The city has not turned the corner on all its obvious problems. But determination has clearly gained the upper hand over despair
The arising-from-the-ashes moment has been heralded at intervals for a long time. “There is little doubt that Detroit has turned the corner on some of its most obvious problems,” reported theback in 1980. “Middle-class whites are moving back into the city, and a visitor senses a new vitality downtown.” Yet in the decades ahead lay the exodus of hundreds of thousands more residents, more declarations of renaissance and, in 2013, America’s biggest municipal bankruptcy.
By the beginning of the year, Detroit’s unemployment rate had dropped below 7% for the first time since 2000. Mr Duggan boasts that “at this point, anybody in this city who wants to work has a job available.” With tax receipts running well ahead of forecasts, the city is applying its—more than $800m—to improving its public spaces and its workforce.
Henry Ford invented mass production in Detroit, and while working on a Ford assembly line Berry Gordy, playing the piano in his mind, began to create the Motown sound. Towards the middle of the last century, the city government was so rich it could shovel money to its Institute of Arts to buy paintings by Rembrandt.
One of the most prominent ruins was Michigan Central railway station, a Beaux-Arts massif of marble and bronze designed by the architects behind New York’s Grand Central station. In the mid-1990s, when Lexington was a reporter in Detroit, the three-storey depot and its 18-storey office tower stood empty, stripped and smeared with graffiti. He would wander the vast space trying to imagine the city that once filled it with life.
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