The Nymphs Have Departed…

Detroit, in the middle of a mild winter: it was nice to be back in the Midwest. I’ve gone back often since I left Chicago, and it always feels different each time. I stayed at The Inn on Ferry Street, in Owens House, a mansion, on a street block packed with similar houses (the Inn owns all the six houses on this particular block). Ferry Street in Detroit was a former enclave of the rich during the gilded age. There are still some amazing mansions left here though, and their scale (as personal residences go) boggles the mind. A few of these mansions are preserved on the National Register of Historic Places. These were built in the era of Detroit ascendant, houses of the wealthy that revisited the British aphorism that every man’s home is his castle. Strangely enough, these castles were built in the Queen Anne Gothic Revival style; they are imposing and quite a sight even in their doldrums. The decorations on their metopes and freezes, of cherubs, allegorical figures and nymphs have slowly faded away, worn down by time and overgrown by ivy:

And this from T.S. Eliot (TheWaste Land):

“The nymphs have departed.

And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; 

Departed, have left no addresses…

There are some efforts to restore these mansions. Nearer Wayne State, the university and other nearby institutions are quietly restoring some of the buildings, and along with them, yuppies have bought some of the houses and restored them. However, further along on Ferry street, heading to the I-74, most of the buildings are dilapidated and many are crumbling. The entire neighborhood beyond the few blocks of restored houses is blighted and driving down Ferry Street from the freeway was quite a shock. Things have gone awry here in a big way and most of it was as a result of social conditioning. As the drive for desegregation ramped up in the 1960s, the rich and upper middle class, most whites for that matter, left the city, and the remnant is slowing fading back into the prairie. Who would have believed the mighty city of Detroit would meet such a fate?

On the drive to the airport, my driver rolled through several streets with boarded up storefronts and buildings in need of urgent upkeep. I noted that one building in a stretch of blight was meticulously maintained: a funeral home. I was hit with a great sadness then. Death is big business in the ghetto, and funeral homes are sometimes the only businesses to be found in such places. Poverty such as this undermines the narrative of progress of the American century. Things have stopped progressing here and it is a sad sight.

I turned my gaze away from the blight and left the city.