I’ve only been to Detroit once, this past July. Actually, it would be more accurate to say I’ve been through Detroit. I was returning to St. Louis from Toronto via Greyhound and had a brief pitstop in the U.S. Customs check point as well as the bus terminal. Neither, as you might expect, were impressive.
As the bus returned to the surface after going through the tunnel under the canal connecting two great lakes: St. Clair & Erie, I managed to snap the shot you see at right. The tall towers are Renaissance Place, home to General Motors and one of Detroit’s costly “urban renewal” attempts. The towers looked much better when viewed from across the canal from Windsor, Ontario.
Detroit has many things in common with St. Louis, besides being in the 2006 World Series. For starters, we both have a Fox Theatre. In fact, our Fox and their Fox are twins. The attractive similarities end there. Tragic similarities include massive highway projects that divided both cities, large scale urban renewal projects designed from an anti-city perspective and massive population losses. St. Louis has Delmar as a racial dividing line while Detroit has 8-Mile as the separator between city and county.
Detroit, at its peak in the 1950s, had around 1,850,000 in population for a density of 13,309 people per square mile. St. Louis, also peaking in the 1950s, had roughly 850,000 in our smaller 62 square miles for a population density of 13,709. Today, however, detroit is more densely populated than St. Louis. Per MayorSlay.com, Detroit has “approximately 950,000 residents” and is “approximately 139 square miles in area.” To refresh your memory, St. Louis has roughly 350,000 residents within 62 square miles. That works out to a density of 6,834 people per square mile in Detroit and only 5,645 people per square in St. Louis. To look at this another way, to equal Detroit’s recent population density we’d need a total of 423,708 residents — an increase of 73,708 people! That represents more than a 20% increase over our current population numbers, and that is just to get to their low number with respect to density. I want to see St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay bet Detroit’s mayor not on the outcome of the World Series but that we’ll match their population density in say 10 years.
I’ve posted a few more pictures, including a couple of Detroit as seen from Windsor, Ontario, on my Flickr account in group on Detroit. Not that Wiki is perfect but here are links to St. Louis and Detroit.
Well, time to stop writing and start rooting. It is top of the 7th in Game 4 of the World Series and we are down a run to Detroit.
