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Weekly UpdatesA few miles east of Detroit's gleaming new ballpark and glittering new casino hotels, a few miles west of the sprawling mansions lining Grosse Pointe's Lakeshore Drive, north of the General Motors assembly plant, south of the Daimler-Chrysler assembly plant, and just west of the regional airstrip known as City Airport, you'll find a five-acre parcel of land known as Fletcher Field. At first glance. Fletcher could be pretty much any park in urban America: it has a baseball diamond in one corner, an asphalt basketball court in the other, a large swing set, and a bright-red jungle gym. It has two electric-blue plastic picnic tables and one spring rider, origin unknown, in the shape of a dolphin. As of last year, it has mowed grass. As of last month, it has a small garden of flowers and a few stalks of corn, guarded by a cheerful scarecrow salvaged from the wreckage of a nearby home.
Zoom out, and the perspective changes. Fletcher lies at the heart of what is perhaps the most dangerous section of what is perhaps the most dangerous city in America. Once a working-class neighborhood, its residents employed in those nearby auto-manufacturing plants, the City Airport neighborhood, as the area is known, has crumbled. As the plants closed-and as Detroit's overall fortunes plummeted-residents (white, then black) fled the neighborhood. The exodus was under way before the 1967 race riots convulsed the region, but it accelerated in their wake, exacerbating the misunderstanding and mistrust between the two races that were trying, unsuccessfully, to share the city. Today, homes that haven't been condemned or destroyed by arson have been left to rot, some of them transformed into drug houses-cocaine and, later, crystal meth. The neighborhood school has disintegrated from the inside out, its windows shattered by stones and the occasional bullet, its metal fixtures-pipes, doorknobs, screws-stolen for scrap metal. Residents often find themselves without phone service: copper is especially valuable on the black market, and it's common to see phone lines slackened nearly to the ground, their rubber skins sliced open, the sparse remains of their inner wiring spilling out.
But it's rare, these days, to see people out walking on the streets near City Airport, or to see children playing in the park. The few residents left in the area often stay inside their houses-the drug dealers to avoid the cops; the other residents to avoid the drug dealers. "It's safer that way," says Esther Etheridge, a longtime resident who is hanging on despite the dissolution.
Neighborhoods like City Airport's often fall through the cracks when it comes to the journalistic record, victims of news outlets' tendency to focus their reporting on those who can afford to pay for it. (Ask City Airport residents what they think about the treatment they get in the press, and you'll almost always hear, after the What-treatment? laugh, "They only cover the crime.") When they're given attention, it often comes in the form of a "problem piece" an exploration of crime patterns or public-policy concerns, or of a vaguely anthropological study of "the other America." As reporting budgets tighten, though, and as reporters themselves get spread ever thinner, journalists' ability to immerse themselves in communities, get to know their residents, and attune themselves to their nuances is a luxury few big-city papers can afford.
Two things, however, distinguish the City Airport neighborhood from its counterparts: it has a small but determined group of citizens who advocate for it, and it is the subject of a blog. Both can be traced to Detroit's second-largest newspaper. On its Web site, the Detroit News hosts Going Home: A Journal on Detroit's Neighborhoods, which gives voice, with a regularity and an intensity that a resource-strapped newspaper simply cannot, to the neighborhood. Don't let its expansive tagline fool you: Going Home, at least for now, is exclusively about this neighborhood. Through prose and pictures, it introduces the areas residents and documents the neighborhood's physical devolution. It links to regular News stories, audio slideshows, and interactive graphics about the area. As a piece of journalism, Going Home is stubbornly anti-anthropological; its posts are not mere vignettes, narrated in the detached tones of reportorial observation. Going Home, as its name suggests, is highly personal.
The blog's guiding force and principal writer is Michael Happy, a News sports reporter who grew up in the City Airport neighborhood but moved away when he was twelve, in 1976. Though the neighborhood Happy remembers-mostly blue-collar factory workers, mostly Polish-Catholic-was a rough one even "back in the day," he says it was home. When he and his family left their house on Dobel Street, part of the mass exodus to the suburbs, the departure was, he says, "heartbreaking."
