On the 29th, I went on a bus tour of Detroit.
I have lived in Ann Arbor for a long time, but I have spent very little time in Detroit (which is about an hour east of Ann Arbor). Poor Detroit has suffered terribly from about every ill a city can face. Not hurricanes, or other extreme weather, I guess, but about everything else. Way too much dependence on the automobile, both for employment and for transportation. Racial tension. White flight. Other things I don't know about.
It has always seemed to me that everything must have come together in a "perfect storm" of harm for Detroit, whose population is now about a quarter of what it was at its height several decades ago.....
The tour was organized by people at work, for the benefit of summer interns. The rest of us were allowed to fill up the bus.
Our tour guide was University professor Ren Farley, whose focus has always been on race relations and urban studies. He has been interested in Detroit's plight, and in its strengths, for decades. He is interested, and engaged, and is a big Detroit booster.
It was a very interesting and informative tour. (He gave us each a 34-page handout, with color pics and urls!)
We boarded our very nice tour bus right outside my office building, and headed for the River Rouge plant. I knew that iron ore used to get turned into cars there, but I'd thought it was closed. Not so. Steel is still made, and Ford F-150 trucks ("the most popular vehicle line in the USA") are still made at River Rouge.
It is a HUGE complex. We drove around the outside of the complex in our bus.
The circle says Continuous Improvements to Environment.
Brand new trucks, loaded on railroad cars, ready to head out to their new owners.
Not nearly as "surface-of-the-moon" desolate, around the complex, as I guess I expected.
Heat waves shimmied up these chimneys.
One theme of the tour was the importance of Detroit as a center for the growth of labor unions, and as an example of a place where blue-collar workers made good money and had good benefits (largely, if not entirely, because of the unions) for many decades.
All of this was Very Big. I tried to imagine a tiny me, going in there to go to work, and pretty much failed. I bet it's hard and stressful work, in a not-that-healthy environment.
Note piles of ... stuff. I'm pretty sure the black one is coal, but am not sure what the grey or tan ones are. They look new; I bet they are part of current production needs.
(Note also drips on bus window, and inevitable glare/reflections. The great majority of the pics I took on this tour were taken from a moving bus......)
Near the River Rouge complex is a refinery. Over a billion dollars are being invested here. Oil from tar sands in Alberta will be refined here (Alberta is not close to Michigan. I wonder what path the oil will take to get to Detroit....). When the refinery is in production, a huge amount of "vehicle fuel" (diesel? gasoline?) will be made here.
A corollary of the "union" theme of the day was that modern industry is vastly more mechanized than in decades past. Once this refinery is finished, it will need only 135 people to run it. Over a billion dollars in investment, creating very few jobs.
It clearly takes an enormous amount of power to run a refinery. Wondering about the cost of the energy required for making gasoline....
This is a closeup of the lower left corner of the above.
I was struck by the vast size of ... whatever this is. It looks like something that might have been ... inside a telephone? ... years ago. The same sorts of connectors at the ends of wires....... But this is HUGE. Those things that look threaded are well over a yard long.
Factory. Empty space. Trash. Green stuff, growing regardless.
The Detroit waste-water treatment plant is the largest single-site water-treatment plant in the US.
This former church is on the grounds of the water-treatment plant. As you would guess, dozens of churches have been closed, as the population of Detroit has shrunk over the years.
Zug Island. With gull, on pilings. Framed by bus window.
Wires and more wires.
Fort Wayne barracks. This is one end of the barracks, which are only one part of a large complex (the WikiPedia page shows a front view of the barracks).
I tend to think that, once things are "fixed", they'll stay fixed. Like -- the Revolutionary war separated us from England, and that was that, no? No. People were still concerned about the British trying to take us back, for a good long time. Hence the building of this fort, to defend Detroit from an invasion by the British from Canada.
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