"Tell people that you live in New York City, and they ask which neighborhood. Tell them that you lived in Rome, and they ask how you could ever leave.
"Tell them that you lived in Detroit, and they ask, 'Why?' ”
So begins a column in The New York Times by Frank Bruni, a regular columnist who spent five years in Detroit in the 1990s as a reporter for the Free Press.
Bruni writes that he loved Detroit, "not in an electric way but in the way you love something honest and unforced, the way you love someone who doesn’t wear any masks or makeup and doesn’t insist that you do."
He continues:
"There is one nice thing in particular I want to say about Detroit, by which I mean not just the city but the broader metropolitan area, including Dearborn to the west, Oakland County to the north and, to the east, the Grosse Pointes, where I lived for two years after three in downtown Detroit. Bereft of vanity, Detroit is bereft, too, of pose and pretense. The people there don’t tether their identities to the luster or mythology of their surroundings. Their self-image isn’t tied to their ZIP codes.
"I encountered little smugness in Detroit. Sure, there were people who talked boastfully about buying a house in Grosse Pointe Farms rather than Grosse Pointe Park. There were people invested in the cars they drove. This was the Motor City, after all.
"But Detroiters didn’t dash as madly to the hot new restaurant. They didn’t chatter as preciously about their preferred summer weekend destination. And that wasn’t just about limited means. It was about different, more down-to-earth priorities.
