GENEVA DATELINE » NYT LETTERS

Remaking Motor City

April 20, 2013   ·   0 Comments

Source: NYTX

Above: From a photo on the front page of the NYT digital edition, 14 April. Hole in the ground after the demolition of Hudson's Department Store

From: Eugene Schulman

To: Editor, New York Times

Sir,

Regarding David Segal's article (NYT, 14 April, 2013) A Missionary's Quest to Remake Motor City, I certainly wish Dan Gilbert well. But I think he is going about refurbishing Detroit in the wrong way.

It is one thing to buy up a lot of old buildings on the cheap, but quite another to fill them up, or bring people back to the downtown area.

Gilbert's top down attitude is exactly what's wrong.

What made Detroit a thriving city was it's manufacturing base and the huge numbers of jobs it provided over the years.

All that began to disappear during WWII when manufacturing went West. And then to the far East.

Those jobs will never return to Detroit, and the remaining population can only think of one thing, getting out and finding those jobs elsewhere.

Unless Mr. Gilbert can bring jobs back to his beloved city, it will remain empty and boarded up.

There was actually an opportunity a couple of years ago when the automobile companies were going under before Mr. Obama bailed them out. What a mistake that was.

All that bail out money went to the owners who failed to reinvest it into jobs or infrastructure.

If that money had gone into creating another industry on the grave of the auto industry, such as manufacturing high speed rail transport, jobs would be pouring back into Detroit, stores would be active, and real estate values would be soaring. Alas.

The David Stott Bldg. on Griswold Street, Detroit.
Just one block south of Hudson's Department Store.

From my father's 30th floor office windows, one could look north toward Hudson's, and west over the Detroit River into Windsor, Canada.

What a nostalgia trip. I was born in Detroit one year after the David Stott Bldg. was built. My father, who was in the construction business in Detroit (Seyburn & Schulman) purchased the building in the late 1930s. Our family continued to own it after we moved to Los Angeles in 1943. It was sold, I believe, sometime during the 1960s, when I discovered that my brothers and I were nominally the owners.

I well remember the trips downtown with my mother to visit my father at his offices in the building, and perhaps have lunch and a shopping expedition at Hudson's department store. How sad it is to see what has become of Detroit after all these years.

Eugene Schulman
Geneva, Switzerland

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