Ologies with Alie Ward - Detroitology (DETROIT) with Aaron Foley

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

Why an episode on Detroit?! It’s got a great story. Standalone, this episode is a fascinating look at a metropolis that swelled and thrived during the auto boom, then declined, and is navigating a rocky rebirth of sorts. Aaron Foley was Detroit’s first official City Storyteller and wrote the book “How to Live In Detroit Without Being a Jackass.” I’ve wanted to have him on Ologies for five years, and we finally sat down to talk about MoTown, car culture, square pizza, $1000 houses, gentrification, urban infrastructure, underground salt mines, amusement park slides, Diana Ross, emerging rappers, and the city’s abandonment issues. Stay tuned for the March 21 Domicology episode on how buildings and neighborhoods decay, and what people – and science – can to do about it. Also, if you’re looking for a book to read, I’m loving Aaron’s debut novel, “Boys Come First,” which he describes as “very Black, very gay, and very Detroit.” Visit Aaron Foley’s website and follow him on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok  Buy Aaron’s debut novel: Boys Come FirstBuy Aaron’s non-fiction books: The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook and How to Live in Detroit Without Being a JackassA donation went to the Detroit Justice CenterMore episode sources and linksOther episodes you may enjoy: Domicology (ABANDONED BUILDINGS — out March 21, 2023), Mythology (STORYTELLING), Genealogy (FAMILY TREES), Maritime Archaeology (SHIPWRECKS), Classical Archaeology (ANCIENT ROME),  Metropolitan Tombology (PARIS CATACOMBS), Deltiology (POSTCARDS), Ferroequinology (TRAINS),  Nomology (THE CONSTITUTION), Urban Rodentology (SEWER RATS), Meteorology (WEATHER & CLIMATE), Melaninology (SKIN/HAIR PIGMENT), Futurology (THE FUTURE)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's the guy on your street with the giant dog and no, he does not put a saddle on it. Don't ask him. Allie Ward, back with a little bit of an offbeat episode for you. It's on a topic you probably thought we would never cover, Detroit, an American industrial city. Allie, why isn't this an episode about prairie dogs or something? Because this is allergies, we can cover it over one as long as it's an allergy.

So this week is March 13th or 313, which is the area code for Detroit. And thus, it is the officially celebrated 313 Day in Detroit. And I've been to Detroit countless times. I shoot the TV shows Innovation Nation and Dimension Invention at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. That's in Dearborn. And our family grew up listening to my mom's Motown records from the jukebox. I have thrown the first pitch at a Tiger's baseball game and I did a very bad job.

I practiced for weeks and I absolutely embarrassed everyone who's ever met me. I have seen Detroit in all seasons over so many decades in the history and it's present really fascinates me, but I have never lived there. So this episode is a standalone episode, but it's also kind of like a context bomb for an episode that's coming up in two weeks. And I'm not going to tell you what, no spoilers, but in the 2018 mythology episode, we talked about this guest. Allie, I take telling stories super serious.

I know, I love it. I do. I think it's a big responsibility. I feel like it's a calling. I feel like Detroit in the fall of last year, just appointed first city in the U.S. appointed a chief storyteller and it's this guy in Detroit, an African-American guy that's a brilliant journalist and writer and storyteller. And he has taken on the task of trying to change the narrative about Detroit.

Oh my God, I love this so much. I don't. My sister lived in Detroit for a decade, so I've always had a soft spot for Detroit history and the city's chief storyteller is Aaron Foley. He's an author in his 30s and he hates the word gritty, like your sister-in-law hates moist. He says, quote, by forever branding Detroiters as gritty, we're put in the position of being pitied over, bleeding hearts all over the place suddenly feel the plight of Detroiters,

which is a good point. Aaron Foley wrote a book called How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass, which let's be honest, was written for chicks like me because I'm like a jackass and I have dreams of living in an old Detroit Victorian. So a point taken. Also this book bears this gold and green cover script that it takes you like half a second before you realize it's an homage to Werner Soda. This book is very much on my reading list now, so thank you, Aaron.

If there's an ology about Detroit, can we please talk about it? And that was five years ago. So pandemic started, time went by, and I finally caught up with a storyteller who is now a senior editor at PBS NewsHour and a John S. Knight journalism fellow, also a novelist of the excellent book Boys Come First, which is somehow hilarious and heartbreaking and so human and so good. And if you're not into fiction, you can enjoy this guest's other books, such as The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook and, again, How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass.

He also knows how not to live in Detroit without being a jackass, and we'll get to his recent relocation in the episode. But first, thank you patrons at patreon.com slash ologies for supporting the show and sending in great questions for this. Thank you to everyone who passes episodes along to others and everyone subscribed and rated and all the people who leave reviews, I read them all, including this week one from MS. Passell who wrote that they appreciate the show's enthusiasm for all this cool stuff and how

we interview experts and truly real and fascinating people and not random celebrities. Thank you very much from this random not celebrity. And real quick, is Detroit ology a real word? It is. So Detroit, first off, it's a French word for straight as in the straight of Lake Erie. Kind of boring anemology there. But one town historian by the name of Anna Cohn who runs a justice-oriented nonprofit in the city coined the term while getting her degree in Detroit sociology years back.

So the word exists and Detroitologists exist. So get ready for my long-term ology streams to come true as this charming and affable and celebrated public figure teaches us so much about Midwestern invention, urban transportation systems, giant slides, Coney Dogs, gentrification, abandoned houses, free branded neighborhoods, square pizza, house prices, the font of the D, the bell of the aisles, the historical Motown and the new crop of rappers. And of course, the giant slide with journalist, novelist, Detroit's first ever official storyteller and thus Detroitologist, Aaron Foley.

Aaron Foley pronouns he-him. I have known about you for years. I think I DMed you like two or three years ago. I think it was before the pandemic because you've been on my list for so long to talk to you. And I always thought I would catch up with you in Detroit. We're not in Detroit. We're in Brooklyn.

