white people." "I mean, it was always very tense, the racial situation." "The police were like a white occupying army in the ghetto." "All my African-American friends, every one of them had been shaken down and humiliated by the police at one time or another." "And there was just this incredible anger and resentment that had built up." "You couldn't stand on the street corner and sing any more." "The police would ride by in unmarked cars, and they'd get out and arrest you or beat you on the head with a club, or just tell you to "get away, you can't stand here and sing, you can't gather two or three on corners. "" "It was like martial rule." "Detroit was becoming half and half black and white, with the migration of whites to the suburbs." "But everything was still run by whites." "It was very clear that the tensions that were developing between the young folks and the police were going to explode." "It was like a tinderbox." "It's in the air," "I mean, that kind of feeling that we can't take it any longer." "You knew it was going to happen, you just didn't know exactly when, and it was overdue." "And then boom, the riots." "Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!" "We're coming up to the corner of 12th and Claremont." "#..." "Kick out the jams" "# Yes, kick out the jams... #" "The riots took place, you know, right in here, and then all up and down this street, this 12th Street." "This is where it took place, right here." "Where's our rights?" "Where's our rights?" "Where's our rights?" "It wasn't like a rally, or a demonstration that went wrong." "It was like the police busting in on after-hours drinking at five o'clock in the morning." "The police brutality got out of hand." "Well, the men standing by, they just couldn't take it any more, and the fight started." "# Kick out the jams... #" "We were on our sailboat on Lake Sinclair, and we saw smoke, and the sky was dark," "I thought, "not again. "" "We were at the Fox Theatre, and somebody beckoned me to the edge of the stage and said," ""Martha, come here, come here. "" "I thought my dress was unzipped or something." "They said, "you've got to tell everybody there's a riot, they'd better go home. "" "You could say it was right out of a science fiction novel, or you could explain that this city had a plague of some kind, or that we were in the middle of a war." "I'm standing here in a lane on the John Lodge Freeway." "The only vehicle coming is loaded with fellas who make their living as professional soldiers the National Guard." "I was driving my car down the freeway, and I was diverted by the military." "There were tanks on the freeway heading downtown." "The National Guard was out in full force." "'67 was not a race riot, '67 was a righteous uprising against police brutality." "This is a rebellion." "This is not just looting, and this is not a criminal element." "It was a rebellion, and it started all over the United States." "It was time for equality." "It's a simple statement that black folks are tired of being misused and mistreated, oppressed for over 400 years." "And for 7 days there was violence on the street. 43 people were killed." "# It's an invitation across the nation" "# A chance for folks to meet" "# There'll be laughing, singing and music swinging" "# Dancing in the street" "# Philadelphia, PA Dancing in the street" "# Baltimore and DC Dancing in the street" "# Can't forget the Motor City Dancing in the street" "# All we need is music Sweet music" "# There'll be music everywhere" "# There'll be singing, swaying and records playing" "# Dancing in the street" "# Oh, it doesn't matter... #" "When the riots took place here I was 12." "I saw buildings on fire, and what I thought, as a kid," "I thought that this world was coming to an end." "I thought it was over." "# Oh, the Motor City's burning... #" "I saw the National Guards come down this street here, riding in those jeeps, and in the back of those jeeps they had these guns." "It was a war." "They decided to bring in the federal troops, because it would stop it no matter what, and that pretty well put an end to it." "The jubilation in the city was fabulous." "We had scared the hell out of them." "And the riots absolutely shook my parents to the core of their beings." "My father was travelling at the time, my mother was home with us, and, you know, the gunfire, the National Guard." "But my father was resolved to stay in the city." "# It's another year for me and you... #" "We didn't come down to Detroit much at that point any more." "Personally it was just a kind of a non-event for me." "I wasn't working in Detroit at the time any more, so, we were in our own world, so it didn't matter what was happening down here for the most part." "Except at Christmas time - we'd take the train down to Detroit to see Santa Claus and then go home." "That was the extent of going to Detroit." "It's expedited the city turning black." "Whites fled, OK, and they went to the suburbs." "# It's 1969, OK?" "# War across the USA... #" "The white people just wrote off Detroit." "They just solidified their plans to completely abandon it." "Here is something that will live with me for a lifetime." "I'll never forget that." "We've never recovered." "Never recovered." "In that period from 1962 to 1973 when we moved here, our whole world had sort of collapsed around us." "Crime was out of control, taxes were high, city services were almost non-existent." "We had neighbours who, you know, there was two people shot outside their house, and the bodies were on the lawn in the morning." "By 1973, we were the only white children in our neighbourhood and in our school." "Here's the school here, you can see it's abandoned." "Well, being the only white children in a school that is all-black is tough." "You get bullied, you get jeered at, you get shoved, you get made fun of." "I can relate to what it is to be a minority at school." "We then moved to Royal Oak, where there was no black children in our school at all." "# Panic in Detroit... #" "There was a racial divide occurring almost simultaneously." "While people were moving out, there was an Eight Mile demarcation point." "Almost like a Great Wall of China, and it separated, literally, the suburbs from the city." "And the white people in the suburbs of Detroit, of which there are about 3.5 million, compared to, say, 100, 000 now in the city, they don't know anything about the city of Detroit." "They only go there to go to a football game, a baseball game, or a concert." "If I had to try to simplify the difference between the city of Detroit versus the suburbs, it is as clearly different as black and white." "This neighbourhood here is perfectly safe." "Police patrol, grass is cut, there's flowers planted, the street is clean." "When you cross the Eight Mile Road bridge, you come into another world altogether." "# Only way that I know how to escape from this Eight Mile Road" "# You gotta live it to feel it, you didn't, you wouldn't get it" "# We'll see what the big deal is, why it wasn't the skillest" "# To be walking this borderline of Detroit city limits... #" "On this side of the Eight Mile Road, you have a neighbourhood where most of the houses are gone." "The houses aren't physically here any more." "There's already a lot of houses that people have just walked away from, burned-out structures, garbage in the streets." "We have the highest murder rate in the nation." "This is one of the worst neighbourhoods in Detroit, crime-wise, despite being 2, 000 feet from the suburbs." "The Smiths' house, where we spent a lot of time as children is there, but it's been burned out, it's just an abandoned house now." "# So let's go back, follow the yellow brick road" "# As we go on another episode" "# Journey with me as I take you through this nifty little place" "# That I once used to call home sweet home... #" "Mr Smith worked at Ford Motor Company as well." "They lived in here." "This was, this was the lounge room, this was the living room, this was the dining room, we had many meals here, the kitchen here." "You can see there's been a fire here, unfortunately." "There was a pantry in the back there." "There's something terribly sad about coming here." "Hard to believe." "Hard to believe." "They had stayed much later than most of us, and then one of the daughters had gotten knocked down and her bag stolen just half a block from here, and that's when they left." "Moved to Royal Oak." "# Welcome to my nightmare" "# I think you're gonna like it... #" "In the early '70s it was a mess." "We had the first what they called oil crisis, remember that?" "Where this whole thing we're involved in now, really came to the surface in about '73." "Gas prices go up overnight, and all of a sudden," "Americans are desperate for small, fuel-efficient cars." "Foreign cars started pounding the Detroit manufacturers, because they wouldn't make the little cars, because you didn't make as much money per unit on them." "The Japanese and the Germans brought in these little cars, you got twice as many miles out of it." "They didn't know how to compete." "They were so used to being the top dog, that they thought they could dictate the rules, and the world was changing." "They took their eye off the ball, they ignored the competition from Asia and Europe." "And then all of a sudden, the plants were closing down." "The Fisher body, the Cadillac plant was being closed down." "The momentum was no longer there." "As long as you were doing Hudson's downtown you didn't see too much past that, and for a while it held its own, Hudson's did, until it finally gave up in '83, I think." "By that time it was a disaster." "I was here the day they blew it up." "The day the implosion came was an awesome, sad day, so Hudson's was all set with charges here, dynamite charges." "You'd hear "boom, boom," and nothing happened." "We felt, "wow, this is really a strong building, it's going to defy these,"" "and then all of a sudden, it started to come down." "# Detroit, Detroit, Detroit... #" "I didn't want to see that, I didn't want to see it come down." "#..." "Detroit, it's Detroit... #" "History in the making here in downtown Detroit." "You could see all the Hudson's smoke and asbestos, too, coming through all the canyons, all the streets, and just coming right at me, so I start running my butt off to avoid inhaling any of the smoke." "We are being covered in a fine dust, pieces of J. L. Hudson's covering everything