Detroit's Lost Poletown

Around 1985, perusing my university library's new video collection, I ran across George Corsetti's recently released documentary film Poletown Lives! Intrigued by the title but knowing nothing about Detroit Polonia or Hamtramck, I ended up sobbing uncontrollably right there in public watching the destruction of this doomed working-class neighborhood that I'd never heard of. I could never have imagined that twenty years later I would be the mayor of Hamtramck, and that this neighborhood, this Polonia, and this history would become an integral part of my life.Author Brianne Turczynski experienced something similar, learning with shocked disbelief of the injustice done to what she calls “the little neighborhood that touched a nation.” If only that rather too facile subtitle were true. But despite Corsetti's film and eyewitness Jeanie Wylie's 1990 scholarly account, Poletown: Community Betrayed, the tragedy of Poletown's utter destruction by a cabal of city, industry, and religious powers is still little known outside Detroit's aging Polish community.So what was Poletown? After years-long rumors of its demise, in 1981, the lumbering and obsolete Dodge Main auto plant, the lifeblood of Hamtramck's economy, was finally shuttered. But painting itself as the savior of Detroit's shaky economy and its future as leader of the nation's struggling auto industry, General Motors and the City of Detroit adopted a plan to demolish not just Dodge Main but hundreds of acres in the adjacent Detroit neighborhood that came to be known as Poletown. Immaculate Conception parish, under the leadership of Father Joseph Karasiewicz, became headquarters for a grassroots movement to save the neighborhood, an ethnically and racially mixed area of working-class families, small businesses, places of worship, and local institutions. When the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of General Motors—a decision that was overturned decades later—over 4,000 residents were displaced, 144 businesses were destroyed, and sixteen churches, including Immaculate Conception, were demolished. In their place, GM built the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant, still popularly known as the Poletown Plant and now renamed Factory Zero, spanning the Detroit-Hamtramck border. The plant never fulfilled its exaggerated job creation promises, and most of what was once a community is now parking lot and landscaping. But many of the people who lived, worked, worshipped, and shopped there retain a stubborn, if melancholy, identification with the neighborhood, and its demise remains a cautionary tale for city planners and community organizers.Turczynski's Detroit's Lost Poletown is a popular retelling of this sad story, relying mainly on the above-mentioned sources, contemporary newspaper articles, archdiocesan records, and interviews with the displaced and those who witnessed and chronicled the destruction. With its cover photo of a crowd in front of Immaculate Conception church awaiting its demise, and its back cover photo of Father Karasiewicz, widely considered a martyr at the hands of unsympathetic and mercenary Archdiocese of Detroit leadership, it is also a tribute to Karasiewicz, his parishioners, and their supporters, who organized, protested, were arrested, but ultimately lost their fight for their neighborhood, their church, and, in Karasiewicz's case, his livelihood and his life.The author's own journey that led her to discover and compelled her to tell this story is in itself intriguing and full of wonder. Her purchase of a beat-up stained glass window at an estate sale began a trail of what seem to be fated coincidences leading ultimately to this book, and reveals her sensitivity and compassion for the human impact of her subject.The book is organized thematically, beginning with a perfunctory and arguably arbitrary history of Detroit, its Poles, and their traditions, told mainly through Poletown family histories and illustrated with private family photographs. This somewhat unsatisfactory overview just underscores the need for a thorough scholarly history of Detroit Polonia, hopefully the work of some future historian, but it serves its purpose here by placing us in the workplaces and households of some of the families we'll come to know better as the book continues.The next chapter, “Neighborhood Landmarks,” briefly explores a small handful of Poletown's lost institutions, and may be the most unsatisfactory section, as not all the choices are ones that come most immediately to the minds of former residents. Nor is the information provided always accurate (the Joseph F. Majeske School, for instance, is misnamed as John F. Majeske) or helpful in understanding their significance. The longest segment deals with Immaculate Conception church, which does help lay the groundwork for the struggle to save the neighborhood. At the same time, a more impactful illustration to demonstrate the church's unique importance might have been chosen.Turczynski hits her stride, however, whenever she uses material from her interviews with former Poletown residents, as she does in the next chapter. Reliving their childhood memories of the neighborhood, we are drawn into a world of evocative sights, smells, and experiences recounted with warmth and some understandable nostalgia. It ends appropriately with a focus on memories of Immaculate Conception.The next three chapters, “The Beginning of the End,” “The Powers that Be,” and “Exodus,” delve in detail into the meat of the story. They are the longest and most well-developed sections, blending interview material with historical research, just as the lives and livelihoods of the real people to whom we are introduced are upended by powerful decision-makers acting under the cloak of institutional impunity. Turczynski recounts the neighborhood's struggles with economic and demographic changes familiar to so many American manufacturing centers. She outlines the community's gradual understanding of and response to the developing plans to claim and decimate their neighborhood. And she looks back with the hindsight of the decades that followed to reveal the long-term effects on individuals, on families, and on community. It is a sad and maddening story, and Turczynski tells it with compassion and sensitivity.For readers interested in learning more about Poletown and its destruction, the book outlines several other resources, including the Corsetti film and Wylie study, as well as the photographs of Bruce Harkness, who chronicled the neighborhood in its last days. Harkness's latest book, Photographs from Detroit, 1975–2019, edited by PAHA's own John Bukowczyk (Ohio University Press, 2022), contains some of those photos, and Harkness is currently working on a compilation of memoirs by neighborhood residents. Additionally, the Humans of Chene Street Facebook page, an offshoot of the University of Michigan's Chene Street History Project, also contains many photographs and oral history excerpts from former residents. Another documentary, Taking Poletown: A Community's Fight Over Economic Justice & Eminent Domain, completed in 2021, is available on YouTube.As part of the larger landscape of works on Poletown, Brianne Turczyński is to be commended for telling its story with compassion and sympathy, and for keeping its memory alive and introducing it to new audiences through her public presentations. She is an engaging storyteller who cares deeply about her subject, and through Detroit's Lost Poletown, her readers and listeners can't help but care about Poletown, too. And mourn its loss

History · Race, History, and American Society · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies