“Detroit: Then and Now”, by Cheri Y. Gay

 

144 pages, Thunder Bay Press, ISBN-13: 978-1571456892

Detroit is on the rebound. Again. No, really; select sections of the Motor City are in the midst of a comeback, and downtown hasn’t looked this good since Gordie Howe was throwing down or the Four Tops were putting on their show. In Detroit: Then and Now by Cheri Y. Gay, the photoarchivist of the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library, has gathered together a series of photographs that show just how Motown has changed between…then and now. Then, Detroit was America’s fourth-largest city with 1.8 million people, and the Big Three – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – were humming along and offered a myriad of job opportunities for any willing to work and earn.

But now? Times have changed, and the effects of the collapse of the auto industry, the rise of the global marketplace and the disintegration of the nuclear family have left Detroit a shell of its former self. Several former factories are now nothing more than vandalized monuments to deindustrialization. From its peak population in the 1950s, the city now has fewer than seven hundred thousand residents, with city services that often don’t function and, since July 18^th, 2013, struggling under Chapter 9 bankruptcy. The so-called comeback has affected many of the popular, visual places that people frequent, but as any activist will tell you, the residents of Detroit have seen little to celebrate in their neighborhoods.

To witness this slow decay in person was hard, but to watch it all over again in Detroit: Then and Now brings the fall of this Great American City once again to the fore. Over a hundred years ago the first Model T put the world on wheels from the bustling Ford Piquette Avenue Plant. Today, visitors may stroll the aged wooden planks of the former factory floor, snapping photos of antique cars; the place that was once a symbol of American modernization now functions as a museum and a love letter to Detroit’s industrial past. The Motor City, the eponymous home of Motown Records, has been inextricably linked to the auto-manufacturing industry ever since Henry Ford débuted those cars at his factory, and one can only hope that this rebirth is for real. This time.