we have." "Blocking out the sun." "The lack of morals and ethics have driven greater civilisations than ours into dust." "It did seem like at that time, "Well, we're done, we're not going to go anywhere. "" "I'm trying to think of some place shady here." "Detroit became kind of an experiment in post-industrial life." "What would happen if you took these people and then you took all the jobs?" "And then in the '80s, what would happen if they gave them some really cheap cocaine that you could smoke?" "A nightmare, yeah, I'd say." "In my neighbourhood, it was a middle/working-class neighbourhood, there was houses everywhere, there was kids playing everywhere, there was trees everywhere, it was beautiful." "And when crack cocaine hit the inner cities, it destroyed everything." "The children started to see things, see people making money selling drugs, and that's what they wanted to do, because there was no other means of them getting a job, just like now." "Growing up as a kid, I saw guys that stood around and told women what to do, brought lots of money, so I thought, if they can do this, my father and my mother going to work for eight hours," "these guys has got bags full of money, which way do I want to go?" "What got me fascinated with drugs is because I want..." "I like to just be fly." "I love the special shoes, the special clothes, I love that stuff." "I love that fast life." "I mean, I've been shot, I did some shooting." "I mean, that's just the reality of it." "And I believe that the real war, it's not some place else, but it's here." "And what the hell is democracy?" "If you can't get it to work here, how are you going to go some place else and set up some type of democracy when it's not working here?" "Now you've got kids raising kids, or raising themselves." "So what else are we going to do?" "Well, let's go bust out a window." "They're closing down a lot of the schools here, that's unheard of." "Where are the kids to go to school at?" "There's no jobs for these people when they get out of school." "There's really no point in the school being here or training these people if there's nothing for them to do once they get out." "This is a really favourite spot of the local graffiti scene." "These are broaching machines they use in the auto industry in die casting, and they teach people how to run the machines for the auto factories." "And this was one of the main vocational schools where they taught people to do this." "And, you know, in Detroit we used to make things," "What is that book?" "Er, it is American Government." "Kids don't know what love is now." "It's heartbreaking seeing schools this way." "Schools aren't supposed to look like this." "They took arts out of schools, they started taking..." "The playgrounds was destroyed, they took music out of schools, so you've got all these kids with idle time, and we all know, when you've got idle time, it's time for the devil to play." "I've burnt down a house before, and I did it just because it was fun." "I thought," ""Destroy it." "Let's see if we can get away before the police come." ""Let's throw a rock at the police and get them to chase us," and that was our fun." "Then 1986, I remember standing on the porch of that house with all the dots on it, and I had an epiphany." "Fireworks went off in my head, and I was able to see the street become a work of art." "And one of the houses here spoke to me." "'What's up, Doc?" "'" "I heard it." "And I went on and I made a dot on it." "And that dot grew, and it kept growing, and I kept listening and I kept hearing it." "And the cops came to talk with me, and they wanted to know whether or not I was crazy." "I would have to say that I am crazy, somewhat, taking that that was chaotic and making it into something very positive." "Using art as a way to speak out, a way to talk about my neighbourhood, a way to talk about all of the abandoned homes and vacant lots here in this city." "Back in the mid-'90s, some of the most prolific and epic parties in Detroit history, rave parties, were here in the Packard." "It became the pinnacle of Detroit's party heyday." "Richie Hawtin has a track called Packard, and it's really strange, because it gives the impression of the sounds that you would hear in the Packard, the walking around." "It's kind of a low, droning heartbeat." "At sunrise you will hear that in your head, walking around here." "The Packard is the iconic cross-section of Detroit culture." "So you have the automotive industry being built here and that musical cross-section." "This is where everything comes together." "The oil prices went back down in the late '80s and the early '90s, and Americans, doing what Americans do, will typically buy the biggest vehicle they can afford to put fuel in." "All the big three bail themselves out with a car that's going to make more trouble than it's worth, and I'm talking about the big gas-guzzling SUVs." "We're a big country, we're an open country, we're spacious." "You know, we like big." "It doesn't cost really that much more to engineer and design a big car than a small car, but you can charge much more for a big car." "When they were making those SUVs, they made $10, 000 profit per unit." "Per unit!" "In some ways