Download or read book Living Detroit written by Brandon M. Ward and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-03 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Living Detroit, Brandon M. Ward argues that environmentalism in postwar Detroit responded to anxieties over the urban crisis, deindustrialization, and the fate of the city. Tying the diverse stories of environmental activism and politics together is the shared assumption environmental activism could improve their quality of life. Detroit, Michigan, was once the capital of industrial prosperity and the beacon of the American Dream. It has since endured decades of deindustrialization, population loss, and physical decay – in short, it has become the poster child for the urban crisis. This is not a place in which one would expect to discover a history of vibrant expressions of environmentalism; however, in the post-World War II era, while suburban, middle-class homeowners organized into a potent force to protect the natural settings of their communities, in the working-class industrial cities and in the inner city, Detroiters were equally driven by the impulse to conserve their neighborhoods and create a more livable city, pushing back against the forces of deindustrialization and urban crisis. Living Detroit juxtaposes two vibrant and growing fields of American history which often talk past each other: environmentalism and the urban crisis. By putting the two subjects into conversation, we gain a richer understanding of the development of environmental activism and politics after World War II and its relationship to the crisis of America’s cities. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in environmental, urban, and labor history.

Download or read book How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass written by Aaron Foley and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one of Curbed: Detroit’s Top 11 Books about Detroit, Aaron Foley, editor of The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook, offers the definitive inside look at one of America’s most talked-about and least understood cities. With a wry sense of humor, Foley, a native Detroiter, walks you through the most difficult questions about the Motor City, offering seven simple rules for making it there. Perfect for coastal transplants, wary suburbanites, unwitting gentrifiers, or start-up disruptors, this recently updated guidebook offers advice on everything from the glories of Vernors ginger ale to how to rehab a house to how to not sound like an uninformed racist. In twenty short chapters, Foley walks you through: How Detroiters do business The unofficial guide to enjoying Faygo How to be gay in Detroit How to raise a Detroit kid How to party in Detroit. Both hilarious and insightful, this no-frills look at Motown is written for those who live there but also, as Vanity Fair put it, “for anyone participating in contemporary global urbanization who would like to avoid behaving like a subjugating dick.”

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 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 312 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 Life with Mae written by Neal Shine and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Life with Mae, the late Neal Shine combines an engaging memoir of his family life in prewar Detroit with a biography of his mother, Mae, whose vibrant spirit and fierce affection left an indelible mark on her three sons and their friends and neighbors. Mae was born in 1909 in the small town of Carrick-on-Shannon, Ireland, where her father ran the depot that distributed Guiness Stout. Going into service as a housekeeper at fourteen, Mae quickly saw that the only future she had in Ireland was as a servant. By the time she was eighteen, she had saved enough money from her housekeeping job for a one-way ticket to the United States, where she eventually settled in Detroit. Shine, longtime editor and former publisher of the Detroit Free Press, tells his story in a series of entertaining interconnected vignettes, reflecting on his mother, his family life in Detroit, and later his journey to visit family in Ireland. Whether recounting Mae's feud with a local tavern owner, her distrust of the food sold by local grocers, or her standoff with a department store deliveryman who had come to repossess their furniture, Shine lovingly conveys his mother's fierce protective streak, her effervescent personality, and her outspoken identification with the poor. For fans of Shine's insightful and humorous storytelling, as well as fellow Detroiters and readers with Irish roots, Life with Mae will be an entertaining and satisfying read.

Download or read book Working Detroit written by Steve Babson and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Babson recounts Detroit's odyssey from a bulwark of the "open shop" to the nation's foremost "union town." Through words and pictures, Working Detroit documents the events in the city's ongoing struggle to build an industrial society that is both prosperous and humane. Babson begins his account in 1848 when Detroit has just entered the industrial era. He weaves the broader historical realties, such as Red Scare, World War, and economic depression into his account, tracing the ebb and flow of the working class activity and organization in Detroit -- from the rise of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor in the 19th century, through the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the sitdown strike of the 1930s, to the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The book concludes with an examination of the present day crisis facing the labor movement.

