How Can People Live Like This?

I was working on a project where I looked up houses where specific people lived in 1940. It is frustrating in Detroit as so many homes have been demolished and only overgrown yards remain. Now the house at 15070 Stout is in Brightmoor, a community built with low cost housing for the many migrants moving up from the south. The developer was criticized for ‘shoddy construction’ to which he replied ‘It’s better than what they had in Appalachia.’ He became very wealthy, lived in Grosse Pointe and travelled frequently to Europe.

As for the neighborhood he left, the houses weren’t built to last. Add on to that the overall housing problems in Detroit with foreclosures, decreasing city tax revenues, an increasingly destitute population. Brightmoor now has a lot of green space – overgrown lots devoid of housing.

I found the house on a real estate site as it was listed for sale 2019. Hit the jackpot as it still has photos, 21 of them! I looked. I’m left wondering who took the photos as no realtor in their right mind would post such photos. Take a look: https://www.trulia.com/p/mi/detroit/15064-stout-st-detroit-mi-48223–2050753595

Here is just a sample, I think this might be the kitchen. Have you every seen anything like this?

And the home owners are in the photos on the real estate page. The listing says all these upgrades were done to the property; didn’t see anything I consider an upgrade. Could the property have been in a worse state? In the basement are numerous mattresses on the  floor as if they had illegals stashed there. Maybe they did. And 4 mastiffs!!! Count them in the photo!

You know something is wrong when the garage is more suitable than the house. As I recall the City of Detroit requires an Occupancy Inspection when sold; no way this could pass anything and might even end up condemned. You got around that by selling for cash. Back in the 1980’s that was what people did in order to get out, especially when they knew they have to make improvements. The selling price didn’t justify doing any work, if you could sell it at all. When I sold my Detroit house in 1986 I had a black inspector who was very picky to find infractions; my father built the house and he was an obsessive German carpenter.

I am curious how people choose to live like this. I’ve watched the hoarding shows, but this house is filth, garbage strewn. You can be poor but don’t need to roll around in trash. And there are so many thrift stores with really cheap bed sheets and comforters. The difference I see in photos between now and those of poor people in the Depression is ‘stuff’. People now have a lot of junk, bits and pieces, stuff. Those depression shacks and tents were essentially bare. No clothing all over the floor, no shelves full of plastic containers. So even poor people today are better off because they still seem able to buy things or accumulate them.

The property description goes on to talk about a wooden fence now around the property. Homeowner is out of state but there is a relative squatter living there. Huh? they can easily remove them. The listing has been removed. this house sold for $900 in 2011. Was listed now for $16,000.

I’m still so curious as to who actually posted the photos.

 

De-Troit

Recently I had occasion to spend a bit of time in Detroit. Not the Detroit of media coverage – the ruin porn people love to marvel over. Nor the hip, trendy, Midtown area where they are all out of rent subsidized apartments (boy amazing how quickly a subsidy will fill empty apartments).
I’m talkin’ the rest of the city neighborhoods, specifically what one time were middle class and upper middle class subdivision. Solid neighborhoods with fine brick homes.
St. Mary’s of Redford church holds carillon concerts in the summer. Why a church already in distress would install a carillon in 2002 is puzzling. Like they maybe thought parishioners already gone 25+ years would come flocking back for a bell concert? The neighborhood had definitely changed for the worse by 2002.
Decided to catch the last one of the season end of July. 5:15 pm on a summer evening, still very light outside. Put out our folding chairs on the lawn. Grand River Rd. traffic noise behind us. They placed about 10 chairs next to the side entrance, seats taken by elderly females and the pastor.
Then the bells started. It was nice. Played traditional, religious and popular. A nice breeze kept us comfortable.
While enjoying the music we watched the side street activity. Junky cars passing, a group either attempting a car repair or dismantling a car for parts down the walkway from the church. Car parked in a drive of a nearby house, occupants changing, people stopping by to talk to them, kid coming up to the car. Residents strolling down the church drive heading for a nearby party store. Different lifestyle.
As it got closer to 6:15 activity picked up. Glad concert was over as it was clearly time to go.
On Grand River I drove slowly. People crossing every which-way, slowly, ignoring all traffic. Just don’t hit anyone here, I said. Not in this neighborhood where police are unlikely to show up and I might get dragged out of my car and beaten.
Had a little problem getting back on the freeway and ended up in South Rosedale Park. Two prostitutes and a drug transaction in front of me as I halted at a stop sign. Oh geez, just want to find my way OUT of here! Still couldn’t find my way onto an entrance ramp so turned on my navigator. Drove with extra alertness among the seemingly deranged drivers. Finally, the on ramp and get the hell out.
Here is the point. How is anyone going to even begin to tackle the problems with the rest of Detroit? What do you do with this population? There will never again be a variety of easy factory jobs that just need labor, any warm body will do. If they don’t have jobs their situations will never improve, never change.
Efforts happen every summer to clean up pockets of trash. The city gets fed money to tear down a few more houses. Meanwhile more homes fall into disrepair. It is never-ending. I read stories of people restoring houses in formerly upscale old areas; I’ve been reading those stories since the 1970’s – same areas, maybe same houses, that area doesn’t improve.
Between downtown and Belle Isle are lots of big new, tall apartment buildings. They have iron fences, secured gates, cameras, patrols. Put in a moat! Install a portcullis with big iron doors! Have a drawbridge. Maybe if I were queen I’d be okay to live like that; I’d have a lot of other concerns to occupy me, like succession. But being afraid of driving home in the dark, waiting for the gate to slide open and hope you’re not hijacked, can I walk the dog, that’s no way to live.

