The “Motor City” across the straits from Canada reached its apogee with Second World War production, when the automotive “Big Three”—Ford, General Motors and Chrysler—and related industries provided a solid industrial base, burgeoning employment and global clout. Five decades later, Detroit symbolizes the rustbelt— hemorrhaging people and jobs and deeply scarred by racial division. The estimated 1998 urban population plunged below 1 million (the metropolitan area exceeds 4 million).

Where Motown music celebrated an exuberant city in the 1960s, the recurrent arson of “Devil’s Night”—when abandoned property blazes on Halloween—provides an eerier emblem for the 1990s.

As Thomas Sugrue argues in The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1998), Detroit’s discrimination in employment and housing laid the foundations for later decline, foreshadowed in 1943 riots. While manufacturing drew diverse workers, neither owners nor the powerful United Auto Workers established equality. By the 1950s, automation cost jobs and the city lacked land for updated plants, which scattered around the US. The city’s growing black population was slammed by segregation and diminishing opportunities. Bloody riots in 1967 increased white flight to Grosse Point, Oak Park, Dearborn Heights, etc., while the inner city languished.

Capital and production shifts to cheaper assembly areas as well as the rise of foreign cars further drained the economy in the 1970s and 1980s, as an African American mayor Coleman Young tried to respond with urban patronage.

Detroit retains vestiges of its one-time wealth and power, from the Diego de Rivera murals in the Art Institute to its extensive library Wayne State University and its successful sports teams—Tigers (baseball), Pistons (basketball) and Redwings (hockey). Yet continuing crises overshadow the city in Ze’ev Chafet’s Devil’s Nïght (1990) or the chilling future of Robocop (1987).