We are in Bed-Stuy. Bed-Stuy do or die. How long have you lived here? Just a little over two years. Will you forever be Detroit's storyteller or was that a gig that was like it ended at a certain time? So the job title was Detroit Storyteller. I held that for two and a half years, but I'll always be a Detroit storyteller.

Like I can live on Mars and talk to the person about Detroit. Was the pandemic part of the reason why you moved? Partly, yeah. I had a job opportunity here and it became clear a lot of things would be remote. And so I had a very narrow window where like my family was doing well and things kind of lined up for me personally to be like, let me see what a life is like outside of Detroit. Is this the first time you've lived outside of Michigan? Unless you count like an internship in college, yes.

Really? Yeah. How has it been the last two years? It's been weird just because I know Detroit like the back of my hand. I don't need maps or anything. I know like my favorite restaurants and things like that. Here in New York, it takes a while to kind of get into the groove and then there's so much to discover.

And I do kind of feel like not at home sometimes because I don't know like, you know, everything. So there's no place like home and by home, I mean Detroit. How does someone become a city storyteller? I to this day still don't even know how I ended up with that job. It was definitely something that was needed because Detroit has always sort of struggled with outside perception and it really needed a hometown advocate. And fortunately, there are several now, I'm not the only one, but it needs kind of that hometown voice to convey to the outsiders like, hey, this is what we're about.

This is what we have to offer. What part of Detroit are you from? I grew up on the West Side. That's what I claim. I spent some time on the East Side as a kid near Lafayette Park, but I matriculated and came of age in Russell Woods and that's Dexter and Davidson for people who are looking on a map. I was living in Rivertown, Gold Coast, the area along East Jefferson near Belle Isle.

So Belle Isle, side note, is a 982-acre park on an island in the Detroit River. And it's not always been called Belle Isle. It was also once called Hog Island because it was overrun with hogs, but now it's beautiful and it's been a gathering place for locals for years from picnics to car clubs and cruising. They've had concerts, they've had lovins there, military training, and also the start of a brutal race riot in 1943 that killed over 30 people. So Detroit's history is a very American one for good and bad. And as a Detroit storyteller, what were those first meetings like?

What was the job interview? Did you see a posting and you were like... No, I have to credit now former Chief of Staff Alexis Wiley. She went off to start her own strategy agency, but we literally had drinks at Queensborough. We had beers. She and the director of communications at the time got me drunk and said, we want you to help tell stories about the city. And I was very skeptical as a lot of people were because I was just like, I don't want

to do PR for the city. I don't want to do PR for the mayor's office. There's a machine, a tank that does PR for the mayor. And they were like, no, no, no, no, you'll be working in media services, which is the division that controls like the public access channels and making, you know, flyers and things like that for the city. So there was some money allocated for education programs and Detroit wanted to invest that into video and digital content, even live events, gatherings, and essentially outreach

that didn't feel like a pamphlet that Cheryl from HR made, but represented the authentic voice of Detroit. Aaron's role was dual. We kind of do two things. We explain some of the goings on at city government in a way that people can relate to it. I think sometimes any city, you know, they send out the press release and it can be gobbledygook sometimes, and it just kind of gets lost. But if you put like a face on it per se, that helps people relate to it more.

But also just filling in the gap that that gap is starting to be filled in. And I like to take credit for that. At the time, there wasn't a lot of like granular neighborhood coverage of the young entrepreneurs, especially the young entrepreneurs of color, opening businesses and things like that. A lot of spotlight on some of the minority communities that weren't Detroit's majority of Black, but there was also a strong Bangladeshi population, Latinx, queer populations. I wanted to talk about queer people outside of Pride Month in June. And you know, you have to go to like those community papers to find that coverage.

But I was like, I feel like it should be a little bit more mainstream and get a little bit of a larger platform. So we did a lot of that. I sent a camera crew to a gay bar that burned down last year, unfortunately, late at night, off hours, and they filmed a voguing competition. And we aired that voguing competition on City Cable. And there had been nothing like that on City Cable. Vogue has really evolved.

And I mean really evolved in the sense of the influence that it now holds and really being recognized as a true art form. City Cable is all like, you know, here's what's going on at the rec center today. Yeah. And then like, you know, three o'clock comes and it's just like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And that's what we were going for, was just trying to do again, like do something that a city government public access outlet had not done, but also kind of look for some of

these gaps that were in Detroit media coverage. And it sounds like, as you mentioned, the public perception versus the local perception of someone who actually lives there, what gulf did you need to bridge? So I started that job in 2017. And still there were people kind of coming to Detroit, like, you know, where are the drugs? They were looking for one thing. They were looking for Eminem.

They were looking for the drugs. They were looking for the ruined porn and still kind of looking for that exploitative of people of color living in poverty and things like that. This is not to deny that poverty does exist in Detroit for many reasons, it's systemic. But 2017 and in the years around that, we're still kind of touch and go in terms of like, look at all these impoverished people of color and look at all the young white entrepreneurs on a mission to save them. And all the while there's a new generation of, again, young entrepreneurs of color.

Erin notes the career of CEO Melissa Butler, who is the founder of the cosmetics company, The Lip Bar. And to be fair, on the lipbar.com, her role is defined as a CEO and boss, B-A-W-S-E boss. And her story is another Detroit triumph. But she was on Shark Tank and famously got turned down from Shark Tank and then got a deal with Target. She just got a whole round of like $7 million or something like that from some investors. Around that time, 2017 is when people like her and so many others were on the come up

and people just weren't talking about them. You know, one of my favorite stories was, Kenzie Clark, she wrote a story about a gay couple that moved to Detroit from the suburbs and they moved to Rosedale Park. And she got a letter, not a letter, but email, romanticized it a little bit, but she got an email from a lesbian couple who said, we read this story on the city's website about this new queer community sort of slowly coming together here because of that story we decided to buy a house in Detroit. And that's one of my favorite quote-unquote success stories was that again, kind of showing

some of these people who aren't famous, it would either be those entrepreneurs on the come up or these kind of ordinary people doing great things and inspiring people to invest in the city, to move to the city. I'm still proud of that. And Aaron's excellent novel, Boys Come First, is a window into what it's like to live in Detroit and to see the city change kind of block by block. And the three main characters are all queer black men and one is a real estate agent, another is a teacher at a charter school, and then the third has just moved back in with

his mom in Detroit after living in New York. So definitely add it to your reading list. We linked it in the show notes if you want to buy it. And if you absolutely do not read, that's okay. Aaron just announced that he's optioned the rights for his book for development into a series at Prime Video with WandaVision writer Chuck Hayward attached as a showrunner. And Aaron tweeted, thanks to everyone for believing in this very black, very gay, very Detroit story.

