Southern North Stars

At my core, I am still a city kid. There is something familiar, comforting, and very unthreatening about spending time in cities, even though at this stage in my life (and indeed for the couple of stages before) I want to live in a somewhat less hurried and more gentle setting.

For lots of obvious reasons, General Assemblies meet in cities, although no longer the really, really big ones like New York or Chicago, for reasons, I suspect, of economy – those places can be extraordinarily expensive. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed sampling the differences in the “downtown urban cultures” of the different cities in which we have met as a church.

This holds true again this year in Detroit.

Without question, Detroit is a city under great stress. What had once been the fourth largest city in America, the Motor City has been beset myriad economic woes which have brought so many other trials raining down – violence, physical decay, and a near complete desertion of a viable middle class.

But amid this, there are many women and men standing fast in their hopes and dreams for Detroit, and there are clearly pockets of urban design and energy testifying to those hopes and dreams. This is largely true of much of the city’s downtown core. Wide and gracious boulevard-like avenues are flanked by majestic and bold architecture gracefully mixing visions of the city’s proud past with promises of a bright future -- interesting examples of wonderful twentieth and twenty-first century design. “Downtown” is bordered by the football and baseball athletic complex of Ford Field (Lions) and Comerica Park (Tigers) on the north, and the Detroit River on the south. The riverfront is accessible, pedestrian friendly, and altogether a fine piece of urban landscape architecture.

Across the river is Windsor, Ontario. Now think of that slowly – from Detroit, one looks south into Canada!

And despite the numerous times I have been to Detroit over the last forty years or so, I cannot get used to this. Canada cannot be south of the United States! It is not supposed to be. Yet here, it is.

This makes Detroit, for me, a city kid, very disorienting. So much so that I am always thinking that I am heading one way, when in fact I am heading another! Normally it only takes one block or so before I figure out both that and where I have gone wrong, but it doesn’t seem to matter. I keep doing it!

The People Mover makes things both better and worse.

Worse because even though it is a one direction (clockwise) loop, there is really no discernible geographic direction. Because all of the twists and turns, it is possible to see Comerica Park in the distance on the right side of the train, only to have it reappear two minutes later, closer but now on the left! Go figure. So it is nearly impossible to get a sense of how the streets (with their intersecting grids and angular avenues) relate to each other.

But the good (or better) news is that all one needs to do is get on the thing and it’ll eventually get to where you want to go.

Sort of like a Yellow Brick Road. Oh my!