Motorworld

Detroit

Way back when, the good people of Detroit decided it would be a good thing to have a railway station. And this was not to be a platform with some geraniums on it either. No siree, you wouldn’t be able to find Bernard Cribbins having a chinwag with Jenny Agutter in the steam here. They wanted something big. Really big.

And that’s what they got: the biggest, flashiest, tallest railway station the world had ever seen. The huge marble cavern of a concourse sat at the bottom of a twelve-storey skyscraper and backed on to no fewer than sixteen platforms.

Unfortunately, Detroit became the car capital of the world and large, free-flowing urban interstates sprang up like mushrooms after a summer shower. They connected the new suburbs with the downtown auto factories and frankly, no one really needed the station any more.

And so, it closed down.

It’s still there, dominating the Detroit skyline, but today it’s smashed and broken. Every slab of marble is cracked, the concourse is littered with burned mattresses and the upper floors are said to be in an even worse state of repair.

But no one is absolutely certain because Detroit’s railway station is at the end of Michigan Avenue and, as such, is at the epicentre of a gang war that measures 9.4 on the Richter scale.

Rival outfits with silly names like the Ice Warriors fight for control of the high ground. And this is not Reggie and Ronnie Kray either. You can forget all about honour among thieves here. This is vicious like you simply would not believe.

Every year 600 people are shot to death in Detroit and, in that railway station, I very nearly became one of them.

The police had said we were mad to even think about going in there. ‘Not even that phoney accent is gonna save your ass. You go in there and you’ll come out in a body bag,’ said one cheery soul in a hexagonal hat.

But frankly, the British perception of gangland violence is some spotty eleven-year-old with a penknife. We could handle these American pussies, no problem at all.

It took about five minutes to find that we couldn’t. We’d just set the camera up when, from the minstrel’s gallery, a not-very-minstrel-like voice asked whether we were cops.

We were then ordered to stand still and advised that, if we moved, we would be shot repeatedly. And then killed.

I could have passed muster as a statue until, from behind one of the pillars, came this guy who was about fourteen feet tall and nine feet across. Also, he was brandishing what we later discovered was a ‘street sweeper’ — a machine gun that fires 12-bore shotgun cartridges.

He frisked us, checked out the camera equipment, listened quite politely while we explained we were from the BBC and then said he was going to check us out.

Now this puzzled me. I was still standing there, wondering if he had a hotline to John Birt, when a girl emerged from the shadows. She last knew what she was doing in 1976. Here was a person whose hair was green, whose nose sported sixteen silver rings and whose eyes had as much life to them as cardboard.

Her first words were odd. ‘You’re that guy off Top Gear, yeah?’ ‘Um yes,’ I replied, wondering where my royalty cheque was if they were showing it in America. Actually, that’s a lie. I was really wondering where the lavatory was because I was about four seconds away from shitting myself.

But then her face broke into a broad grin as she explained she’d once worked as a researcher on Newsnight and she ‘just luurrrved’ the BBC.

Within seconds, we were joined by an army of gangland down-and-outs, all clamouring for an interview. Christian, the least stoned and most eloquent, explained that things are pretty bad in downtown Detroit these days.

Had he been shot at? ‘What today? Yeah sure. I was down the gas station this morning and these guys came in. It was pretty ugly.’

So we are in danger then? ‘You sure are. If they want your trucks, they’re going to take ’em. If they want your camera, they’re gonna take it. If they want your shoes, you’d better hand ’em over, because if you don’t the results could be disappointing. No… the results could be catastrophic.’

We had a long chat, turned down several invitations to various parties and left. The police, waiting for us at the end of the drive, were impressed. ‘When you went in there we expected you to come out through an eleventh-floor window. How in the hell did you get talking to those guys? You ain’t even black,’ said one.

Observant bunch, the Detroit cops.

No, they really are. Two days later, we were being driven round an area of the city called Brush which had obviously just been on the receiving end of a B-52 strike. Not a single house was in one piece. Every car in every street was a wreck.

There’d been a drive-by shooting, two people were dead and our chauffeurs were out looking for suspects. It’s OK, that’s what they were paid to do. They were policemenists.

We were chatting about this and that, about how no one has a job because there are no jobs to be had, when one of them, Hal, suddenly asked if we’d like to see an arrest.

In the blink of an eye, the car had stopped, and two fifteen-year-olds were spread-eagled on the bonnet.

This would have made good footage but sadly, the Chevvy had child locks and we couldn’t get out without scrabbling over the front seats and tumbling into the street with my legs tangled up in the umbilical cord that links the camera to the sound equipment.

By the time we were ready to roll, Hal had pulled a small gun and some drugs from the suspects and radioed for back-up… which arrived just as the crowd started throwing stones at us.