Let's make history. So getting back to that very Detroit story, you mentioned the term ruin porn, which I haven't heard of, but I remember there being a tumbler of crumbling Victorian houses, right? There are probably several. There were several tumblers and blogs and flickers and all that sort of thing. Ruin porn is literally like, you know, you take gorgeous, you know, now we have portrait on the iPhone, but imagine 10 years ago before portrait mode, just taking that style of photo of a crumbling house, a crumbling building, an empty lot of vacant auto plan

or something like that. And just literally putting up there for people to gawk at and be like, oh, my gosh, this city is looks like a meteor hit it. And that was very pervasive. It sort of came in line with the rise of like humans of New York and stuff like that. Kind of like these ordinary amateur photographers kind of going around. And all of that sort of came around. And Detroit really did get that reputation of being the ruin porn capital of the world.

And it was funny to us, Detroiters, because we were like, some of these buildings, like the Michigan Central Depot, the big train station, that's been empty all our life. It was kind of that a flippant, like you guys are just now noticing it, but also the frustration because there are full neighborhoods, there are vibrant neighbors that never stopped existing even during the hardest times. And there are always black entrepreneurs, brown entrepreneurs, Latino, South Asian, and so on and so forth, even going back to someone like the Polish and Irish in German. Great, great grandchildren of the immigrants that first came to Detroit that never left

the city, you know, keeping the seats warm. So at its peak in the 1950s, Detroit had over a million residents. But that began to decline steadily as a lot of automotive jobs moved to plants overseas and in Mexico, and the 2008 financial crisis hit. And then Detroit based General Motors filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. And though there was a fifty one billion dollar government bailout, and that saved one point two million jobs, Detroit's population has never really recovered. And right now there are about six hundred and thirty thousand residents.

And many neighborhoods and businesses are thriving. But the instant association of Detroit is of plywood windows on these crumbling homes and vacant factories and the Michigan Central Station, which waved goodbye to its final train in 1988 and then sat vacant for 30 years and was highly photographed in its decaying and flooded state. But it was bought by Ford in 2018. They have plans to reopen it later this year. But Detroit is often thought of in the past tense as a victim.

While its present and its future get less attention. It would always get overlooked in favor of like pictures of the train station or the Packard plan or something like that. And that became the image of Detroit. And people are just like, do people actually live in Detroit or is it just like a ghost town? And it's like, you know, I got like hundreds of thousands of people being like, yeah, you know, I go to work here, send my kids to school, all that type of stuff. Yeah.

And when it comes to the history of Detroit, the arc of it, if someone isn't familiar with Detroit, I know that it's got such a long and rich history. And there are so many great books and even novels and so many resources out there. But when you kind of describe a little bit of Detroit's history, where do you start? I like to start in two different places. You can start with 1701, I believe, you know, when the French settlers first came and they were fur trapping and things like that and started the ribbon farms and display several of the indigenous population that we don't talk about that as much.

And also some of those early French settlers enslaved both indigenous people and black people, that gets lost in the conversation a lot. You could start there. Fur trapping is what the city was kind of built on into this day. Weedie Jordaners love to wear furs, you know, de-strict furs. So yes, before Detroit became a hub of innovation and industry in the 1920s, it was a French settlement and I'm just going to read the sentence straight from the mouth of Wikipedia because it's just, wow, the first recorded mention of the site was in the 1670s, when

French missionaries found a stone idol venerated by the Native Americans there and destroyed it with an axe. So yes, the French may have named to Chois after the Strait of the Lake, but they did not discover the region. So the indigenous nations, including the Potawatomi, the Huron, Ottawa and the Haudenosaunee, which are erroneously called the Iroquois by the French, they had all inhabited what's now the Detroit metro area. But before them, up to 11,000 years ago, were other humans, some known as mound builders

who constructed these giant kind of conical pyramidy mounds to bury their dead and defend the living. And the largest of these mounds was a great mound off of the River Rouge, which according to a historical society site was 200 feet long and 20 feet tall. And when it was inevitably destroyed to make streets and lots, all sorts of chipped stone weaponry and axes and pottery and human bones were discovered. So that area is now the Delray neighborhood of Detroit. And I went down a hole and I cross checked with some historical maps and Google Street

view, and it appears that on the site of the great mound, there is now a carpentry studio that builds theater sets. And I don't know if the real estate agent was like heads up. The site is an indigenous burial ground that was tragically desecrated by colonists. But on the upside, plenty of parking. But that's one history of Detroit. You can start there. I'd like to kind of start with like the Great Migration.

