Remembering the Renaissance City: Detroit's Bicentennial Homecoming Festival and Urban Redevelopment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Remembering the Renaissance City: Detroit's Bicentennial Homecoming Festival and Urban Redevelopment by Julie Longo In 1976 the city of Detroit celebrated its 275th birthday. Designed to correspond with the American Revolution Bicentennial, Detroit's "Homecoming" festival promised "to be Michigan's biggest party ever." Complete with "jazzmen, actors, entertainers, artists, doctors, and scientists," the festival was meant to attract tourist and entertainment dollars to a city suffering racial discord, economic uncertainty, and a corporate driven "Renaissance" whose redevelopment projects would have several unfortunate outcomes.1 When asked what the bicentennial had to do with the urban crisis, Mayor Coleman Young's office answered, "Everything. If we can build Detroit as a labor history center and promote it as a tourist attraction we shall have more jobs. If our streets are filled with people enjoying fairs, exhibits, and performances, those streets will be safer, and ultimately, to the extent that we are able to involve all segments of our community, the bicentennial can help build bridges in a polarized City."2 Site of one of the worst race riots of the late 1960s, Detroit in the 1970s was fast becoming one of the most racially divided cities in America.3 Unemployment in the city proper had reached 13.1 percent by 1976 compared to the 7.4 percent national average; more than 90 percent of those unemployed inDetroit were minorities.4 Between 1974 The author is grateful to the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada, the College of Urban, Labor, and Metropolitan Affairs at Wayne State University, and the Gerald R. Ford Library inAnn Arbor for their generous support of this work. 1 Helen Fogel, "Detroit Plans Huge Bicentennial Party," Detroit Free Press, February 27,1976, A3. 2 Press release, Mayor Coleman Young, n.d., box 30, Detroit Bicentennial Commission Papers (hereafter DBC Papers), Detroit Public Library. 3 Reynolds Farley, Sheldon Danziger, and Harry J. H?lzer, Detroit Divided (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), 49. 4Marietta L. Baba, Urban Redevelopment in Detroit: The 'Renaissance Center" Model of Private Investment and the Problems of Unemployment (Detroit: Center for Urban Studies, Wayne State University, 1978), 5-6. Michigan Historical Review 32:2 (Fall 2006): 89-118 ?2006 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. 90 Michigan Historical Review and 1976, at least twenty-three major employers had moved their manufacturing businesses south, taking 150,000 Michigan jobs with them.5 In this climate of capital flight and job loss, those who could afford to leave the city did. Pervasive racism in the city's municipal departments and Detroit's law-enforcement practices escalated social tensions. The riots of 1967 sped up the exodus of whites from the city, many of whom cited their fear of race-motivated violence as the reason they were moving. Deserted by Detroiters fleeing the city for suburban communities on its periphery, by 1976 the central city looked as if it had been bombed. Both white- and black-run community businesses closed. Houses were abandoned, city services were gready affected by the loss of tax dollars, and Mayor Young found himself laying off police officers and civil servants as well as reducing the use of street lights to conserve electricity.6 Yet in the midst of this social and economic collapse, Detroit planned an urban renaissance, a civic rebirth inspired by dramatic changes to the built environment. These changes were determined by the interests of a handful of Detroit's business and civic leaders, backed by a progrowth local government. The idea for a nonprofit organization that would promote and direct city development came out of discussions among powerful Detroit businesspeople like the head of Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford II, and local financier Max Fisher, who knew they could attract capital to support large-scale building projects in the downtown area.7 They created Detroit Renaissance Incorporated, and for the next decade plans to revitalize Detroit took the name of this corporation. Robert McCabe, previously the second in command at New York City's redevelopment corporation, was hired to run it. Redevelopment inmuch of Detroit after 1970 reflected new public private relationships dominated by the belief that attracting capital was the chief...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".