Another guy was arrested and as he lay on the ground, his head pinned to the road by Hal’s shoe, his friend told cameraman Keith Schofield, ‘Get that on your camcorder, Johnnie Fucking Video.’

This was getting ugly and we already knew that everyone was packing heat. You can buy a gun in Detroit for less than half a dozen tomatoes and the statistics show that a gun is a lot more useful.

I must confess that I kept staring at the tiny pistol that had been confiscated earlier and was now lying on the passenger seat of the police car. Was it loaded? Where was the safety catch? Had anyone in the crowd started firing, you should be in no doubt that I’d have fired back.

And I’m the guy who had to lie in a cold room for three days after I once shot a sparrow with an air rifle.

Happily, we emerged from the confrontation in one piece, even though our Chrysler Town and Country people carrier had taken a direct hit.

Compared to Detroit, the rest of America is Trumpton. You ask an American if he’s ever been there and he’ll be too flabbergasted to answer. You can buy T-shirts elsewhere in the States which say things like ‘Don’t Mess With Me. I Have Friends In Detroit’ or ‘DETROIT — Where The Weak Are Killed And Eaten’.

That’s strange because, just 30 years ago, Detroit was the most vibrant city America had ever seen. The people were rich. The factories were humming. You could hear the buzz all round the world. So what turned the motor capital of the world into the murder capital of the world?

Well, way back at the dawn of automotive time, and seemingly quite by chance, a number of individuals set up shop in and around De Troit (it used to be French) making cars. A great many covered wagons had been built there and the city simply added the newfangled internal combustion engine.

This city was home base to Lincoln, Cadillac, Pontiac, Chevrolet, Ford, Mercury, Chrysler, Hudson, Plymouth, Buick, Dodge, Packard and Oldsmobile. It was The Motor City.

There were more car-makers than people and, to attract workers from elsewhere in the States, the pay was high. By the late fifties, the average industrial wage rate in America was $1.50 an hour but in Detroit they were getting $3.

You could start work in one factory on a Monday morning and, if you didn’t like it, catch the afternoon shift in another later that day.

Demand was phenomenal, too. These were the US boom years, before the oil crisis, Vietnam and Watergate, and everyone wanted a car: a big one with a V8 engine from Detroit. In the fifties and sixties, 97 per cent of all cars sold in America were made in America.

No car sums up the times better than the original 1964 Mustang. This two-door saloon was an adventurous departure, not only for Ford but for the whole car industry.

Until the Mustang came along, every car had a specific engine and a specific level of luxury. There was no choice. But with the ‘pony car’, as it became known, customers could choose what motor they wanted and even what body style — two-door saloon or convertible.

And there was an options list. You could go for bucket seats, for instance, or a limited slip differential or a rev counter. It could be a 6-cylinder shopping car or a V8 wind-in-the-hair tyre-shredder.

Ford guessed they were on to something with this new idea and reckoned they’d sell 100,000 Mustangs in the first twelve months. In fact, they sold 680,000 making it the fastest-selling car of all time — a record that’s never been beaten.

But today, the only records being made are crime statistics.

So what went wrong? Well, most importantly, there was the oil crisis which made people slightly less willing to run a V8 with its Oliver-Reedesque thirst. They wanted smaller engines and turned their attention to the newfangled Japanese offerings.

And hey, these cars never broke down, so even when the oil problem went away many stuck with Honda and Datsun and Toyota.

Then there was assembly-line automation, which was bad enough, but cheap land prices didn’t help either.

When the car company wanted to update a factory, it didn’t simply put in a robot here and a conveyor belt there. No, it shut up shop completely and built a new plant, usually out of town where land was cheaper.

Detroit might have been able to cope with all these things but unfortunately there was economic trouble in the South and thousands of black workers were heading to Detroit in a fruitless search for work. They’d heard about the promise of three bucks an hour but when they got there, the cupboard was bare.

Social unrest was inevitable. In 1967, the African-Americans took to the streets and had themselves the riot to end all riots.

Bob Seger, who at the time was an up-and-coming rock and roller from Detroit, remembers coming home from a gig one night to find tanks on the streets. ‘I just couldn’t believe it. This was Detroit and the whole place was on fire. There were police everywhere. They’d got the national guard out. It was like a war zone. It was worse than a war zone. It was hell.’

Shortly after, the White Flight began, as respectable middle-class white families packed up and moved to the suburbs, where half the factories had gone anyway.

In ten years, the population of Detroit halved from two million to one million. Even the Motown record label, which had made Detroit a world capital of music too with its wealth of black artists like Stevie Wonder, Martha Reeves, Diana Ross and the Temptations, moved to Los Angeles.

They weren’t ‘Dancing in the Streets’ any more. Madonna may have been born there but she left, too.

And that was it. Detroit became a wrecked shell whose population is still falling. There are no jobs downtown today and when Hudson’s, the big department store, closed down, most of the city-centre retailers followed suit and went under too.