Gone and Forgotten

One of the favorite phrases seen on older tombstones, say before the 1900’s is “gone, but not forgotten’.
As a visit to any cemetery will show, they are forgotten. And not only because they’ve been dead 100 years.
Last Saturday I decided to take advantage of the lovely day with a trip to a cemetery. I had already been outside all morning. And I knew my mother would come along because it means a ride in the car and maybe a little standing around outside; at 91 she has increasing limitations on activities.
Not just a cemetery at random, but check out the resting place of my sister’s mother-in-law who died last December. Her ashes were interred in her husband’s family plot in any old Catholic graveyard in the southwest area of Detroit, near the Ford Rouge plant.
Dorothy is the one who ever since we knew her we assumed she was as Irish as her husband. She honored the Irish high holidays, decorated her home in green furnishings, loved Belleek porcelain and British vases and those god-ugly Toby jugs. Lo and behold when one day I stuck her name in FamilySearch and found she was Polish! A story for another time.
The last time Mom and I ventured to this cemetery was 2000 when her husband Jerry died. His body was buried here, but Dorothy chose cremation so only her urn of ashes fill the plot. We found the family plot without too much driving around. Fortunately it is a fairly small cemetery and it was a nice day to drive around in spite of the industrial noise.
The Holy Cross Cemetery sits in a stark industrial area. Bounded by a railway on one side, on two sides it is flanked by Detroit Iron & Metals mountains of stone or pellets. They sprayed the mountains to contain the dust that still managed to settle over everything.
Most the graves dated to the 1920’s and 30’s. And the names were overwhelmingly Polish. It was a veritable unprouncable phone directory for Krakow or maybe Posnan. How aware was Dorothy of this? I know she rarely, if ever, visited her husband’s grave.
The tombstones were large – and since this was not a graveyard for Detroit’s rich and famous I wondered about the burden this placed on the families to have such large family stones. The practice here was individual small markers, then a large, erect family name memorial. If the family of Dorothy’s husband was typical, these were working class people. They lived in Detroit’s Corktown, the old Irish section.
The stones were all discolored by years of Rouge plant pollution. The black sat in a layer along the top and ran down the front of the stones. There was a large, marble Pieta atop one stone; Mary’s face was eaten away and gave her the look of a leper. A finger of Jesus was near falling off. It was representative of the bodies beneath.
We viewed the of Dorothy’s family by marriage. Noted all the sons buried there and of course the mother and father. But missing were wives! How did Dorothy slip in? But the flat, individual stones were hard to read being nearly covered by encroaching grass. The family left, the son of Jerry, Jerry’s grandchildren and several great grandchildren, don’t visit. Ever. One granddaughter has come on occasion for her grandfather Jerry. The rest are forgotten, their stones and lives taken over by a thatch of thick grass. No one wants to remember who they were, when they lived, figure out their relationship to the others. I had a garden tool to place some dried flowers, but it wasn’t enough to tackle the overgrown grass. I needed a spade. With my foot I worked to push aside the grass as we tried to read the stones and follow the family history. It isn’t our family. But we have not graves left for our ancestors that we can visit anywhere. The Russians and the East Germans took care of that.
I was puzzled that the cemetery seemed to have a sort of class system in effect. The graveyard was divided by the roads into the prominent mounds of the front sections, and then mounded, round central areas. Toward the back the land was more flat. In viewing the cemetery from the back to front, an area of no tress to the larger trees up front something became clear. Several areas only had large gravestones; all the small grave markers were together in a separate area. I’m not sure I’ve ever seem such segregation of gravestones by size. How do they manage that? When a family buys a plot how can they be assured they will place a large family marker there? Further, the small stones were in order by date of death: 1931 followed by 1932, followed by 1933.
Another oddity, or rather a sadness visited on too many cemeteries now days. I noted several gravestones with the imprint of a large, empty, oval space. There were several. A practice in ethnic cemeteries back 60 years and more was to put an enameled photo of the deceased on the gravestone. These were missing. At the front of the cemetery, near an administration building were the most significant tombstones – large, imposing blocks of stone. They still had photos. I got old of the car to look more closely. I find it a nice touch to view the dead, as they or the family wanted them remembered. These enameled portraits all had chip marks on them; someone had tried to remove them, without success, so far.
From Holy Cross Cemetery I could see gravestones at Detroit’s venerable old Woodmere Cemetery. We drove over there. Now here were truly the rich and once famous. This cemetery too, has dealt with vandalism. The mausoleum doors has been removed by the vandal hoards and are now boarded up with plywood. No longer can you look inside to see the light shine through stained glass or to view the inside decorations. And they too are forgotten.

