4/1/16, 12:38 PMFrom Motor City to Motor Metropolis: Building the Motor Metropolis

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From Motor City to Motor Metropolis:How the Automobile Industry

Reshaped Urban Americaby Thomas J. Sugrue

Building the Motor Metropolis: Automobiles, Highways,and Sprawl

Auto workers--blue and white collar alike--reshapedDetroit's geography, but so too did the automobileitself. Befitting its role as the headquarters of the Americanautomobile industry, Detroit became a true automobile city, aplace that by 1950 looked more like Los Angeles or Oaklandthan New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. Metropolitan Detroitwas home to two of the earliest expressways in the UnitedStates. The Davison Freeway, constructed in 1941-42,provided easy access to the auto plants in Highland Park andthe East Side by directing traffic away from narrow, crowdedsurface streets. During World War II, federal defensespending subsidized a twenty-five mile long expressway(nicknamed "Bomber Road", later incorporated into Interstate94) that connected the city with the huge Willow Runaircraft plant.

Increasingly public policy oriented itself toward car drivers.Funds for public transportation plummeted, leading to adecline in ridership and service cuts that acceleratedovertime in a feedback loop. The city's public transit systemdeclined, leading to service cuts that accelerated over timeand declining public support for transit. It seemed somehowappropriate that the city that had given birth to theautomobile industry had one of the nation's poorest and leastaccessible public transit systems by the end of the twentiethcentury.

As buses and trolleys languished, expressway constructionboomed, particularly after the passage of the InterstateHighway Act of 1956. In Detroit, as in the nation,federally-funded highway construction (and later expansionand maintenance projects) dwarfed public works projects ofthe past. Huge swaths of city were demolished to make way

Becoming theMotor City:Immigrants,Migrants, andthe AutoIndustry

Living in theMotor City:Autoworkers,Race, and UrbanGeography

Building the MotorMetropolis:Automobiles,Highways, andSprawl

Moving Out:Decentralizationand the Declineof UrbanFactories

Downsizing:Depopulation,Disinvestment,and the Fate ofthe City

Bibliography

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DavisonFreeway

Willow Run

Paradise Valley

4/1/16, 12:38 PMFrom Motor City to Motor Metropolis: Building the Motor Metropolis

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for expressways--and as was the case with so many urbanredevelopment projects, black working-class neighborhoodswere most heavily impacted. The Chrysler Freeway blastedthrough the heart of Paradise Valley, replacing HastingsStreet, one of black Detroit's main shopping andentertainment districts. The Lodge and Ford Freeways cutthrough the city's most established black west sideneighborhoods. By the end of the 1960s, it was possible topass through vast sections of the city at sixty or seventymiles per hour on submerged, limited access highways.

New expressways accelerated the process ofsuburbanization. New housing developments for both blueand white collar workers sprung up virtually overnight inwhat had been rural areas on the outskirts of the metropolis.The largest blue-collar suburb (and soon the third largestmunicipality in the state) was Warren. A community oftruck farms before World War II, by 1960, it was home toover 150,000 people who lived on streets lined with blockafter block of little ranch houses and Cape Cods. Warren andsuburban Macomb County (of which it was a part) became aMecca for blue-collar whites fleeing the city. White-collarworkers also filled up new subdivisions as quickly as theycould be built in the city's northern and western suburbs.Wetlands and farmlands alike became seas of green lawns,divided by ribbons of tarmac. By 1960, more whites inmetropolitan Detroit lived in the suburbs than in the city(though very few blacks did--because real estate agentsrefused to sell to them and they faced intense hostility andoften violence when they tried to cross suburbanboundaries).

Over the course of the twentieth century, the Motor City hadbecome the Motor Metropolis, going from twenty squaremiles to several thousand square miles. As the populationspread outward, the whole urban landscape changed. Therapid development of suburban tract housing greatly strainedmunicipal resources. The old, narrow, sometimes evenunpaved roads in new suburbs could not accommodate theflood of cars that accompanied suburban development. Facedwith massive traffic jams, suburban communities scrambledto raise funds to retrofit the old, narrow, sometimes evenunpaved roads that had been built to serve sparselypopulated, rural areas. Wider roads did not, however, reducetraffic--in fact traffic engineers discovered that "if you build itthey will come." Although many suburbanites claimed thattheir new communities offered a haven from urban"congestion," suburban roads were often more clogged withtraffic than their counterparts in the depopulating center city.

Detroiters--like their counterparts in most of the UnitedStates--spent more and more time in their cars. The

Warren

1975Transportation

Map of Michigan

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landscape of the metropolitan area reflected the newdependence on the car. New auto plants, office parks, andshopping centers, were now surrounded by acres of parkinglots to accommodate commuters from all corners of themetropolitan area and even sometimes from further afield. Atmajor intersections and near expressway exit ramps, newcommercial enterprises--gas stations, car dealerships andrepair shops, fast food restaurants, drive-ins, shoppingcenters, and strip malls--sprung up to cater to automobileusers. In suburban Detroit, as in large parts of late-twentiethcentury America, pedestrian life dwindled. Most suburbandevelopments dispensed with sidewalks altogether; childrenwere more likely to be driven or bused to school; churchyards were dwarfed by parking lots. The car culture eventransformed residential architecture. The most prominentvisual feature on most post-World War II homes wasthe garage.

The automobile was, by far, the most expensive consumergood (other than the house itself) that most Americansowned. But despite their expense, cars were not built to lastforever. Each year, auto makers introduced new models,highlighted new features and designs, and celebrated newfeatures. Many commentators described auto design as"planned obsolescence"--the design, the fashion, the veryappearance of the car was meant to be fleeting, to beobsolete. So too did manufacturers treat the facilities thatconstructed automobiles. Many of the first auto plants weremassive, architecturally impressive structures. Albert Kahn,one of the leading architects of the early twentieth century,designed Ford's Highland Park plant and many of the city'sleading factories. But by the 1950s, auto companies werebeginning to jettison rather than to redesign or recycle oldplants. One by one, they replaced the grand structures ofKahn and his imitators with new facilities. The auto plantproved to be just as much a victim of the mentality ofplanned obsolescence as its final product. "Obsolescence,"wrote Henry Ford II in response to critics of plant closings,"is the very hallmark of progress."

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Albert KahnHenry Ford II

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