Two Detroits, Separate and Unequal

Two Detroits, Separate and Unequal
A Journey Across a City Divided
By Laura Gottesdiener
In late October, a few days after local news cameras swarmed Detroit’s courthouse to hear closing arguments in the city’s historic bankruptcy trial, “Commander” Dale Brown cruised through the stately Detroit neighborhood of Palmer Woods in a Hummer emblazoned with the silver, interlocking-crescent-moon logo of his private security company.
Brown rolled down the window to ask a middle-aged woman walking her dog whether everything was okay (it was), and whether she had seen anything out of the ordinary (she hadn’t). Satisfied, he continued on, guided by a futuristic tablet map of the neighborhood’s languid streets. These had become even more impenetrable last year when the bankrupt city paid for and constructed a series of traffic barriers on the community’s edges. On his right, he pointed out, was the Bishop’s Residence, a 30-room Tudor Revival castle originally commissioned by a family of fabulously wealthy automobile pioneers who later sold their company to General Motors.
“This is the part of Detroit that most people are not aware of,” Brown told filmmaker Messiah Rhodes and me. And indeed, the turreted https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7720353173141418796#editor/src=dashboard neighborhood did look far more like something you would find in Detroit’s mostly white suburbs than deep inside the city itself.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175923/tomgram%3A_laura_gottesdiener%2C_a_tale_of_two_cities%2C_post-bankruptcy/#more