17% of the Population

The black, Afro-American, Negro population of the U.S.A. in the 2013 census was 12.2%. The black population of Michigan was 17%. Now Wayne County in which Detroit is located is 40% black. So keeping in mind the US and Michigan numbers, are they now overrepresented on TV?
This came to mind when I saw Martin Luther King III in a commercial talking about how when he grew up he never saw people like him on TV. He goes on to extoll how good it is now that there is a black station.
So, does the argument hold the other way? Because even a news station coming out of the Metro Detroit area has several black newscasters. Now they broadcast and are on cable for areas outside of Detroit and Wayne Co. Seems a lot of black people are in national commercials. Then check the TV and cable shows: How to Get away with Murder, Black-ish and Scandal – 3 major shows. (I don’t have cable so can’t report on that.) Is it 12.2% worth?
And I really don’t want another commercial with rap music, soul or hip hop. Are you listening McDonald’s? That’s a pretty dumb black couple on AT&T’s U-Verse commercials, but most the commercial couples are dumb, and maybe this is just the SE Michigan version. What about the 82% population of this country?
If you make the argument one way, that you have to show a representative population, then it should apply so you don’t over-represent a portion of the population. Wasn’t that the problem to begin with?

And what about Hispanics? Are their population numbers not greatly? Notice though an ethnic group making significant inroads particular in news broadcasting: Asian Indians! What is that attributable to? All of a sudden large numbers of Indian Americans attending Speck Howard Broadcasting School ’cause their parents value that more than an M.D.?
Yes I am saying my Detroit area experience has probably make me more touchy of seeing black people. I liked them more when there were a few, better educated and employed.

Isn’t She Lovely? Not

This is my neighbor. She brought me a housewarming gift 7 months after I moved in. It was a nearly dead, spindly looking hanging petunia. What do you say when someone goes to the trouble of bringing you a gift but hasn’t the sense to at least make it presentable, or perhaps hasn’t the brain capacity to realize it is nearly dead. Or, on the other hand maybe to her the new neighbor is only worth a clearance bin item. Couldn’t help but notice her single hanging petunia pot looked a hell of a lot better, killing one polite reaction above, but I stray.
Didn’t take long to realize something was off in the way she talks. Very loud, rambling on, not making sense. In my first months here I could hear lots of yelling coming from her house, and it was winter, doors and windows closed. I came to learn she always yells, like many black people in the Detroit area.
Now I’m back in the Detroit area after 30 years away. What a culture shock to return. I worked with educated, well spoken blacks, but we also had less capable clerical staff. There was one woman who if she had moved any slower they would have thrown dirt on her. We had a resident druggy too and then the entitled black woman who threatened to sue the company for discrimination, so they dumped her on us.
But back to my neighbor and specifically her clothing. Everything is too, too tight, maybe 4 sizes too small. She must buy it that way. Her breasts push out the top of her bra (it is not low cut) visible lumps protruding above the bra line, through the tops showing every bulge and roll of fat. Perhaps I’m envious that she is self assured enough to show off that body, and I suppose her husband admires it. He probably likes her looking like a hooker during the day with her big false eyelashes and too much makeup. Possibly she was a hooker but I guess I shouldn’t assume every trashy dressed black is or was a hooker.
Her favorite way to enter her house is through her kitchen window. I have video, quite amusing as she scampers to get up onto the high windowsill and then rolls into the kitchen sink. She has done it on several occasions. Now how many times do you lock yourself out of your house before you place a spare somewhere? I do think she is retarded.
And what is the deal with so proud to be black, but can’t get enough wigs with white-people-hair? Don’t want that black hair. I recall Chris Rock’s movie Good Hair.
This is the neighbor who started the bird debacle culminating in my getting a protection order against her husband. That is a story for another post (with video)!
My feeling towards black people deteriorated after experiences with these people and others. The demographics of my neighborhood rapidly change, for worse. I made a mistake, buying this house, not grasping the effects of the housing crisis for a community next to Detroit. I hope to correct this mistake next year and MOVE!