it was good, it was a very profitable time for car makers and suppliers, but it probably delayed the US car makers facing some of these underlying issues." "The money that was there enabled them to escape the restructuring that inevitably had to be done." "It was kind of the perfect storm." "A year ago we had a major gasoline spike in price, which really decimated Detroit's large SUV market completely, which was their last bastion of profitability." "That was shortly followed by the housing lending crisis in the United States and the global economic meltdown." "It was a triple whammy, Detroit just could not pull out of the tailspin this time around." "When things are going really good and it's laying golden eggs all the time, you just think this is the way it is forever, and nobody had the foresight to say, you know, "What if, what if, what if?"" "When you've done something that's been, you know, really successful for 50 or 75 years, it can be hard to change the way you do things." "They thought the golden goose would never, ever die." "A combination of sales dropping by about a third and an inability to get credit really precipitated the crisis that ended up with GM and Chrysler going to the government for loans, and precipitated the bankruptcy restructuring of both companies." "Everybody knew the alternative was that the company would fail and liquidate, and it probably would have cost about three million jobs, it would have shut down most auto production in the US if GM stopped building cars, stopped paying its suppliers." "They estimated the ripple effect would have been catastrophic." "I'm on the other side." "See, when they say the banks are failing, I say, "Great!"" "General Motors is gone?" ""Man, out of sight!" You know?" "Man, maybe the Walt Disney will catch on fire, you know?" "!" "I don't want this shit to work." "I hate it." "I hate it." "The amount of production in Detroit has gone down." "The city and some of the suburbs have been very hard hit." "We worry about that, but in the end, we've got a plan in place and the funding in place to really make GM healthy again, and that has to be the first priority." "They don't give a shit about humans and human life." "You could always go and get a job at McDonald's or something little like that, but now you can't even..." "You can't even do that." "People was forced to do illegal stuff, you know, just to eat and survive." "People are just improvising to make a living and doing whatever it takes, by any means necessary." "A lot of robbing, killing." "Some of the sections of this floor, they use for dog fighting." "A couple of times I've come in," "I've found bloody tarps, evidence of real recent pit-bull fighting." "The drug trade and dog fighting, along with the scrapping, that's probably about the three main things that people will tend to do here when they've run out of other options for making income." "Watch yourself." "If the US wants to be a part of this future of the automobile, then, you know, it's going to take a US-based company, and we feel like GM is going to play a very important role in that." "The auto industry has come to the end of the line." "I'm not saying I don't want to downgrade driving and automobiles, but to think that they are the answer to civilisation and the evolution of humanity is childish." "To get so excited about a few decades of mass production, and to believe that that's heaven, I mean, that's crazy." "The Packard Plant has been designated as a hazardous-waste site, but there's plenty of plants and life flourishing here." "So even in the worst environments, you'll still get life taking hold." "I mean, you know, any time you get flowers and ruins together, it's moving." "It tells its own story." "I always like these little patches of beauty, like, you know, somebody had planted those at one time." "Our grip on this planet is very tenuous." "It doesn't take very long for nature to re-establish its hold!" "For me, though, coming back to the neighbourhood to actually see that there's nothing there, it hurts me in my heart." "You have drug dealers who are squatting in the houses, selling drugs." "At night, you never know what's going to happen or who's going to pop out of somewhere, like a devil coming out of a jack-in-the-box or something." "I was one of the guys up in those abandoned houses selling drugs or tearing up the house, you know, for nothing." "You've got people grabbing little girls, taking them in abandoned houses, raping them." "I've got three daughters, and I have my son to walk them to school, because I'm scared that somebody might grab them and take them up in an abandoned house." "Now to be an adult and look back on all this, like," ""Wow, I've just tore up my whole neighbourhood, for nothing. "" "Our city, it is in total disarray, but the reason it's in disarray, and understand this, that abnormal behaviour in an abnormal environment is a normal response." "Everything is both positive and negative." "I've been to prison six times." "And I'd never stayed..." "I'd never had no job." "I never had nothing to keep me focused until Goodwill came in and really gave me a job." "I weren't doing nothing dirty, but I was so broke," "I was about to do some