Detroit has a long intertwined history with just black history in America, period. Whether it's sort of that early enslavement of black people that doesn't get often talked about because Michigan is in the north. Detroit, especially being part of the Underground Railroad and being the last stop before you go over to Canada or unless you wanted to settle in Detroit. But the Great Migration of black, southern Americans coming up south to places in the Midwest like St. Louis and Chicago and Cleveland and places like those. And Detroit literally bringing like at least a million black people out of Alabama, Mississippi,

primarily Alabama. That's where my people are from. I like to start there because you can trace so much stuff like the creation of Motown, Joe Lewis, all of, you know, like post emancipation black history in a lot of black United States history. Joe Lewis, side note, was born in Alabama to sharecropper parents and relocated to Detroit in 1912. And he was also the world heavyweight boxing champion for over a decade in the 1930s and

1940s. And then he just bounced and served in the Army's Special Services Division in World War Two. And according to the Detroit Historical Society, Joe Lewis, quote, forced America to reexamine its segregationist policies and attitudes, his fists destroyed the myth of white supremacy and his quiet dignity and exemplary patriotism opened the door for the wave of black athletes who followed. So his legacy was lasting, but he shares a history of relocation north with so many

Americans. And for more on this, you can see the genealogy episode about tracing the histories of many black families. And the guest on that is 1619, 20 Africans author Stephen Hanks, who is, yes, distantly related to Tom Hanks. Now on the topic of heading north. Motown, especially, has its roots in the Great Migration. So I like to remind people that I think Detroit is sometimes overlooked as a mecca of

black culture. We're sitting here in Bed-Stuy, which is certainly like, you know, Biggie and Jay-Z and so on and so forth. And then you go uptown to Harlem. And then we talk about like Atlanta and DC, Chocolate City and things like that. And somehow recently in the last couple of years, Detroit gets lost in that conversation. And I'm like, Motown. Quiet Storm Radio.

Slow and sexy. It's the Quiet Storm on JLB. Anita Baker. Even the current new crop of rappers like Baby Tron and Babyface Ray and Peezy and Psyda Baby, T Grisly, all of the rappers around the country are looking at the scene here in Michigan and in Detroit and Flint as the next thing beyond your, you know, running the mill M&M and Big Sean's, all credit to them as well. But there's just so much innovation in Detroit that comes out of black intelligence, let's say.

Just on the topic of intelligence, I want to confess here that I was way too old before it clicked that Motown came from Motor City. But I mean, I was also the kid that thought that U-Haul was a Hawaiian brand pronounced Uaul. So. And do you feel like Detroit's lasting impact on America is just indelible from everything from Motown to art, to car culture, to cars, yeah, to everything. What is some of the history there in the infrastructure that had to be put in place to keep

such a big, huge industrial city running that was also so vibrant artistically and is? It's, I mean, the freeways and the big roads and whatnot are kind of a blessing and a curse. On one hand, the freeways opened up new opportunities for the working class and whatnot to go like by there, like American Dream House in the suburbs, or even just get from point A to point B across the city and house all of these people, whether they were the black people coming out from the South or the many immigrants that have come from Albania and Ukraine, Mexico, so on and so forth, Lebanon, of course, can I forget Lebanon, the entire city of Dearborn will.

Dearborn, side note, is just outside of Detroit and it's one of the largest Arab American communities in the whole country with some recent surveys clocking in at about half the population is up Arab descent due to this large influx of automobile workers in the 1920s. However, in all that time, never had an Arab mayor. Well, until now. So in 2021, the Dearborn born and raised son of Lebanese immigrants Abdullah Hamoud was elected the first Arab or Muslim mayor of Dearborn. And after his victory, he gave a really inspirational address and said, never shy away from

who you are, be proud of your name, be comfortable in your identity, because it'll take you places if you work hard, you're passionate and you inspire people, which he is already doing. And one also does not need to be analogous to know that Dearborn has some absolutely excellent falafel. But at the same time, you know, freeways opened up an addiction to sprawl, suburban sprawl, of course, we're having a conversation now about urban renewal and how I 375 in particular, destroyed a black business district, Paradise Valley, which had Paradise Valley had not been destroyed in the 40s and 50s and 60s, it would be on par with, let's say

a bourbon street in New Orleans in terms of it was at its time called the Million Dollar Black District. All of this vast infrastructure did kind of expand, expand, expand and as like a balloon, the bigger it gets, the more tense it gets. And so now we're seeing the after effects in terms of like that balloon is certainly burst, you know, Detroit is 138 plus square miles. Originally housing 2 million people now is housing roughly around 650,000. And so now we're dealing with all these problems like, okay, what are we going to do with all these abandoned houses, these vacant lots and things like that? There are people steadily moving to Detroit might have seen Mayor Doug

and challenging the census and saying, you know, the census was an undercount, but we have all these receipts that that say otherwise, we're going to wait and see what happens with that, but not enough to fill in all of the vacant space. So I don't know if there's any smarter urbanist out there that can kind of figure out what the next step is. Okay, I'm not going to spoil the surprise of the follow up episode to this, but let's just say I asked a guy about stuff that he's found in abandoned houses. While there are certainly some things to celebrate about Detroit, there's still a long way to go before we can call it a comeback.

He's been here for years. Yeah, I want to get back to that too about housing, but I'm wondering how much did automotive culture and industry, did that fuck up the subway system? Like I live in LA. So I'm like, I live in a place where most people in LA are not as aware of public transportation as, you know, in San Francisco or here. You know, living in New York, I got to say, I got to say, I love the subways. I love the A train getting up to Harlem in, you know, 40 minutes. And yeah, there is definitely a strong argument to be made that the residency's dependence on the automobile, you know, forced

upon the city because the automotive industry was the biggest employer is when you make what you eat or whatever, or you eat what you make. Sorry. I was literally just thinking about this about like, why do I own a car in here in New York? And that goes back to my mentality of like, when I was a teenager, it was embarrassing to catch the bus. Like you caught the bus up to a certain point. Like once you turn 15 or 16, and you didn't have a car, like that status symbol that conspicuous consumption, right? I think that's ingrained in a lot of these cars because it's just like we build these cars, right? Like we have to

have the nicest thing out or at least, you know, get our AXZ plan as Ford lingo to get a discount on something, right? And yeah, I mean, it's very materialistic, but it did kind of create this mentality of like the public transportation is inferior. And I think that's why there hasn't been a lot of investments made into it. But they're trying to service this very large city with the bare minimum of new equipment and stuff like that. Add on top of that, that Metro Detroit has what three different public transit systems not working in really in sync as they could. So if you live in the city, you would have to catch the D dot up to a certain point. That's the Detroit Department of Transportation to

