Scrappers began showing up almost immediately after the last patient left the nursing home in August 2011.
They’re still showing up. They have ripped out the copper and virtually anything that is metal. They have cut through the fences. They have knocked valves off the plumbing fixtures, which sends water gushing constantly into the basement. Mike Stapleton, co-owner of Prop Art Studio next door, has welded shut the doors, but the scrappers still get in. They recently removed the windows and the frames, so the old nursing home, a modern building attached to a century-old house with turrets, sits on E. Grand Boulevard near Jefferson, a corpse-in-waiting midway through its death cycle.
“I worry about a fire now,” Stapleton says. “It’s nothing but raw kindling.”
Welcome to Detroit, Mr. Orr.
Can you restore the once-bustling corner of E. Jefferson and the Boulevard? Can you at least stop the scrappers? Can you reduce the arson? Can you get the street lights working? Can you extricate the city from its own, half-century-old death cycle?
Today marks Kevyn Orr’s first day on the job as Detroit’s state-appointed emergency financial manager. It’s a historic day in a city that has had an elected mayor for 189 years. Orr will enjoy powers beyond those of any mere mayor to restructure Detroit’s finances and improve its government services. His appointment is only the latest of many attempts to fix Detroit, but it is by far the most drastic and controversial.
Orr's arrival comes at a time of apprehension. The former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, sits in a prison cell in Milan, awaiting sentencing for running a criminal enterprise out of city hall. Candidates are organizing to run in the municipal elections later this year, even though their powers will be diminished under Orr. The leading mayoral candidates have slammed his appointment.
While many Detroiters have told interviewers they are hoping Orr can help repair their broken city, a loud and organized opposition has arisen, partly because a white Republican governor opponents call the gangster nerd has sent the emergency manager to govern a black Democratic city. Critics promise civil disobedience.
Some opponents say the emergency manager usurps voting rights. Others say Orr is likely to sell off assets. Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit branch of the NAACP, likens the imposition of an emergency manager to a poll tax. He told the New York Times, “It’s not about how we should brace for Mr. Orr. Mr. Orr should brace for Detroit.”
Jesse Jackson visited on Friday and encouraged Detroiters to take to the streets. “Detroit cannot be reduced to a rummage sale,” he said.
The takeover takes place amid the rising inequality of modern-day America, which makes the struggle to turn around the nation’s poorest big city all the more arduous.
Orr is a black Democrat who is an attorney and expert at turnarounds and complex bankruptcies, though his roles mostly have kept him in the background, away from public view. He has said he is not a politician, but he will have to play one here if he is to convince skeptics his moves are smart and just.
In the short time since Gov. Rick Snyder introduced him, Orr has traveled the city accompanied by heavy security, impressing almost everyone with his presence, intelligence and ability to talk a lot and say little. He is fond of declaring Detroit has unlimited potential.
Snyder has kept talking about how the city needs to balance its books and improve services, but he has given few details on how that will be done.
Detroit has at least a $327 million budget deficit and more than $14 billion in long-term debt.
Scrappers are like rodents
It also has hundreds and probably thousands of intersections like E. Jefferson and the Boulevard, where homeowners and business owners struggle to survive amid the ruins of a once mighty metropolis that now produces scrappers and other desperate agents of deindustrialization in large numbers.
The neighborhood of Jefferson and the Boulevard has a lot going for it. The streets are two broad avenues that come together as the gateway to Belle Isle, and the corner is anchored by a thriving Tim Hortons and Big Boy restaurant. Prop Art, next door to the donut shop, creates three-dimensional figures, sculptures and other exhibits for a national clientele in a 103-year-old barn-like structure that was used in the World War I era to charge electric automobiles. Farther north on the Boulevard is a well-kept apartment building.
But the area also is home to variety of abandoned structures and forgotten landscapes, like the untrimmed bushes and trees around the corner on E. Congress that grow in summer to block part of the street and hide the scrappers as they rip apart the vacant nursing home. When I visited Friday, two wild dogs wandered through the vacant lot behind the Big Boy.
Stapleton, who owns Prop Art with his sister, Denise Abrash, said after the nursing home closed, a new owner had a plan to use it for a halfway house for 180 early-release prisoners. Residents and business owners opposed it, but at every step they ran into a sclerotic bureaucracy that offered little help. Eventually the plan was dropped.
Stapleton said he has called police six times over the months. They showed up three times – coincidentally when the boat races were being held nearby – and each time they took scrappers into custody.
He said he has no idea if the scrappers were charged. His late father was a Detroit police detective, and Stapleton said he understands the understaffed department has to make violent crime a priority.
“The scrappers are like rodents,” Stapleton said. “They find a way in, and they work at night. They find the easy spots. They eat away at the back of the building and when they are done in the back, they move to the front.”
With every city department in some stage of dysfunction on top of the staggering financial crisis, does Stapleton believe Orr can make a difference at Jefferson and the Boulevard?
“I think we’re going to have a little better shot at it,’” he said. “They need to figure it out. I like it that the FBI and other federal agencies will be patrolling. I think it’s going to help. We know this is not working.”