It’s hard for a European to understand this because we have no equivalent, but there is a very real possibility that one day, Detroit will implode: that it will simply cease to exist.

Already, there are people in the suburbs who are proud to say they haven’t been downtown in twenty years. The nineteen-year-old doorman at our hotel in Dearborn admitted one night he’d never been there.

He simply couldn’t believe it when, every morning, we bundled our kit into the trucks and went off to the centre, even though it was only twelve miles away. He was even more amazed, though, when we actually came back each night.

He obviously had a word with the manager who, one day, advised us not to go down there any more. When he found that we had to and that we preferred to drive in on Michigan Avenue, rather than down the safer expressway, he rushed off to explain to the girls on the reception desk that our rooms might become available sooner than he’d thought.

Despite this attitude, the mayor, Dennis Archer, is ebullient, saying that Detroit was only murder capital of the world once and that no one will beat the city in making quality cars. ‘We’ll take on anyone, any time,’ he crows.

But he’s missing the point because none of the car firms is dependent on Detroit any more. GM has a factory in Mexico for chrissakes. Honda is in Marysville, Ohio. Toyota and BMW have factories in the USA too, but they’re not even in Michigan.

Sure, Ford, GM and Chrysler — the only remaining US car firms — still build cars on their home turf, but they’re in the leafy suburbs. And when I say leafy, I’m talking equatorial rainforest.

Should you ever need to go to Detroit, drive west from the city centre on Jefferson, past Belle Isle and make sure your windows are up. Crash the red lights too, because to stop here is to invite the unwelcome intrusion of a 9-mm slug.

And then, at one set of lights, you’ll notice that everything changes. On the east side, the shops are burned out and shabby. Black men shuffle around in the wreckage looking for anything that could be lunch — a bedspring or a butt end, perhaps.

On the other side of the lights, the fire hydrants are painted Dulux commercial white, the street lamps are mock Tudor and the houses are immaculate and huge. Every fourth car is a police cruiser and every third person is out jogging. Welcome to Grosse Point, a lakeside suburb where the big car-firm bosses live.

I hated it. This was like something out of The Stepford Wives and we’d only been there for five minutes when the cops arrived. They’d had a flood of calls about a group of guys in jeans. Jeans in Grosse Point. You’d get further in a G-string at Henley.

I swear that before we left we even saw someone cutting his lawn with a pair of nail scissors.

It’s not quite so bad on the other side of the city, north of Eight Mile Road which is the accepted barrier between rich and poor, black and white, civilisation and a Bronze Age war zone.

These are just like any American suburbs — until the Friday-night reminder that you’re in The Motor City. Or near it anyway.

There’s a pretty vibrant classic-car scene out there as car workers past and present feel the need to restore and pamper great cars from the days when their city was great too. They meet up at weekends with their customised, power-packed Chevvies and Fords and discuss each other’s sometimes spectacular beards over a Bud or two.

They even have their own radio station called Honey which is run from the back of a four-wheel-drive truck. It simply turns up at the meeting and plays a selection of good old rock and roll.

I’ll tell you this. Wandering around a car park full of hot Mustangs and lowered Vettes on a hot summer’s night with Bob Seger belting out of a couple of hundred car radios takes some beating.

What beat it was what happened when AJ’s Lounge and Eaterie closed. These guys didn’t simply get into their cars and go home. No, they got in, eased out onto the road alongside each other, waiting for the lights to go green and had a race.

All over suburban Detroit every summer weekend every straight bit of road echoes to the sound of supercharged V8s doing full-bore standing quarters.

Big money changes hands. Bets of up to a thousand dollars are not unknown as the cars line up… on the public roads.

You can barely see through the haze of tyre smoke as El Camino pickups roar off the line at full revs. Wilbur and Myrtle can only stare in open-mouthed wonderment as their puny little Honda finds itself sandwiched between a lime-green Dodge Charger and an egg-yellow Plymouth Super Bird.

This is as subtle as a Big Mac, as restrained as a can of Coke and as American as both. Big cars, big engines, big people and big beards, racing each other over a quarter of a mile straightaway.

These guys spit at Ferraris and laugh at Lotus Elans. They are not interested in a car’s ability to handle the bends on a switchback mountain pass. They don’t care about pinball-sharp steering or five-valve technology.

They’d drink a pint of warm beer before they’d own up to a fondness for European and Japanese engines that rev to 8000 rpm.

They like their V8s big and lazy and their rear tyres massive. American street racing is straight down the line and simple. It’s a national characteristic. The only thing in the world less complex than a blue-collar American is wood.

One guy watched a bright-blue Camaro launch itself off the line with its front tyres a foot in the air, then turned to me grinning and said, ‘Chevrolets and apple pie, baby, Chevrolets and apple pie.’

