Into Detroit’s backwater
“For every riverfront there’s a backwater. River Rouge follows the city’s westernmost border through marsh, heavy industry, and warrens of postwar housing. It flows far from the showpiece parks of downtown, extreme and remote. Polluted, dangerous, exhilarating; snaking through dockyards and half-submerged pilings and back porches; a site of forgotten history and sublimated trauma; a landscape teeming with odd characters and strange lore; a place that deserves a second look, a second chance before it, too, in the face of demographic change and accelerating development, becomes New Detroit.”
For a long-form feature in Landscape Architecture Magazine, I paddled down an industrial waterway at the margins of Detroit. The story is as meandering as the River Rouge itself. Along the way, as I float towards the confluence with Detroit River, it digresses into labor history, geological record, environmental justice, apocrypha, and personal reflection. It manages to swerve into the Diego Riviera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts, visit Henry Ford’s palatial estate on the eve of his death, and put up at a legendary local strip joint. For those especially curious, the piece also indicates the coordinates of my future final resting place.
The Rouge isn’t widely known in Detroit, let alone beyond it. Yet it presents a complicated and urgent case study in the development of American cities — and its environmental, social, and human costs.
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I was fortunate to come across knowledgeable and generous sources whose voices animate the story. Urban planner Damon Rich, University of Michigan professors Paul Draus and Orin Gelderloos, and landscape architect Sam Lovall contributed a flood of information. And my friend David Kukier served as guide, companion, and photographer on the story. Kukier’s photographs unblinkingly document the debris of a post-industrial city.