the smart bus, the suburban mobility, something, something rapid transit that only runs in the suburbs. So a, you know, a 30 minute trip from, let's say downtown Detroit to, I don't know, Royal Oak or something like that would be like an hour on the bus. Whereas like, you know, in New York, you have all of these systems working together in the way that the systems in Metro Detroit don't. And every time it comes up to a vote to kind of integrate all these systems, that old eight mile divide between, for those who don't know the movie eight mile, yes, but the city suburban divide, the city of Detroit lies below eight mile road. And then the suburbs, which have historically been mostly white are north. And there's a

lot of racism embedded in that. And so when it comes to integrating the transit systems, there's a fear, there's always been this persistent fear of like, all the black people in each one are going to like cheapen our surroundings here in Royal Oak and Madison Heights and all these types of places. So we're going to make it as difficult as possible for you to come here, even with cars, you know, it's no secret that black motorists are pulled over at a much higher rate in the suburbs than they are in the city. I'm thinking specifically all my Detroiters are going to get this one 94 in Telegraph that underpass there. There's always somebody waiting there. Everybody hates it or going down in 94 in Allen Park. There's always

that one officer waiting on the on the exchange there. Like, you know, I could go on all day at that. But just how people get around and how they get to their jobs and make their livelihood and that impacts everyday life. So I can only imagine how frustrating that is. I know as someone who lives in a giant sprawl that was shaped by automobiles, it really does change the architecture of the city. But you were mentioning houses and population and stuff. And I'm so curious how Detroit, how it's looked at in terms of housing markets, if there's bidding wars in so many cities, and it's so hard to find a place, it's so hard for, I mean, first time home buyers, millennials and Gen Z have been absolutely just fucked over so hard. Is there any

kind of like bittersweet mentality about any kind of revitalization that would also seem like just mass gentrification of the place? I would say now I'm not like actively in the housing market, you know, preemptive right there. But I follow a guy, Otis, who has tweets all the time about like, you know, wanting to buy a house in the neighborhood he grew up in and which is a common story in Detroit, or just trying to buy a house in someone like the name neighborhoods like a Rosedale Park or a grandma or something like that. And they always end up in a bidding war. They always end up in a bidding war. I've seen houses in neighborhoods in Detroit, including the one I grew up in, at pricing these houses at like, I'm like, are you serious? Like 300,000

and live off Dexter? See, for example, 2639 Monterey Street in Detroit, it's between Dexter and Linwood. Listing price, 280k, six bedroom, four bath, new appliances, new everything. And if you're like Aaron, Allie, that's a ridiculous deal for a six bedroom house. Just please consider that it previously sold in August of 2020 for $1,000. A 2,200 square foot home, $1,000. How does this happen? Well, stay tuned for a future episode on that. I'm just going to say it's called Dome Ecology. It's going to be out March 21. It's about abandoned properties. Anyway, according to realtor.com as of 2023, the median listing price for a home in Detroit. You ready for this? $80,000.

How about Atlanta? Atlanta is five times that $400,000. New York median price for real estate there, 745,000. LA is more than that, which shocked me. 1.1 million is the median listing price for LA. But in my dear birthplace of San Francisco, 1.3 million. And to be fair, the Dexter-Linwood neighborhood of Detroit did have some listings that were less than a used car. For example, the 10 bedroom, 10 bedroom, 3.5 bath brick mansion located at 2470 West Bonavista Street, 3,900 square feet. Think about that. Guess how much it cost? 3,900 square feet, 10 bedrooms. Guess the number? Okay, it's lower than that. It's lower. It's $5,000. $5,000. I am seeing some houses in some neighborhoods where it's just like, I personally do not put

down the neighborhood, but to be real, it's not a walkable neighborhood. You're kind of banking off of the potential that something's going to happen here, which does lead to gentrification, right? Because some people are going to see that expensive price and be like, oh, something must be happening here. And you get one person to buy into it, and then you get their friends or their peers to buy into it, and then boom, you've got something like what's going on in West Village right now. So West Village is so-called because it's just west of this historically Ritzy area named Indian Village. And West Village has homes in the style of Queen Anne and Tudor and Georgian and Mediterranean and Colonial Revival. And this area has been called Quaint and Daytripworthy,

and a little retail and residential oasis for young professionals. And I've never been there, but I feel like it would be easy to spend $7 on an iced matcha. I was staying in an Airbnb in West Village last time I stayed in Detroit. And part of me is just like, I can see why someone would pay the premium to live here. But at the same time, I remember West Village 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when some of these town houses were boarded up and stuff like that. And it didn't have that prestige as Indian Village had. There weren't all these nice new restaurants. But it was still like a very affordable place to live. It was safe. People looked out for each other. Same with Island View, the neighborhood to the west of West Village. That's the neighborhood with a lot of pristine,

older Victorian types. I'm probably getting the architecture name wrong. Nope, he's right. Beautiful turn of the century turrets and arches and bay windows and porches. But having gone to school over there for elementary school, I knew some kids that lived over there. Now that spot is turning into what we're seeing here in Bed-Stuy. We're just like, where are you from? I haven't seen you here. I haven't seen your kind here before. Are you rich? And now you're starting to see houses go for like in the high six figures in those neighborhoods. I already remember like, you know, nothing hits six figures. I see more houses going for a million or being listed at a million. When even just five years ago, it was unheard of to list anything in Detroit

for a million. Now there are multiple, you know, showing up on like Christie's and Sotheby's. I'm like, what? Do you think that's good for Detroit or is it like for Detroit? I am not an economist in terms of like, will this tie lift all the boats, right? I just look at the practicality. Like, if I'm paying a million dollars to live in Indian Village, I'm only going to be walking to other houses in Indian Village. I'm like, what is, what is the bang for your buck here? I remember there was like, I tweeted about this, like there was something for an absurd amount of money in Midtown, which is the hotspot for all of these conversations around gentrification and whatnot. And in the real estate listing, it was like, in close proximity to Bronx Bar. And I was like,