dirt." "We go in and we salvage the best part of the house." "We tear the house down, but we're doing it where we can recycle it and sell it and make it a better place." "I think this whole project will make people feel a lot safer." "This programme gives me a sense of pride because finally I'm a part of something that's positive." "I haven't thought about nothing negative." "Everything that's came my way has become positive." "It's made a change." "And it's a way of me giving back to my community, and I really do appreciate it." "This is our opportunity." "Every man in here, this is our opportunity to give back." "We lift each other up." "It's good to get paid for, but at the same we're doing what we're doing because we want to show everybody you can come out of prison and be somebody out here." "At least 50, 000 houses have been bulldozed." "And when the lots became vacant, many older African Americans who had been raised in the south and who had grown their own food decided to plant community gardens, not just for the food, but because they recognised" "that food is the way that you care for yourself and think about yourself in a very different way." "They're even talking of eliminating buildings and actually start putting up farming, which makes it even more bizarre for me to see places here that might be farms where they were thriving establishments." "The fastest-growing movement in the US today is the urban-agricultural movement." "And what's been so exciting is the number of young people who come to" "Detroit because they feel that we are pioneers for the 21st century." "That's an amazing thing to me about Detroit, that it brings people who are, like, risk takers out to implement things that they believe in." "Come here for a couple of days and you're like, this place is amazing." "And on paper, it's the worst place on earth." "It's the last place you ever want to go to." "I look around Detroit and see the watermark." "What happened to Detroit is basically economic Katrina." "It was a manmade disaster, not a natural disaster." "And suddenly you realise that we were willing to let a major American city just fall off the face of the earth." "And I thought, "I want to go into the belly of the beast and see if I can figure out" ""what's going on, and how do we make things better?"" "Our city government isn't very active or actively keeping track of what's going on, you know, so a lot of us are growing our own food." "I want to test out that theory that you can make a decent living on an acre of land, and right now it's bringing in about $500 a week." "Which is about what I make at Chrysler in a five-day week." "Without all the satisfaction that I get right now." "My people come from down south and we have 40 acres still down there that we used to farm and grow on, so it's not really anything new to me." "Actually, it's better now than when I thought I was really doing good." "How could I live like this?" "How could I not live like this?" "This developing cottage industry is pretty much going to be Detroit's economy in ten years instead of regular industry." "I don't think it's going to be that long." "Really." "Everybody came to Detroit to get away from the farms." "Like, my dad grew up on a soybean farm." "He came here to work for Buick, you know." "What's the progression in going back to farms?" "It's kind of a regression in a big way, I think." "Well, they're never going to rebuild Detroit!" "No future in it!" "What are they going to do with it?" "I feel sorry for him." "I feel terribly sorry for him." "I don't know, I'm old, you know." "I don't have to worry about the future too much." "I'm not going to get too much of it." "The all-American dream is dead." "We're in the process of creating a new American dream." "It's happening here." "It's happening in the Detroit City of Hope." "I'm proud of that hope." "It's not a black thing, it's not a white thing." "Economics play a part in a lot of this craziness that exists, but I think that people are coming around now, and they are starting to understand that it's not about just I." "It's about all of us." "And those of you who are in your office buildings, driving your Bentleys and your Jaguars, making judgements on us, are somewhat a part of it, really." "Wondrous is this wall-stead" "We had made it, fate broke it" "Battlements broken, giants' work shattered" "Roofs are in ruin, towers destroyed" "Broken the barred gate, frost on the concrete" "Walls gape, torn up, destroyed, consumed by age" "Earth-grip holds the proud builders" "Departed, long lost in the hard grasp of the grave" "Until 100 generations of people have passed" "Often this wall outlasted." "You..." "You survive in the end." "What's at the end of the rainbow?" "Hopefully a pot of gold." "But likely not in this town." "You can look at Detroit and see nothing but disaster, devastation, depopulation, disinvestment, or you can look at Detroit and say, that's the future." "Our plans are only paper plans." "We either don't intend or are not able to do what we have said we will do." "People of the nation and the world, you owe your continued support of Detroit." "I solemnly assure you that we will not fail you in any way." "Thank you very much."