Download or read book A 500 House in Detroit written by Drew Philp and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young college grad buys a house in Detroit for $500 and attempts to restore it—and his new neighborhood—to its original glory in this “deeply felt, sharply observed personal quest to create meaning and community out of the fallen…A standout” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, decides to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp buys a ramshackle house for five hundred dollars in the east side neighborhood known as Poletown. The roomy Queen Anne he now owns is little more than a clapboard shell on a crumbling brick foundation, missing windows, heat, water, electricity, and a functional roof. A $500 House in Detroit is Philp’s raw and earnest account of rebuilding everything but the frame of his house, nail by nail and room by room. “Philp is a great storyteller…[and his] engrossing” (Booklist) tale is also of a young man finding his footing in the city, the country, and his own generation. We witness his concept of Detroit shift, expand, and evolve as his plan to save the city gives way to a life forged from political meaning, personal connection, and collective purpose. As he assimilates into the community of Detroiters around him, Philp guides readers through the city’s vibrant history and engages in urgent conversations about gentrification, racial tensions, and class warfare. Part social history, part brash generational statement, part comeback story, A $500 House in Detroit “shines [in its depiction of] the ‘radical neighborliness’ of ordinary people in desperate circumstances” (Publishers Weekly). This is an unforgettable, intimate account of the tentative revival of an American city and a glimpse at a new way forward for generations to come.
Download or read book Canvas Detroit written by Julie Pincus and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It will be essential reading for anyone interested in arts and culture in the city.
Download or read book The World According to Fannie Davis written by Bridgett M. Davis and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As seen on the Today Show: This true story of an unforgettable mother, her devoted daughter, and their life in the Detroit numbers of the 1960s and 1970s highlights "the outstanding humanity of black America" (James McBride). In 1958, the very same year that an unknown songwriter named Berry Gordy borrowed $800 to found Motown Records, a pretty young mother from Nashville, Tennessee, borrowed $100 from her brother to run a numbers racket out of her home. That woman was Fannie Davis, Bridgett M. Davis's mother. Part bookie, part banker, mother, wife, and granddaughter of slaves, Fannie ran her numbers business for thirty-four years, doing what it took to survive in a legitimate business that just happened to be illegal. She created a loving, joyful home, sent her children to the best schools, bought them the best clothes, mothered them to the highest standard, and when the tragedy of urban life struck, soldiered on with her stated belief: "Dying is easy. Living takes guts." A daughter's moving homage to an extraordinary parent, The World According to Fannie Davis is also the suspenseful, unforgettable story about the lengths to which a mother will go to "make a way out of no way" and provide a prosperous life for her family -- and how those sacrifices resonate over time.
Download or read book The Elusive Purple Gang written by Gregory A. Fournier and published by Wheatmark, Inc.. This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Elusive Purple Gang: Detroit's Kosher Nostra is a concise history of one of America's most notorious Prohibition gangs. The Burnstein brothers and their associates were the only Jewish gang in the United States to dominate the rackets of a major American city. From their meteoric rise to the top of Detroit's underworld to their ultimate demise, this is an episodic account of the Purple Gang's corrosive pursuit of power and wealth and their inevitable plunge towards self-destruction.
Download or read book Arc of Justice written by Kevin Boyle and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and homes. And so it began-a chain of events that brought America's greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweet's murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet family's journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Ossian Sweet's story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his era's changing times.
Download or read book 500 Small Houses of the Twenties written by Henry Atterbury Smith and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 1990-05-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perspective drawings, floor plans, and descriptions of principal features of outstanding '20s designs, many by leading architects of the period. 1,135 black-and-white line illustrations, 262 black-and-white photographs and tone drawings.