Bronx Bar? Like the Wayne State College Dive is why I'm going to pay six figures to live here so I can get bloody married every weekend. That's the call here. Just P.S. Midtown is a place that was once called Cass Corridor. And it was known for being a pretty rough part of town, but it's less rough and it's more expensive now. And it's changed its name to Midtown. But locals are like, yeah, it's Cass Corridor. And I learned that from Aaron's book, which is called Boys Come First, and it's linked for purchase in the show notes. And it will teach you a lot about Detroit. I wonder if also in the pandemic, if working from home has changed where people are moving, if they're from Michigan and their parents are still there and

grandparents in childcare, it's like, well, if I can work from an extra bedroom that I couldn't afford in San Francisco, then why not move to Detroit? I've seen that happen where, so my grandparents lived, speaking of Indian Village, my grandparents lived there. They sold their house a couple of years ago in a huge house. And it's got this like pedigree. It belonged to Edzo Ford's sister-in-law. And there were only three residents before they bought it. And the person who bought their house was the startup guy from San Francisco. Now, my grandparents had this house like decorated, like it was a home full of furniture and stuff like that. This guy and his now ex-wife or ex-fiancée moved from like a studio in San Francisco,

but they had all this startup money, right? And moved into what was my grandfather's house and only had like a studio apartment's worth full of furniture. And it was like all in the living room of that. And so I visited the house. My grandparents left the dining room table because it's one of those like big, long ones that you can't like take out, right? But the house was empty. And I was just like, my entire life, I've never seen this house empty. And he was like, yeah, this house is fucking huge. I was like, yeah, I bet it is. And so I do kind of wonder about that. I mean, the houses in Detroit are kind of large. And then it gets cold and you have to like pay more to heat it. Is there really a trade-off from working from home? Yeah, that's a good question.

I know I remember my sister lived in Dearborn for a while and she lived in Inkster and then Dearborn. And I remember just coming out from California and being like, wait, there's a whole floor underneath this floor, a basement floor? And there's an attic? Like we don't need California, we don't have that. The owner, I get the less I need a basement. I'm just like, I'm definitely in the, I don't know if there's a trend for it yet, but like the minimalist millennial, like the older I get, I'm like, I don't need this. I want to throw everything away. I know less storage space means less stuff to accumulate. It's like Marie Kondo, everything. Can I ask you before we go? Can I ask you a couple of questions from listeners? Oh yeah, of course. Oh my gosh. Okay, cool. I asked

people, I told people I was talking to you. Yeah. I'm excited. But before we lob questions at our guest, we're going to toss some money at a good cause. And I asked Aaron and he said, I like to donate to Detroit Justice Center whenever I can. And it's a non-profit that he really trusts. They're a non-profit law firm working alongside communities. And you can find out more about them at DetroitJustice.org. So thanks to sponsors of the show for making that donation possible. Okay, let's get to them. Your Detroit questions. Okay. Oh my gosh. Lizzy Carr wants to know, what's the weirdest or most unhinged fun fact you know about Detroit? The weirdest or most unhinged fun fact. There's a historic neighborhood called Black Bottom.

It is so named because the soil, it was a historically black neighborhood. Yes, but it's not called that because black people live there. It's because the soil was so rich and dark. It was called Black Bottom. But you cannot type Black Bottom on a government-owned computer in Detroit because it thinks you're looking for porn. So as as as Detroit's chief storyteller, there will be times where I had to describe the history of Lockheed Park and say like it was a or talk about like Paradise Valley and talk about Black Bottom. And I would want to Google it just to make sure I was getting certain details right. And I always get this like angry like all red caps, like you can't look at this. Oh my God. And at first I was like,

why can't I look at it? I was like, oh, oh, Black Bottom. And for more on Googling Black Bottom, you can see the novel Boys Come First, which is linked in the show notes. Oh, speaking of. Sarah Acre had a great question. What's your favorite representation of Detroit and its story in the media? I like how like every black fictional thing has like a character from Detroit. So I was watching a different world reruns and Ron Johnson. And what's wrong with him? I don't know. It's a first. Ron Johnson is speechless. He's got the good work, Cam. It's from Detroit. And then like randomly, like one of the side characters had on a old English D hat. I think about like school days and Big Brother Almighty.

He has a famous to me line. I am from Detroit, Motown. So you can watch this. And it's just like, he's kind of like one of the worst characters in the movie. But like, but he just has this like his attitude is very in John Carlos Esposito plays the hell out of that role. And Martin, of course, like a tweet went viral of the outside of Garden Court, which is the real name of the apartments. But they showed the exterior of Garden Court Apartments over on Jefferson in Mount Elliott on every episode of Martins. And so that is recognizable to an entire population, right? They're a real people that live there. My best friend's mom, shout out to Brandon and his mom, Gail. She lives in that building. And so I texted him the tweet and the tweet asked,

if you if you know who lives here, you get a gold star or something like that. And I was like, do you know who lives here? Not Martin Gina. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, a lot of black things have Detroit representation somehow. And people who are from Detroit, do they say Detroit or did they say Detroit? I am a Detroit, like a second syllable. Yeah. Okay. The order I get like Detroit, you know, it's I let it slide, but I'm a Detroit. Okay. I lived in Los Feliz for a long time and Los Feliz versus Los Feliz was like a very common and someone recently I was born in San Francisco, someone recently called it Frisco to my face and I let it slide. But I was like, don't let it have it again. So I made the fatal New York era of calling it Houston and not

Houston. Oh, no. When I first got here, I think they were going to throw me in the next river. Oh my God. If you've always wondered this, it's because Houston, Texas is named after one dude, a general, while Houston Street in New York is named after some Southern founding father, William Houston, who seemed kind of like a jerk and a creep. But Houston Street is also a person, a professional baseball player, who is not from Houston or New York, but from Austin. But all of this comes down to the fact that in New York, south of Houston should really be pronounced Sauhou. So correct anyone you want at any time. But another fun Detroit fact is that the International Airport is technically in the city of Romulus. So when you're there, you're a Romulan.

