"I purchased the house in October 2009 at a live county auction for $500 cash. I was 23 years old," Detroiter Drew Philp writes in BuzzFeed of his Poletown home on Detroit's east side.
The writer recalls his experiences moving to Detroit and purchasing a home in a longform personal essay.
I grew up in rural Michigan, 45 minutes away from any freeway. I’m the first male member of my family in three generations never to have worked in front of a lathe, and aside from one uncle, I’m the oldest with all of my fingers intact. The university had given me some grandiose ideas like “true solidarity with the oppressed,” and I figured “the oppressed” lived in Detroit, never mind the patrimony. I thought I was making a sacrifice. I thought moving here was staying home when everyone else was leaving the state. I thought I was going to change the world and had some vague notions of starting a school. I cringe at how naive I was. I first rented an apartment in the city, sight unseen, that didn’t have a kitchen sink, so I did my dishes in the bathtub.
I got an 8-pound puppy and named him Gratiot, after the main boulevard that runs up the east side. The date I set to move in was the day after Forestdale’s annual block party to celebrate that year’s harvest, which includes drunken hayrides, pressing our homegrown apples into cider, and bonfires. I moved in with a hangover. I didn’t think it was safe to put anything in my house that was salvageable — plumbing, wires, or heating ducts — before living there, so I had no electricity, water, or heat. The abandoned and wide-open house next door was close enough to touch from an upstairs window. I slept on top of my workbench.
I replaced a load-bearing wall in the house with a laminated beam I got from a collapsed recycling center down the street. During Labor Day weekend, eight of my friends, all of whom have built abandoned houses into homes, helped me lift it into place. It got stuck as everyone was holding it above their heads. I used a bottle jack to lift the ceiling and as I hit the beam with a sledgehammer, my friends cheered with every inch it moved until it slid home. It now holds the entire house up.
Stitched through it are vignettes of Philp's life in Detroit. The time he learned to bale hale. Being hired by a Detroit construction company because they "need a clean-cut white boy." The history of Poletown. His thoughts on Hantz Woodlands and Dan Gilbert and Whole Foods. (Mixed.)
It's surprisingly detailed for a BuzzFeed article, in a section of the website focusing more on storytelling and less on cat gifs, and offers a very personal explanation of one man's thoughts on Detroit living.
I’m not certain I’ve accomplished anything other than taking one abandoned home off the street, teaching a few kids how to read, or bearing witness to a something larger than myself. I’m not certain I’ve become an example to anyone or necessarily changed a whole lot for the better. But I’m still here. I go to bed and I wake up every day in Detroit, in a house I built with my own hands. Sometimes success means just holding on.
As a friend who grew up in Poletown put it, “We want things to flourish, but we want them to have roots.”
Read the rest right here.