Download or read book Building the Modern World written by Michael H. Hodges and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-16 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A photographically rich biography of protean architect Albert Kahn. Building the Modern World: Albert Kahn in Detroit by Michael H. Hodges tells the story of the German-Jewish immigrant who rose from poverty to become one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. Kahn’s buildings not only define downtown Detroit, but his early car factories for Packard Motor and Ford revolutionized the course of industry and architecture alike. Employing archival sources unavailable to previous biographers, Building the Modern World follows Kahn from his apprenticeship at age thirteen with a prominent Detroit architecture firm to his death. With material gleaned from two significant Kahn archives—the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library and the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution—Hodges paints the most complete picture yet of Kahn’s remarkable rise. Special emphasis is devoted to his influence on architectural modernists, his relationship with Henry Ford, his intervention to save the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts (unreported until now), and his work laying down the industrial backbone for the Soviet Union in 1929–31 as consulting architect for the first Five Year Plan. Kahn’s ascent from poverty, his outsized influence on both industry and architecture, and his proximity to epochal world events make his life story a tableau of America’s rise to power. Historic photographs as well as striking contemporary shots of Kahn buildings enliven and inform the text. Anyone interested in architecture, architectural history, or the history of Detroit will relish this stunning work.
Download or read book Flower House Detroit written by Heather Saunders and published by . This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A House on Fire written by John A. Jackson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If You Don't Know Me By Now," "The Love I Lost," "The Soul Train Theme," "Then Came You," "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now"--the distinctive music that became known as Philly Soul dominated the pop music charts in the 1970s. In A House on Fire, John A. Jackson takes us inside the musical empire created by Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Thom Bell, the three men who put Philadelphia Soul on the map. Here is the eye-opening story of three of the most influential and successful music producers of the seventies. Jackson shows how Gamble, Huff, and Bell developed a black recording empire second only to Berry Gordy's Motown, pumping out a string of chart-toppers from Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, the Spinners, the O'Jays, the Stylistics, and many others. The author underscores the endemic racism of the music business at that time, revealing how the three men were blocked from the major record companies and outlets in Philadelphia because they were black, forcing them to create their own label, sign their own artists, and create their own sound. The sound they created--a sophisticated and glossy form of rhythm and blues, characterized by crisp, melodious harmonies backed by lush, string-laden orchestration and a hard-driving rhythm section--was a glorious success, producing at least twenty-eight gold or platinum albums and thirty-one gold or platinum singles. But after their meteoric rise and years of unstoppable success, their production company finally failed, brought down by payola, competition, a tough economy, and changing popular tastes. Funky, groovy, soulful--Philly Soul was the classic seventies sound. A House on Fire tells the inside story of this remarkable musical phenomenon.
Download or read book Shmulik Paints the Town written by Lisa Rose and published by Kar-Ben Publishing ™. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Israeli Independence Day is coming up and the mayor is planning a celebration. He asks Shmulik to make a mural in the park, and Shmulik agrees. But he can't decide what to paint! Maybe his dog, Ezra, can help!
Download or read book Heaven was Detroit written by M. L. Liebler and published by Painted Turtle. This book was released on 2016 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heaven Was Detroit is a comprehensive collection of essays on the long history of Detroit music by some of America's best-known music writers.
Download or read book The Last Days of Detroit written by Mark Binelli and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * It was 'the most modern city in the world, the city of tomorrow'. But the Fifties witnessed one of the greatest economic slides of the last century, as Detroit, formerly a beacon of the capitalist dream, degenerated into the urban wilderness it is today, where trees grow from the rooftops of derelict buildings and wild pheasants roam the long-empty parking lots. * By the end of the nineteenth century Detroit was thriving. 