American Ruins

February 26, 2005...Though I spent the first eighteen years of my life just across the river from Detroit, I have little direct experience of the place. Growing up, I'd watch daily news reports of murders and fires on Detroit TV stations, but, other than annual class trips to Greenfield Village or the Detroit Zoo, I never went there. Still, the place had an effect on me. It still does.

My parents told me about how they'd used to cross the border to shop in downtown Detroit, but how all of that ended the year they thought they'd take a shortcut to northern Ontario through Michigan … only to be turned back at the border because of the riots. The '67 riots, and the city's rapid decline thereafter, changed things.

As a kid, I remember marveling at the dilapidated (but still occupied) houses I could see from the Jeffries Freeway in Detroit -- leaning one way or another, but never standing up straight like our own tar-paper shacks back home. And the burned-out wrecks I saw from the school bus on our annual class trips were always the highlight of the year for me. I'm still not sure I could explain why.

A few years ago, though, I discovered the work of a photographer named Camilo Vergara, who seems to share my fascination with the ruins of America's industrial era cities. Vergara's modus operandi is to photograph neighbourhoods as they fall apart. In the books The New American Ghetto and American Ruins, which I can't recommend highly enough, he tracks the decline of buildings, never more than four or five at a time, over the course of many years. While Detroit isn't the sole focus of these books, the Motor City's abandoned Victorian-era mansions feature prominently in them.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any of Vergara's better Detroit photographs online; and, like almost everything else I own, my copies of these books are in a storage locker far, far away, so scanning a photo to post was not an option. It turns out that Camilo and I aren't the only people in the world fascinated by these things, however. The photograph below, of an abandoned building in the broken heart of Detroit, is from Lowell Boileau's website The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.

So, all that said, the first time I heard today's song, "We Almost Lost Detroit," I just assumed it was about the '67 riots. I was bathing in the tinkling glow of the Fender Rhodes and the nighttime feel of the song and not really paying close attention.

Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson - We Almost Lost Detroit

In fact, the song has nothing to do with the riots of 1967 and everything to with a near meltdown at the Fermi nuclear plant, thirty miles south of Detroit, in 1966. This is a chapter of local history I'd never learned as a kid…

*****

"We Almost Lost Detroit" is on the 1977 Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson album Bridges. Scott-Heron, the vocalist, and Jackson, the keyboardist, maintained a song-writing and performing partnership throughout the 1970's writing socially-conscious r & b tackling subjects like apartheid ("Johannesburg") and drug addiction ("Angel Dust"). And if you've ever wondered where the phrase "the revolution will not be televised" came from … well, it was one of their songs.

In the early 1980s Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson went their separate ways. Scott-Heron continued performing, making a particular target of then U.S. President Ronald Reagan in the songs "Reron" and "B-Movie," before running headlong into hard times. Brian Jackson got into computers. There is an excellent article about the two in the December 2003 issue of Mojo. I've given you a link to the website, even though you won't ever find much of anything of interest there. Perhaps, if you dig deeply enough, you'll be able to figure out how to order a back issue. I never have.

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