Downtown Detroit’s elaborate Michigan Theatre movie house was built in the 1920s on the site where Henry Ford had created his first car. Attached to a larger building, the theater thrived through World War II, but–like the rest of Detroit–it fell on hard times in the 60s and 70s, becoming a porn theater, a supper club, and a concert hall in quick succession. “The owner tried to demolish it but couldn’t, because it was structurally interdependent with the office tower,” says Charles Waldheim, director of graduate studies at UIC’s School of Architecture and coeditor of the new book Stalking Detroit.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Instead, in the late 70s the owner ripped out the balconies and put in a parking garage. “The velvet curtain is still there,” says Waldheim. “They cut out what they needed to, and cars park in an Italianate plaster movie palace.
Most American cities have areas that have been abandoned because of decentralization and globalization–such as U.S. Steel’s 600-acre South Works site in south Chicago–but, according to Waldheim, Detroit decentralized “first and fastest” because the city’s economy was so inextricably tied to the auto industry. Detroit’s rapid growth in the early 20th century and its calamitous decline in the postwar years were equally determined by the imperatives of that industry. Thus, argue Waldheim and his coeditors Georgia Daskalakis and Jason Young, “Detroit is the most thoroughly modern city in the world.”