Download or read book Living Arts Detroit Wolf Trap written by Roberta Lucas and published by Front Edge Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is full of true stories about performing artists at Living Arts, a small nonprofit in Detroit, Michigan, who formed a national affiliate of the Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning through the Arts. That’s the early childhood outreach of the Wolf Trap Foundation, which is part of the world-renowned Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. In Detroit, this team of artists—dancers, actors, musicians, storytellers, puppeteers and more—developed training experiences with Wolf Trap’s guidance. Now, these teaching artists are bringing lessons to children aged 3 months to 5 years, many of them in low-income neighborhoods with few other opportunities to experience the arts. The Wolf Trap teaching artists also are training classroom teachers and opening doors for family involvement workshops as well. The stories in this book capture the excitement of those interactions. As you will learn in these pages, research is stacking up to demonstrate the dramatic contribution arts education can make in early childhood development—as well as specific skills in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) subjects. In these pages, you will meet all 12 of the 2016 teaching artists at Living Arts’ Detroit Wolf Trap affiliate. Each tells an inspiring—and often surprising—story about interactions with children and adults. By the end of the book, readers will have learned lots of creative ideas from these professionals. Readers also are left with further opportunities. The book includes videos of the artists at work, tips for establishing or expanding your own nonprofit and ways to connect with this Wolf Trap program. The book is intended for individual reading or group discussion with friends, parents, educators and community leaders anywhere across the U.S.

Download or read book Detroit City Is the Place to Be written by Mark Binelli and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The fall and maybe rise of Detroit, America's most epic urban failure, from local native and Rolling Stone reporter Mark BinelliOnce America's capitalist dream town, Detroit is our country's greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the city's worst crisis yet (and that's saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neo-pastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalists--all have been drawn to Detroit's baroquely decaying, nothing-left-to-lose frontier. With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new, Detroit-area native and Rolling Stone writer Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence. Throughout the city's "museum of neglect"--its swaths of abandoned buildings, its miles of urban prairie--he tracks the signs of blight repurposed, from the school for pregnant teenagers to the killer ex-con turned street patroller, from the organic farming on empty lots to GM's wager on the Volt electric car and the mayor's realignment plan (the most ambitious on record) to move residents of half-empty neighborhoods into a viable, new urban center.Sharp and impassioned, Detroit City Is the Place to Be is alive with the sense of possibility that comes when a city hits rock bottom. Beyond the usual portrait of crime, poverty, and ruin, we glimpse a future Detroit that is smaller, less segregated, greener, economically diverse, and better functioning--what might just be the first post-industrial city of our new century"--

Download or read book Detroit Is No Dry Bones written by Camilo J. Vergara and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-11-16 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A photographic record of almost three decades of Detroit's changing urban fabric

Download or read book Canvas Detroit written by Julie Pincus and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detroit’s unique and partly abandoned cityscape has scarred its image around the world for decades. But in the last several years journalists have begun to view the city through a different lens, focusing on the wide range of contemporary artists finding inspiration amid the emptiness and adding a more complex chapter to the story of a city long labeled as a haunting symbol of U.S. economic decline. In Canvas Detroit, Julie Pincus and Nichole Christian combine vibrant full-color photography of the city’s much-buzzed-about art scene with thoughtful narrative that explores the art and artists that are re-creating Detroit. Canvas Detroit captures hundreds of pieces of artwork in many forms—including large-scale and small-scale murals, sculptures, portraits, light projections, wearable art, and installations (made with wood, glass, living plants, fiber, and fabric). Works are situated in both obvious and more hidden spaces, including on and in houses, garages, factories, alleyways, doors, and walls, while some structures have been entirely transformed into art. Pincus and Christian profile internationally known figures like Banksy, Matthew Barney, and Tyree Guyton; prominent Detroit artists such as Scott Hocking, Jerome Ferretti, and Robert Sestock; and collectives like Power House Productions, Hygenic Dress League, the Empowerment Plan, and Theatre Bizarre. Canvas Detroit also features contributions by Marion Jackson, John Gallagher, Michael H. Hodges, Rebecca R. Hart, and Linda Yablonsky that contextualize the current artistic moment in the city. This beautifully designed and informative volume showcases the stunning breadth and depth of artwork currently being done in Detroit. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in arts and culture in the city.