UPDATE: Yes her craziness was verified the next year when she went ballistic about birds using my decorative birds houses as way stations from which they flew out then bombarded her car with poop. I kid you not. It got ugly with her drug dealer old man jumping in necessitating a restraining order. What horrible people! And note the court system in Detroit, Wayne Country is just as dysfunctional as the city, and racist against white people. Yes I did move, left the area that became the new Detroit (pun intended on the old economic development group).

Ch 2 We Take Flight pg 3

about Detroit Metro – but it is a real downer to the start of a trip for which we have such great anticipation.
So why am I putting myself through this torture of airports and cramped airplanes, countless waits, running for shuttles, travel with an elderly mother, crammed into uncomfortable and inhumanely tight seats risking blood clots, airborne diseases and other unanticipated horrors? I am taking my mother back home, to see a place of such influence on her life, where she spent her youth.
Mother is Edith Klemm, née Brumpreiksch. Home is a place she last saw 57 years ago. She was fleeing the country with her sister, escaping in front of rapidly advancing enemy Russian troops. Home is the cities of Heydekrug and Grabuppen in Memelland, East Prussia.
None of us could ever have even dreamed that it was even remotely possible to visit Memelland. I would have paid closer attention when the family talked about the place, but it was so remote and not like a real place I could actually visit, say like Hamburg or Berlin. We could visit our relatives in the east so I knew a bit about that area. And we accepted as fact that our relatives in the east side were stuck, never to be able to travel out of their country west, to visit places they dreamed of. Now, in such a short time everything changed, history overturned and the last fifty years erased, an entire ideology made obsolete overnight. No more tense border crossings, guard dogs, searches for decadent western printed matter, costly visa applications, absurd registration formalities upon entry and exit. No more paranoid regimes. We don’t have to exchange western money for each day we stay in the workers paradise. It all sounds so ridiculous so many

Ch 2 We Take Flight pg 1

Before the outward-bound journey was over, we’d see four airports and pass through two additional countries to get to our destination. Seeing these airports in close succession makes the differences all the more striking. At least time would work in our favor, leaving in the afternoon and arriving in Lithuania late in the evening so we could go to bed before having to set out in a foreign land.
Living in Michigan it made sense to fly out of Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Chicago’s O’Hare would be about the same distance, but a lot more traffic getting there and the connections were no better. Metro is under construction once again, so maneuvering through the airport proved a greater challenge than usual. The airport was being totally overhauled with construction sites blocking much of the airport. We spared our relatives having to come see us off; none of them wanted to come on the trip. Neither my sister nor any of my nieces are interested in travel to Europe, and especially not Germany or our relatives.
Trying to eat at the airport proved a major challenge. A vegetarian, I pretty much have lost interest eating in most places, but these airport options set new lows to even find any edible food. We arrived with plenty of time and hoped to fill the time taking it easy and eating something nice. We will be totally immobile for an entire day so didn’t need to make ourselves feel any more bloated.
I recall that Detroit got an award for having the fattest population. I now know why. Just looking at the fast food menus posted above counters where sullen staff stood as immobile as mounds of lard draped in cheap polyester, it was enough to clog our arteries and raise blood sugar levels. Long lines of people stood zombie like for the high corn syrup and cholesterol offerings. We searched among the construction chaos for anything