A Landscape of Ruin and Repair: Parks, Potatoes, and Detroit's Environmental Past, 1879–1900

The Michigan Historical Review 40:1 (Spring 2014): 49-72©2014 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved A Landscape of Ruin and Repair: Parks, Potatoes, and Detroit's Environmental Past, 1879-1900 By Joseph Stanhope Cialdella During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Detroit was in a state of disarray. Air quality was poor, and the smells of the city were less than inviting. City reports and newspapers recorded numerous complaints, from the filthy conditions at the Eastern Market and the muddy streets, standing water, and sinkholes on the Eastside near Bloody Run Creek, to the unsanitary and abandoned buildings on Michigan Avenue and Fort Street.1 Most of the city's effluence found its way to the Detroit River, because, as census worker J.C. Holmes noted in 1880, "The natural drainage of Detroit is not very good, and is by no means depended on for the drainage of the city." 2 In addition to these environmental concerns, tensions between residents of the city festered as they tangled over issues of immigration, unemployment and population growth. In just ten years the city's population nearly doubled from 116,000 in 1880 to 205,000 in 1890, with nearly a quarter of the residents (over 45,000) listed as "foreign-born."3 Like many American cities during this period, Detroit was defined by the characteristic demographic, economic, and environmental transformations of a growing industrial center that created a landscape of seemingly perpetual ruin and repair.4 1 For example of complaints regarding environmental conditions in the city, see Journal of the Common Council of the City of Detroit, 1894-95 (Detroit: Allied Printing, 1895), 1300. The Detroit Evening News was dismayed to find abandoned and neglected buildings after a recent tour of the area. "Fort Street West," Detroit Evening News, April 1, 1894. 2 U.S. Census Bureau, Tenth Census of the United States, 1880 (New York, NY: Norman Ross Publishing, 1991), 605-09. 3 Michigan Department of State, Census of the State of Michigan, 1894, Vol. I (Lansing, MI: R. Smith and Company, 1896), 216-227. 4 In his work, Another City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), architectural historian Dell Upton refers to late eighteenth and nineteenth century American urban centers as "cities of perpetual ruin and repair" (pp. 19-40). In this essay, I use the terminology to think about the meaning of Detroit's burgeoning industrial landscape. 50 The Michigan Historical Review Amidst this chaotic urban development, city leaders imagined ways they might transform Detroit into not just a manufacturing hub but also a place with the order and prestige of a great metropolis. There were many political, economic, and social ideas that individuals, civic organizations, and the municipal government employed to meet the challenges of reconciling human life with urban expansion. Among these choices, leaders in Detroit also wondered: Could parks and gardens serve as necessary tools to mend this broken landscape, achieve social cohesion, and meet their own expectations about Detroit's future? Among the defining features of Detroit's past, parks and gardens are generally not the first of these ideas that come to mind. Compelling histories of the automobile and other technological transformations, industrialization, race relations, and, more recently, a place and a people devastated by the policies of urban disinvestment, have instead come to define the city's history. However, connected to these better-known stories of Detroit's past is an urban environmental ethic where the role of parks and gardens helped make Detroit a modern city of national significance. The growing City Beautiful movement, with its ethos of visual order and neoclassical design, National Parks, and an environmentalism caught between notions of preservation and conservation, were spreading across the United States during this period; in Detroit, city and civic leaders, planners, and everyday residents increasingly recognized the value and power of the environment in which they lived. As they debated ways to reshape and reuse the city's landscape, Detroiters developed strands of a nascent urban environmentalism, which they used to invent and test ideas about how human relationship with nature would function in an industrial setting. In particular, the development and construction of two...

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