It didn’t make sense but I knew exactly what he meant. This was heartland America.

And the cops were not about to make waves, partly because they need the support of the white middle classes. A patrol car sat for an hour in a side street watching the action before moving in.

Over the car’s public address system he announced that the show was over and that ‘anyone on the street in ten minutes is going to jail’. It would have been terribly authoritarian and effective except for one thing. I could see through the tyre smoke and the flashing lights that the guy was grinning.

He knew that he was witnessing what the people of Detroit have been doing for 50 years.

In the sixties, manufacturers used to bring secret new cars down to these meets and race them against the home-tuned opposition. Many remember Ford rolling up one night in the early seventies with some kind of Mustang which blew everyone into the weeds. It became the Mach 1.

It’s stories like this which set Detroit apart. It doesn’t matter where you turn, there is always a reminder that you are in The Motor City.

There’s a comic book sold locally where all the heroes are cars. Take a stroll round the Detroit Institute of Arts which, amazingly, still exists downtown, and you’ll note that every single exhibit was paid for and is funded by the car industry.

The poets in Detroit write about cars and within a twenty-mile radius of the city-centre grand prix track there are five drag strips. Ben Hamper, a local boy and the funniest author I’ve ever read, is a former GM worker.

And downtown, there are the buildings, huge and solid monoliths whose foundations are set in V8 brawn. Pick any one of them and you’ll find it was built with car-industry money. They’re the American equivalent of Britain’s country houses, a solid and lingering reminder of a once-great past.

And an inspiration to strive for a better future. The American car industry has owned up to the fact that the Japanese were an invented enemy dreamed up to disguise its own shortcomings and has now stopped making awful cars.

Sure, there’s still the Buick Skylark and the Chevrolet Caprice, brontosaurial machines which handle like lawnmowers and have all the visual appeal of dog dirt. But at least they’re well made these days.

American cars, from the seventies especially, were not only hideous to behold but they were also prone to catastrophic bouts of unhelpfulness. It was not uncommon to find Coke cans rattling in the doors and a line worker’s tuna sandwiches under the seat.

And GM’s answer to poor morale was to introduce the Quality Cat, a man in a moggy outfit who bounded up and down the lines, inspiring a cynical workforce to greater things. Trouble is, most of them were asleep in boxes at the time, or down at the shop-rat’s bar.

Ben Hamper tells the story of new electronic boards which were erected throughout the factory. One day, the message read ‘Riveting is fun’, which made him ask the question, ‘Well hey, if it’s so good, how come all the management aren’t coming down here in their lunch breaks to have a go?’

Those days though are long gone and even the designers are back on form with cars like the Dodge Viper, the Lincoln Mark VIII and the Saturn range. They’re good-looking, inexpensive, reliable and advanced. The Cadillac STS only needs servicing every 100,000 miles and, thanks to sophisticated electronics, can cross a desert with no water in the radiator.

But if you want to spotlight one car which demonstrates Detroit’s new spirit, you should take a look at the Chrysler LHS.

It’s made by a company which, in the early eighties, was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy but which is now posting profits which some say are obscene.

Most American cars are too large, too thirsty and too ugly to have any appeal outside the States but the LHS is different. It looks wonderful, thanks to its cab-forward design whereby the engine is shoved right up to the front of the engine bay.

That lets you have a short bonnet which means more space for passengers and luggage. It’s also quiet, well-equipped and fast, despite the absence of a V8 motor. I’m almost embarrassed to say it but here we have a car which, by global standards, is right up there with the best.

It, along with the new Fords and GM cars, means that in the short term, at least, the big three American car manufacturers are safe. But what about their birth town? What about Detroit?

Well there are some chinks of light. Today, right in the city centre, there is one 300-yard stretch called Greektown where trendy restaurants abound and where you can walk on the pavement at night in relative safety. There are lots of beggars but they only let murderers in in packs of ten.

There is also the appropriately named Renaissance Center, which houses office blocks, a shopping mall and the world’s tallest hotel. You’re fairly safe in there too because armed guards outnumber visitors by 200 to 1.

And there’s the people mover — a monorail which tours the city. Now sure, it’s pretty pointless offering a public transport alternative in a city where the public don’t go and where, even if they did, they’d take a car, but never mind; someone had the confidence to build such a thing.

The trouble is, these are details. Building a shiny new monorail in Detroit is like cutting someone’s toenails when they have lung cancer. And Detroit, to pinch a line from Robocop, does have cancer.

It’s called crime.

The Mayor says Detroit will be the next great international city, and a great place to do business. Yes, and I’m a little teapot.

I’m so mad, in fact, that I always list Detroit as one of my five favourite cities in the world. It is as soulful as the music it once made and, as Gertrude Stein once said, ‘There is a there there’.