Happy speaks--and writes--with a sincerity that is almost anachronistic. He commonly refers, without irony, to miracles. His sleeve bears not only his heart, but also his humor and his joy and his anger. ("That Mike Happy," his childhood friend Jim Morey puts it, "you know he means it.") Happy came of age in a time and place where Elks Clubs and Cub Scouts were the norm, and when a neighborhood was distinguished by more than just geography. He spent eight years in the Navy. Community, to him, is not a goal, but an assumption.
For Happy, writing and maintaining Going Home--which he does in addition to his full-time News beat--is equal parts personal catharsis, reportorial documentation, and moral crusade. The blog's evolving narrative starts with the writer himself. In an early post, Happy describes his emotional return to the neighborhood. His old house, he writes,
The bitterness here is apt. Witnessing the area's blight firsthand, and meeting the people who live among it, it's impossible not to feel outrage-even if it's not your childhood home. Yet outrage in isolation is impotent; and over a tumult of introductory posts rolled out in late August 2007, the blog found a narrative arc that transcends atomized emotion. Happy had two realizations: first, that there are other former residents of the City Airport area who love and miss "the old neighborhood" as much as he does; and second, that those people might be enlisted to work on the neighborhood's behalf.
He was right, and as more people discovered Going Home, it soon shifted its focus, becoming less about Happy and more about community. Happy enlisted his friend and colleague, Jonathan Morgan, the News's multiplatform editor, to write the blog with him. He met a community leader named Edith Floyd-"Captain Edith," he calls her, likening her to "a diminutive U.S. Navy captain of a half-sunken ship"--who became both a friend and someone instrumental to his work in the neighborhood. He introduced readers to other residents, many of whom had moved in right after his family had left. The process was haphazard, as many things blog-related often are, but by September 2007, narrative-building had evolved into coalition-building. Telling the neighborhood's story had become working to give that story a happier ending. Happy and Morgan had begun advocating for the neighborhood. Loudly. Passionately. And their audience-mostly suburbanites-shouted back.
Comment from: 7561milton
I wanted to add my voice of support for all the work people are doing for the old neighborhood. I joined the service and left Michigan. I recognized some of the names in the blog and just want to say "Hi" to all those working hard at Fletcher Field. Community service is a tough job to do, just want to say, hang in there.
JOE Sokolowski 11/23/07 @ 11:12
Comment from: michael zielinski
Over the years I've been through the old neighborhood. And to tell the truth it made me sick to my stomach to see or not see most of the houses in the area. but I don't want to dwell on the negative ever since my brother (LITTLE JOE)called me and told me about this site, i've been pooring over the letters and pictures. Thinking about the way the old neighborhood used to look and the great friends I had back then really hits home. THANKS SO MUCH MICHAEL HAPPY GREAT JOB.AND REMEMBER YOU CAN ALWAYS GO HOME!! 03/18/08 @ 22:02
In the year since Going Home has been live, Happy, Morgan, and a team of community leaders have mobilized those who feel a claim to the neighborhood-residents both current and former-to clean up Fletcher Field, turning it from urban wasteland to playable park. They have formed an advocacy operation, Friends of Fletcher Field, to ensure that the park remains a safe place for neighborhood kids to play. They are taking steps to register Friends as a nonprofit. They have organized a reunion of now middle-aged students from the neighborhood's old high school, enlisting many of those who came out for it-some from across the country--to dedicate time and money to the neighborhood. They have met with the members of the Rotary Club and other service groups to ask for money and manpower to help the neighborhood. They have arranged for groups to speak at City Hall on its behalf. They spend so much time, in fact, either in the neighborhood or thinking and writing about it that when they laugh with each other about their wife (Happy) or their girlfriend (Morgan) leaving them over their "other woman," they're only partially joking. It's common to see a Going Home post time-stamped 2 a.m. "We're trying to be abstract and high-level here," Morgan says, "but we're also learning the resources it takes to keep things going on the ground."
ASK HAPPY AND MORGAN what Going Home is, fundamentally, and they'll tell you, without hesitating, that it's journalism--a logical extension of the work they do and the skills they've developed as professional reporters. But Going Home is more than storytelling. It is community building. It is advocacy. And Happy and Morgan aren't just reporting the neighborhood's story. They're affecting the story. In some ways, they are the story.
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