Editor,
I’m also a native of Detroit, the one we both grew up in, the one that doesn’t exist anymore. As five years her senior, I also experienced the intense energy that even a child could sense as that city mechanized to match the already mechanized and marching Germany.
When the War ended, Detroit went back to being the Car Capital of the world. We had won! Everything was growing. Everything except downtown Detroit’s central business district of tall buildings and impressive shopping. J.L. Hudson had 14 floors filled with the best of everything.
I think I heard that Aretha was around ten when she arrived in Detroit. That would be 1952. In 1953 I graduated from Lincoln High in Ferndale, the first northern suburb, just across that infamous 8 Mile Rd. By 20, I was married and had a secretarial job at a law office on an upper floor of one of the tall bank buildings. From my daily elevator rides I saw the empty office spaces on floor after floor. It never once occurred to me that I was witnessing the death by desertion of this once dynamic, alive and extremely successful city. I don’t know the reasons behind moving the downtown prosperity to the northern suburbs of Oakland County but I do know that nature abhors a void and the world has witnessed what became of the remains of that once proud city.
Why Aretha’s Detroit connection brought all this painful past history to mind was the interview I heard with Smokey Robinson who spoke of living behind Aretha in a neighborhood that included Diana Ross and other famous talents. What stopped me in my tracks was when he mentioned that Aretha lived on Boston Blvd.
The main street in Detroit is Woodward Ave. It used to run from the Detroit River north to the distant suburbs. I lived one block west of Woodward and two blocks north of 8 Mile. The Woodward Ave. bus would take you all the way downtown and just before you got there you would pass Boston Blvd. and a couple of other residential streets that displayed palatial homes unlike any other viewed from Detroit’s main street on the eight mile ride to downtown. These homes must have been built by the early elites of Detroit society.
The last I heard of Boston Blvd. was it had been hit by White Flight in the mid to late ‘50s. All this time later I find these white like me but very rich people were fleeing families that brought up Aretha, Smokey, Diana and others. And I am glad Aretha still claimed Detroit as home. I also hope that the descendants of those whites who thoughtlessly abandoned a city to protect their profits are a little ashamed of their heritage. It seems to have set the direction this whole country has taken. By the ‘80s it was an openly stated fact, “It’s all about the money!”
I hope the artists and others who are attempting to rebuild downtown Detroit can create a new national compass to reset our direction, which the Soul of our Nation is sorely in need of at this moment in time.
Julia Brumitt
Eureka Springs