Detroit celebrates a poor symbol, Joe Louis's fist

"On the plaza in front of the Detroit municipal building is a huge bronze replica of Joe Louis’ fist and arm, as if to say: “Here is a city ruled by brawn.” Brawn counts for very little in the modern world. The earnest redevelopers who hoped to renew Detroit by razing its history instead destroyed the raw materials out of which urban renaissance has come to so so many other American downtowns. A couple of days after I returned from Detroit, I telephoned a friend who had lived and worked in the city for many years. My friend, it’s relevant to mention, is the son of an Irish cop, ardently Catholic and defiantly conservative. Why did Chicago recover and Detroit fail, I asked. What doomed the city? He thought for a moment. “Not enough gays.”

Detroit confirms the lessons taught by Jane Jacobs and Russell Kirk. Preservation is as vital to urban health as renovation. Indeed, they are inseparable. The preservation of the old incubates the new.

It’s a lesson with application not only to Detroit’s past, but its future. The great factory complexes along the Detroit River have shuttered. America no longer manufactures here. Some will want to rip the factories down. Leave them be – leave them for now as monuments and memorials of the achievements of the past; leave them for the future, when somebody will want them. Want them for what? Who can say? Who in 1950 could ever have imagined London’s Docklands converted into condominums? Who would have guessed that New York’s emptied toolshops would provide some of the city’s most coveted office space? The 22nd century will put the artifacts of the 20th to equally unsurmisable uses, if only we permit it. Cities can molder for a century or more, and then reawaken to a new era that rediscovers something of value in the detritus of an earlier time. Brooklyn did. So did Miami Beach. Ditto Boston and Charleston – and even more spectacularly, Dublin and Prague. The promise of renaissance may yet come true, even for the ghost city of Detroit."