1913 saw the arrival of Henry Ford and the Model T plant, mass-producing cars and transforming the area into the Silicon Valley of its day. By the mid-1950s General Motors had become the single biggest employer on earth, and Detroit the fourth largest city in America. * But by the time Berry Gordy founded Motown Records in 1960 - creating Detroit's other great assembly line - the cracks were already beginning to show- big industry was looking elsewhere for cheaper sites, cheaper labour and better tax breaks; urban planning was in meltdown; corruption was rife; racial tensions were running high. * The 1967 riots - at the time the worst in US history - left 43 dead, more than 7,000 arrested and 3,000 buildings destroyed. Detroit, a former beacon of the capitalist dream, had degenerated into an urban wilderness where unemployment ran at 50%. With more guns in the city than people, the murder rate was the highest in America - three times that of New York. * Mark Binelli returned to live in his native Detroit after a break of many years. He tells the story of the boom and the bust - and of the new society to be found emerging from the debris- Detroit with its urban farms and vibrant arts scene - Detroit as a laboratory for the post-industrial, post-recession world. Here's what an iconic rust-belt city now looks like and how it might transform and regenerate itself in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Detroit Hustle written by Amy Haimerl and published by Running Press Adult. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journalist Amy Haimerl and her husband had been priced out of their Brooklyn neighborhood. Seeing this as a great opportunity to start over again, they decide to cash in their savings and buy an abandoned house for 35,000 in Detroit, the largest city in the United States to declare bankruptcy. As she and her husband restore the 1914 Georgian Revival, a stately brick house with no plumbing, no heat, and no electricity, Amy finds a community of Detroiters who, like herself, aren't afraid of a little hard work or things that are a little rough around the edges. Filled with amusing and touching anecdotes about navigating a real-estate market that is rife with scams, finding a contractor who is a lover of C.S. Lewis and willing to quote him liberally, and neighbors who either get teary-eyed at the sight of newcomers or urge Amy and her husband to get out while they can, Amy writes evocatively about the charms and challenges of finding her footing in a city whose future is in question. Detroit Hustle is a memoir that is both a meditation on what it takes to make a house a home, and a love letter to a much-derided city.
Download or read book The Empty House Next Door written by Alan Mallach and published by . This book was released on 2018-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned city planner and housing advocate Alan Mallach presents effective strategies for community leaders, local officials, and nonprofits contending with vacant properties in the United States. Examples illustrate creative ways to reduce the harm caused by vacant properties, jump-start housing markets in struggling neighborhoods, create the potential for future revival, and transform vacant properties into community assets.
Download or read book Electronic Landscapes written by and published by . This book was released on 2021-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Electronic Landscapes: Music, Space and Resistance in Detroit (EL) celebrates Detroit's techno, house and hip-hop musicians who construct home studios, renovate buildings and sustain community despite increasing pressure from land development and speculation. It sheds a fresh light on the city's cultural significance and further contextualizes its current resurgence. Readers are invited to glimpse rarely seen aspects of Detroit's electronic music culture, and to reflect on historic and contemporary places in Detroit's landscape related to it. Featured musicians discuss their process and the significant link between race, space and cultural production, a theme expanded upon in critical texts by scholars Dora Apel and Carla Vecchiola, and internationally renowned DJ, John Collins.
Download or read book House of Horrors written by Robert Sberna and published by Kent State University Press / Black Squirrel Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Oct. 29, 2009, a SWAT team entered Sowell's house to arrest him on a sex charge, and found the bodies of ten women scattered throughout the house and buried in the back yard. Sowell lured his victims with promises of drugs and alcohol, then raped, tortured and strangled them ... and lived among their rotting corpses. Five other women were attacked by Sowell, but lived to tell their stories.--Publisher.
Download or read book Detroit written by Dave Jordano and published by powerHouse Books. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dave Jordano returned to his hometown of Detroit to document the people who still live in what has become one of the country's most economically challenging cities. Against a backdrop of mass abandonment through years of white flight, unemployment hovering at almost three times the national average, city services cut to the bone, a real estate collapse of massive proportions, and ultimately filing the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, Jordano searches for the hope and perseverance of those who have had to endure the hardship of living in a post-industrial city that has fallen on the hardest of times. From the lower Southeast Side where urban renewal and government programs slowly became the benchmark of civic failure, to the dwindling enclaves of neighborhoods like Delray and Poletown (onceblue-collar neighborhoods that have all but vanished),Jordano seeks to dispel the popular myth perpetrated through the media that Detroit is an empty wasteland devoid of people. He encounters resolute individuals determined to make this city a place to live,from a homeless man who decided to build his own one-room structure on an abandoned industrial lot because he was tired of sleeping on public benches, to a group of squatters who repurposed long-abandoned houses on a street called Goldengate. Jordano discovers and rebroadcastsa message of hope and endurance to an otherwise greatly misunderstood and misrepresented city.Detroit: Unbroken Downis not a document solely about what's been destroyed, but even more critically, about all that has been left behind and those who remain to cope with it.
