New York transplant Toby Barlow, chief creative officer for the Team Detroit advertising agency, has lived in Detroit since 2006.
A Lafayette Park resident, Barlow has been a Detroit supporter -- almost a booster -- who has written positive pieces about improving the city for the New York Times, including one in 2009 about making Detroit a bike utopia and another last November in which he offered five simple steps to "lead Detroit back to awesomeness." (Step 5: "Everybody move here." Simple?) He also is one of the founders of the Signal-Return letterpress print shop in Eastern Market, and he is the author of the critically acclaimed novel "Sharp Teeth," a story about werewolves in Los Angeles written in verse.
He is also a man about town.
Barlow is frustrated. He's mad at the banking system that refuses to deal with Detroit's foreclosure problem. And he's angry people dump their boats in Detroit. He writes it's suburbanites who are doing the dumping -- that's probably true, at least in part. But Detroiters own boats, too, and it's difficult to tell where a boat came from when it's sitting on the high ground of a vacant lot.
A boat lie on its side in an empty lot. Abandoned in a neighborhood miles from the water, a neighborhood where no one can afford boats, let alone the truck and the trailer that would haul the boat there. But there lies the boat. Now multiply that boat by 50 or even 100, tossed over the years in lots all over the city.
It isn’t a metaphor. They come from the suburbs, dumped in Detroit because that seems to be the easiest and cheapest way to dispose of such a thing. They dump other things too, none of it legal, and it all becomes a part of a neighborhood.
There are other stories that are harder to see. An empty, boarded-up house might represent someone who has moved on, a symbol of the abandonment this city has seen as thousands of people have, over time, moved out beyond the city limits.
But that emptiness might indicate another history.