Okay, Papita and Valerie Horizell wanted to know something about salt mines under Detroit. I have never been to the salt mines under Detroit, but they do exist. Is either the world's largest or the country's largest, I'm not sure. Okay, so the world's largest salt mine, if you must know, is in Ontario, Canada. But the Detroit salt mines, nothing to sneeze at 1000 feet deep into the center of the earth, as deep as the Chrysler building is tall, and they cover 1400 acres, 100 miles of underground roads and tunnels. What do they do with all that salt? They throw it on the roads when they get icy, but they used to eat a lot of it too. There's a very expansive network of salt mines underneath the

city on the southwest side, and they are salt mines. People just go and, I mean, you can't go and get salt, but there are workers that maintain and do this sort of thing. It's one of those things that is always on Detroit Trivia or something like that. Did you know? I know very few people, or anyone who has actually done that. I didn't even know about until right now. Sydney S, Sonya Bird, Papita, Ethan Paton, wanted to know a little bit about Belle Isle. Sonya Bird specifically wanted to know what's up with the incredibly fast and dangerous slide at Belle Isle. Oh my gosh. I heard it's closing. Is it true? No, it should not be closing. So Belle Isle is a historic island park. It is sacred ground to all Detroiters. A fun fact,

this is going deep, deep in my trivia knowledge, but Diana Ross acknowledged in her autobiography how important Belle Isle was to her as a child growing up, and much later when she did that famous concert in Central Park, which by the way, Central Park in New York and Belle Isle in Detroit have the same landscape architect. So Diana Ross did that famous concert and they named a section of Central Park after Diana Ross, and she noted she specifically wanted that to connect Central Park with Belle Isle because she was like, this outdoor space is so important to us. Belle Isle is an outdoor space. It has a arboretum or what is that? Observatory. It used to have a zoo. It does have an aquarium, trails, hiking, a beach, and yes, the casino where everybody does

like church picnics and graduations and stuff like that. And the fountains and back in the day, it's still kind of to this day, but like you would cruise around the Isle and like tricked out classic cars and stuff like that. And there's so many videos and every rapper that came up in the 90s and 2000s doesn't shout out Belle Isle, just have them out. But yes, the infamous giant slide. So first of all, there are giant slides in many places around the country. They are typically a slide with multiple humps. It raises, I'm not sure how many stories, but not that high. We began with the attraction that has turned into a viral sensation. Belle Isle's giant slide reopens amid somehow worldwide attention.

40 feet. It's 40 feet high. That's a slide as tall as a four-story building. And it's still kind of covered with like a molded plastic, right? And so you get on a burlap back in the day. And there's a big debate about this. Back in the day, the giant slide on Belle Isle used to be yellow. And as we found out recently, it was painted with this special thing to reduce the friction and keep people from going all, going all, and they had to like wax it a certain way and all that. So what you do is you pay your little 50 cent fare or whatever, at least that's what it used to be. Get on a burlap sack, sit on the burlap slap, and just ride down the slide. You go up and down, up and down. It's like a very low stakes roller coaster, right?

And it's just very much a childhood ride of passage. I don't even remember the first time I went on Belle Isle. I just know I've been on it several times because it's just what we do. Very recently. So first of all, a couple of years ago, the slide went from yellow to like a tan and now it's like pure silver and it looks like just metal, right? Apparently they over waxed it and like, you know, they just like put like just like coats of turtle wax on it and they reopened it. All of a sudden, like people are just like speeding down the slide and going airborne and whatnot. And all of us, like anyone who has ridden the original giant slide up until like up until this year knows that's not how it's supposed to be. And so they had to and so like

all these engineers had to like figure out what was going on, like why are people doing this? And it was literally the most hilarious thing I had ever seen. But at the same time, I'm just like people are gawking at Detroit again. People are just like, why are people going on this death slide? And I'm like, it's not a death slide. It's not supposed to be like that. So they had to like, you know, take a couple of coats of wax off or whatever. And then they even did a demonstration of how to do it. And it's just like, you don't demonstrate how to do it. You just do it. Like you slide down, you know, that camera. It is the moment you've all been waiting for in just a few hours. The giant bell aisle slide is going to be reopening. Of course, the reopening comes

after last week's reopening got attention from around the entire world of the viral video of everyone's bouncing around. It was not a smooth start on the giant slide. Come on, man. Hey, you can break your back on the giant slide. You can even break your neck on the giant slide. You can even bump your head on the giant slide. It's like jumping off a roof on the giant slide. Man, you can lose a tooth on the giant slide. I'm going to Detroit in a couple of weeks and I'm like, I don't want them to fix it. I want to go down it. I want to sustain some kind of, you know, like bruising. M, Chris Curious, Natalie Jones, Jeffrey Nicks, all want to know, why is the pizza rectangular? It goes back to the pans that were, so the square pizza,

rectangular pizza is cooked in a rectangular pan, right? Buddy's pizza and shields and some of those other pizzerias of the time, everything is connected to the auto industry. So many things are connected. So the pans were used to originally like shuffle the parts around for the cars. And so the plants, the auto plants will like discard these plants. And so the pizza makers would be like, oh, here's some good metal, right? So let's repurpose this. Good example of upcycling, right? Yeah. So they would take these square pans that were originally used to haul car parts and widgets and gizmos and things like that, clean them up, grease them, and line the pans with the dough and it would get crispy around the edges and bake in the middle.

