GM Sold for Scrap

It was the one symbol left that Detroit Still Mattered. The GM sign on the circular 70-story-plus central building of the Renaissance Center. Though the RenCen got a lot of criticism for its fortress architecture, that sign and building could be seen for miles across the city's low-rise and often decaying landscape.

The RenCen was finally remodeled to make it a little more pedestrian-friendly from its surrounding streetscape. If you know nothing of the center, it was Fort Whitey to the extreme. Seven towers placed on a parking garage and an interior bomb-shelter-like superstructure that contained an inscrutibly laid-out shopping mall.

The whole structure was placed right on the Detroit River, and could be driven into directly from a freeway. Where it faced the city, in one direction only, there was what was called an "air-conditioning berm" that made it almost impossible to get to from the street. It looked for all the world like a deliberately-placed high fortress wall. The whole thing connected to Detroit's bizarre People-Mover, the fully automated and often empty monorail that loops around the city's often deserted downtown.

(When my younger brother first took a look at the place, he went into a tour-guide voice and said "this was built in the 1970s to repel the invading Negroes.")

The berm came down, and GM moved to the place from their former Midtown offices. If you've ever seen "Roger and Me" by Michael Moore, you could see that the former headquarters of the world's largest auto company was located in a collection of odd, musty, and completely unimpressive 1920s buildings.

Love it or hate it, the RenCen's bulk does make an impression of power. That's why the TV cameras all focused on it while the company was going down the tubes. It could end up just like the rest of Detroit: disposible, throwaway, outdated. This has become the way we treat older cities now. As the Onion wrote: "Detroit Sold For Scrap."