For the second time in five days, crime in northwest Detroit and the stay-or-go choice for families there Is the focus of a writer who knows that neighborhood well.
Last week's personal reflections came from Sarah Hulett, assistant news director at Michigan Radio, who wrote at Bridge magazine and her network's site about two muggings and a home invasion during recent months in the area where she has lived for 15 years.
Rollo Romig grew up on Gainsborough Road (center), a few blocks north of Grand River Avenue.
Now, in a New Yorker reprint from a new book, Rollo Romig recalls his childhood on Gainsborough Road in North Rosedale Park from 1975 (when he was 1) until his family moved in 1994 -- four years after a murder hit close to home.
For nearly two decades, the beautiful things about living there easily eclipsed the crimes that finally drove us away. . . .
My parents had no idea what a paradise North Rosedale could be until they moved in. All they knew was that they could buy a gorgeous house there for only thirty thousand dollars, and that was good enough. It was a big yellow-brick colonial, built solid in 1928 and clearly designed for a family with means: a wood-burning fireplace in the living room, a leaded-glass window on the stair. . . .
It was good enough that there was a lot we were willing to ignore. Five months after we moved to North Rosedale, three men with guns took my mother’s purse while she chatted outside a friend’s house on a perfect May evening.
Paradise changed more dramatically during the 1980s, "when Detroit was best known for its murder rate and for burning itself down on Devil’s Night," Romig writes, recalling that his pal Chuckie once found a woman's naked corpse in the local park.
This kind of thing could happen anywhere. That’s what we told ourselves.
Or, when that didn’t work, we’d think of each burglary and carjacking and rape and murder as an isolated incident, and another isolated incident, and yet another isolated incident. To live in Detroit is like having religion — it requires faith in unprovable and sometimes irrational things. To live in Detroit is to live in hope, and when people live in hope they have to ignore some things that they know are true. That’s just how hope works.
But hope alone couldn’t keep the chaos from seeping in.
The tipping point came when a neighbor was slain in a 1990 burglary.
At six o’clock that morning, Andy and Sally heard a loud crash from downstairs. Andy went down to investigate, and Sally heard him shout his last words: “Get out! Get out!” Then there were two gunshots and Andy bled to death on his kitchen floor. . . .
I had already left for college by the time my parents finally moved my younger sisters out of the city.
Romig, 40, cherishes his overall experiences in "the greatest place any of us have ever lived."
What North Rosedale really gave us was an occasion to rise to. The disaster of Detroit can be tremendously demoralizing. . . . But disaster can also deliver a jolt of purpose —something to live for beyond comfort or safety or personal amusement.
Maybe people stay in Detroit because they know that the city heightens their need for their neighbors. Our vulnerability made us huddle together, and we wanted to have to huddle together. Community is a reflex that’s sharpened by necessity. . . .
None of my sisters or I are tempted to move back. But we’ve never wished we grew up anywhere else.
His essay also appears in the Detroit edition of the Wildsam Field Guides, a two-year-old series that describes itself as "equal parts travel guide and tribute."
-- Alan Stamm
Earlier at Deadline Detroit:
What Detroiters Talk About When They Talk About Crime, June 26, 2014