And that's why. Another famous thing that is tied to the auto industry just real quick, the Coney Dog. I was going to ask, why is it a Coney Dog? Why do they have Coney Islands? It's not Coney Island. And like, you know, here in New York, it's two different conversations, right? I was like, Coney Island is a place. And I'm like, but Coney Island in Detroit is also a place, but there are multiple Coney Islands. And so, okay, so Coney on the surface, it looks like a chili dog, right? Except that Albanian immigrants were using the cheapest parts of the cow, like the hearts and some of the other discarded meats. I didn't want to. Chopping them up, making them into a fine sauce and putting them in a bun on top of a hot dog. And

they would sell them to auto workers on their breaks. Back when auto workers were not getting paid a whole lot. And before we came up with like the $5 a day and unions and stuff like that, you would pay like, you know, I don't know, 10 cents or however much because again, the meat was cheap. So you didn't have to charge a whole lot for it. And so it became popular with the auto workers. And that's how it started. So in maintaining those recipes over the years and keeping it cheap is how we have the Coney dog. I never knew that. Yes. Last two questions I was asked. What's the hardest thing about being a Detroit storyteller or a champion of Detroit? What's something that is the toughest for you about Detroit? And then I'll ask you your favorite,

of course. Let's start with the toughest thing for me about Detroit is I see the conversation growing around like people feeling like they have to leave Detroit to kind of pursue, especially the artists and creatives and whatnot. I feel like in recent years, there's been a little bit of a struggle to support creatives. And so you do have people who go to like Sweden or New York or all these different places to create their art and feel more and more distant from their hometown. They still represent Detroit everywhere they go, but there's that wishing and needing to create where they come from as opposed to like, you know, you can be a homegrown artist in like San Francisco or whatever, or here in New York. So that's probably the toughest thing. I think,

especially for me as a writer, I have longed for a literary scene in the city. I think it's just now starting to coalesce, but I've seen a lot of false starts over the years. And here in New York, you know, I can throw a rock outside of my brownstone and hit, you know, there's a National Book Award winner on this block. So that's one of the toughest parts. I think one of the harder parts of being a chief storyteller is always sounding like you are PR. Like I find myself kind of that push and pull in terms of like, I inherently know, and everyone from Detroit inherently knows that there is good in the city, but you cannot ignore what we perceive to be negative, which is poverty, which is the schools have a long way to go. Crime is still very much a persistent issue

right now. The big issue right now is like, how do we solve crime? Do we install all this surveillance or not? Do people want surveillance? Do people not want surveillance? Every time I tell somebody like, oh, you know, the DIA is one of the world's greatest museums, and you can go write down the chartreuse and get a great meal and then maybe walk over or, you know, take an Uber over the keysling and then go dance the night away at UFO factory, which is what I did last time I was there. Shout out to Blueprint for that amazing party. Shout out to all those folks. But then someone's always going to be like, but what about a crime? Can I walk around this street late at night? You can't. So that's always going to be the hard part is like, I always tell people

to take the good with the bad. But more and more, the longer I live out here in New York, the more I feel like, oh man, oh man, there's always going to be that butt. And what about the thing that is just in your heart forever about Detroit? What do you love so much about the city? I love that the city forges hustlers. And I don't want to say gritty. I don't want to say never say die or anything like that. But I think there's that combination of like I was talking about earlier that like black intelligence and black innovation. And it's not just limited to black people. I mean, the immigrant determination in Detroit, you know, Albanians creating this Coney empire off of the backs of automotive workers, right?

You know, the city forces you to kind of make a way. I think it's because we are kind of the butt of everyone's jokes. The odds are consistently against us. But we still know who we are. The it doesn't matter how hard times get, we'll put the fur on, we'll put the buffs on, buffs our Cartier sunglasses. We will drive the nicest cars. We have to find a way to get those first. We have to find a way to get the bus, right? We I love that the city has instilled a sense of determination and a fearlessness and audacity, unlimited audacity for me to go conquer a place like New York for other folks, you know, for Mary Gordy to conquer the music industry for Diana Ross to I love Diana Ross. I am a gay man, right? But for Diana Ross to like be the diva of her time

and literally start from nothing started the Rooster Projects. Now she is the one she is what Beyonce aspires to be. So I that is ever present in every Detroit or everywhere we go. It is why like we recognize each other in crowds. If I'm wearing my old English D hat and somebody recognizes we immediately ask like, where'd you go to high school? What corner did you come up on? I love that. I love that for us. So ask storytellers the history of their favorite things and then just sit down and listen. And again, come back March 21st for the follow up episode on Dome Ecology. What happens when a house is abandoned scientifically and sociologically? But follow Aaron Foley on social media, all linked in the show notes also linked his book

Boys Come First, which you can buy and enjoy as I have. So excited for that to be a show also. We also linked Detroit Justice and so many other things on my site at alleyward.com slash allergies slash Detroitology. That's linked in the show notes. Thank you again, Aaron Foley. This was absolutely worth waiting five years for. And I'm alleyward with 1L on Twitter and Instagram where it allergies on both. We also have short kids safe episodes are called Smologies. They're available in this feed or at alleyward.com slash Smologies. That's linked in the show notes too. Thank you, Zeke Rodriguez Thomas and Mercedes Maitland for working on Smologies. Aaron Talbert, Admin, Zeologies podcast, Facebook group with assist

from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Veltas. Emily White of the Wordery makes our professional transcripts and those are linked for free on my website and in the show notes. Susan Hale handles merch and so much more. Noel Dilworth does our scheduling. Kelly R. Dwyer handles the website and can make yours. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music in Jared Sleeper, AKA Hunk of the Month and the magical Mercedes Maitland edited the show. And if you stick around until the end, I burden you with a secret of my life. And one memory I'm always going to have of Detroit, such a sweet one. It was flying there in the summer of 1999. Anyone who was alive in Detroit this time remembers this summer. I was with my sister Celeste to visit our sister Janelle

who lived in Detroit. And Celeste, I heard the pilot of our plane walk by us in the airport mentioning that we would be traveling through, and I quote, one hellacious thunderstorm. But we landed safely in Detroit to see trees ripped out like weeds everywhere. The city was like, give me a minute. I have been through something. And so there was no power. So we hung out at my sister's VW van a lot and outside in parks where there were fireflies twinkling around. And at one point we went to get a soda from the local liquor store. And as we bought it, the girl working there apologized that it wasn't cold saying, I'm sorry, we only have hot pop. And that sentence has replayed in my head so many hundreds of times. And whoever she was, I hope she's drinking a cold

one. Okay, Detroit, you stay cool. You've always been cool. Bye bye. Thank you, Detroit.