Detroit's crisis is nothing new

In misty or imagined memory, Detroit was in its heyday in 1956 -- an automotive golden year of classy Thunderbirds and distinctive Chevys, of downtown restaurants and nightclubs, when even newcomers shared an aura of certainty about the city's greatness.

Maybe we can afford nostalgia in good times. But now, as our worst times are scrutinized by national media, history can be instructive. And in 1956, writer Gerald Weales wasn't impressed by the nation's fifth-largest city.

"There are very few good restaurants or comfortable cocktail lounges, only one real department store, J.L. Hudson's, and a handful of movie theaters," he wrote.

Weales found transportation "difficult," parking "impossible" and the city struggling to get its groove back.

A city like no other

These impressions, published in Commentary magazine, startle today. Their author identified many of the anxieties and problems of today's Detroit a full half-century ago.

Even in 1956, a visitor might spend a year or two living here and conclude it was a strange and somehow disturbing place unlike any other American city.

"By a particularly neat balance, Detroit manages to be a union town and a company town all at once," Weales observed.

He described a city without a soul, beset by identity issues, ethnic and racial separation and lacking any clear sense of community. Want to understand this odd city? Weales, then an English professor at Wayne State University, said you had to think of it as a small town overcome by rapid growth, unable to develop a sense of itself:

"It is not even a city that is passionately hated; it chiefly inspires indifference."

Foreshadowing the future

I tracked down Weales in Philadelphia. He's an 84-year-old retired University of Pennsylvania professor and drama critic. Has he been to Detroit lately? "I've been through it a few times," he said. "You get the impression that it's a little sad."

His 1956 article remains provocative because it aptly foreshadowed today's crisis. The dominance of labor and the Big Three, the ethnic and racial separateness -- these difficulties were uniquely Detroit's and clear to him more than 50 years ago.

From his apartment near the Wayne State campus, where he lived "one or two years," he described a growing suburban population that was reluctant to shop or eat downtown and appalling slums of former Southerners, racially separate but of "equal squalor."

He might have been writing in 1986 or 1996 or 2006 when he observed the many projects underway to change the city. Poignantly, he observed, these efforts "will, it is hoped, revive Detroit, and give it a sense of community."

Some of those projects did take shape, including Wayne State's mature campus, the Detroit Medical Center and the Fisher Theatre, which opened in 1961.

Weales' portrait is mostly unflattering and unsparing. But his cool, critical gaze was dead-on. This was, even then, a city hoping for changes but reluctant to make them.

Laura Berman's column runs Tuesday and Thursday in Metro and Sunday online. Reach her at lberman@detnews.com">lberman@detnews.com.