Download or read book The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit written by Andrew Herscher and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2012-11-14 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intense attention has been paid to Detroit as a site of urban crisis. This crisis, however, has not only yielded the massive devaluation of real estate that has so often been noted; it has also yielded an explosive production of seemingly valueless urban property that has facilitated the imagination and practice of alternative urbanisms. The first sustained study of Detroit’s alternative urban cultures, The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit initiates a new focus on Detroit as a site not only of urban crisis but also of urban possibility. The Guide documents art and curatorial practices, community and guerilla gardens, urban farming and forestry, cultural platforms, living archives, evangelical missions, temporary public spaces, intentional communities, furtive monuments, outsider architecture, and other work made possible by the ready availability of urban space in Detroit. The Guide poses these spaces as “unreal estate”: urban territory that has slipped through the free- market economy and entered other regimes of value, other contexts of meaning, and other systems of use. The appropriation of this territory in Detroit, the Guide suggests, offers new perspectives on what a city is and can be, especially in a time of urban crisis.

Download or read book Detroit written by Charlie LeDuff and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An explosive exposé of America’s lost prosperity by Pulitzer Prize­–winning journalist Charlie LeDuff “One cannot read Mr. LeDuff's amalgam of memoir and reportage and not be shaken by the cold eye he casts on hard truths . . . A little gonzo, a little gumshoe, some gawker, some good-Samaritan—it is hard to ignore reporting like Mr. LeDuff's.” —The Wall Street Journal “Pultizer-Prize-winning journalist LeDuff . . . writes with honesty and compassion about a city that’s destroying itself–and breaking his heart.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A book full of both literary grace and hard-won world-weariness.” —Kirkus Back in his broken hometown, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff searches the ruins of Detroit for clues to his family’s troubled past. Having led us on the way up, Detroit now seems to be leading us on the way down. Once the richest city in America, Detroit is now the nation’s poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age—mass-production, blue-collar jobs, and automobiles—Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, dropouts, and foreclosures. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark, and the righteous indignation only a native son possesses, LeDuff sets out to uncover what destroyed his city. He beats on the doors of union bosses and homeless squatters, powerful businessmen and struggling homeowners and the ordinary people holding the city together by sheer determination. Detroit: An American Autopsy is an unbelievable story of a hard town in a rough time filled with some of the strangest and strongest people our country has to offer.

Download or read book My Detroit Growing Up Greek and American in Motor City written by Dan Georgakas and published by Smyrna Press. This book was released on 2019-03-31 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Detroit is a unique blend of traditional ethnic memoir and a historian's account of the decline and fall of America's most populous industrial city. The interaction of American culture and ethnic consciousness is evident on almost every page. Archbishop Iakovos marches with Martin Luther King, Maria Callas becomes as famous as Marilyn Monroe. Greek diners become neighborhood hangouts. The reader is taken in ever widening circles from the particulars of Greek American culture to the core of an embattled Motor City awash in racism and corruption.

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 246 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 Detroit a City of Today written by and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Made in Detroit written by Paul Clemens and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2006-10-10 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable BookA powerfully candid memoir about growing up white in Detroit and the conflicted point of view it produced. Raised in Detroit during the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, Paul Clemens saw his family growing steadily isolated from its surroundings: white in a predominately black city, Catholic in an area where churches were closing at a rapid rate, and blue-collar in a steadily declining Rust Belt. As the city continued to collapse—from depopulation, indifference, and the racial antagonism between blacks and whites—Clemens turned to writing and literature as his lifeline, his way of dealing with his contempt for suburban escapees and his frustration with the city proper. Sparing no one—particularly not himself—this is an astonishing examination of race and class relations from a fresh perspective, one forged in a city both desperate and hopeful.

Download or read book Italians in Detroit written by Armando Delicato and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2005-10-26 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People of Italian descent have been present in Detroit since Alfonso Tonti, second-in-command to Antoine Cadillac, participated in the founding of the city in 1701. By the close of the 19th century, the trickle of Italian immigrants had become a torrent, as thousands rushed to the growing industrial center. Settling on the lower east side, the community grew rapidly, especially north and east into Macomb County. Italians in Detroit did not remain in a “little Italy,” but mingled with the diverse population of the city. Through a combination of hard work and strong family and community ties, the Italians of Detroit have achieved their dreams of a better life. They have met the challenges of living in a new land while nurturing the culture of the old country. The challenge that remains is to nurture a love of heritage among young Italian Americans as the immigrant generation fades.