Ta-Nehisi Coates, an author a senior editor at The Atlantic, visited Detroit in 2011 and spent time in Palmer Woods, the neighborhood probably mayoral candidate Benny Napoleon dismissed as "not in Detroit" in an interview with a Detroit News reporter. Coates' article described Palmer Woods as a "wormhole out of the angry city and into an opulent idyll," and said he was amazed when he saw the area for the fist time.
Coates writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir "The Beautiful Struggle."
"Palmer Woods now sits on a census block group that, according to the most-recent available data, is 81 percent black, and it is arguably the American black elite’s most majestic enclave. When I first visited, in the fall of 2009, I was awestruck. I had seen well-heeled black neighborhoods before—the prosperous suburbs ringing Atlanta and Washington, D.C., Chatham in Chicago, Baldwin Hills in L.A. But the gates of Palmer Woods are a wormhole out of the angry city and into an opulent idyll. Sleepy curvilinear streets with names like “Strathcona Drive” and “Argyle Crescent” snake through the 188-acre hamlet and its sprawling, irregular lots. Across Seven Mile Road sits the venerable, members-only Detroit Golf Club, which remained all-white until 1986."
"Even as Detroit groaned under the weight of crime, failing schools, and high taxes, Palmer Woods held steady. But the country’s financial straits, particularly the collapse of the real-estate bubble and the struggles of the Big Three automakers, were a direct assault on the region’s twin pillars: houses and cars. The neighborhood association considers approximately 15 out of its 292 homes to be in jeopardy. Problems that were once rare—crime, for instance—are cropping up, as Palmer Woods at last succumbs to the gravity of the city. As a result, those who were once excluded from the neighborhood’s vision of the American dream are now in the position of defending it."
"I took my first tour of Palmer Woods on a chilly fall evening with Barbara and Spencer Barefield and their Saint Bernard, Devo. Barbara is Jewish and a native New Yorker, edits the Palmer Woods Post, and helps organize neighborhood events—block picnics, classical concerts, and home tours. Spencer is African American, a jazz guitarist and composer; like Karen Batchelor, he moved to Palmer Woods as a teenager, in the wake of the riots. Spencer’s mother still lives around the corner in the home he grew up in."
