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Handy (Jam) OrganizationDetroit: City on the Move (1965)

Promotional film made for the City of Detroit, an unsuccessful bidder for the Olympic Games. With views of city highways, automobile manufacturing, a diverse population, and social activities, all shot prior to the city's economic decline.


This movie is part of the collection: Prelinger Archives

Producer: Handy (Jam) Organization
Audio/Visual: Sd, C
Keywords: Detroit, Michigan; City planning; Race relations

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

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Reviewer: Scribble - - August 19, 2008
Subject: The Folly of Urban Planning
Dear Mr or Ms. Smythology

I had a quick visit to the amusing link you provided in your review (white-history), it amazes me that despite the mountains of evidence provided by science to the contrary, there are still those who insist on separating humanity into self-emerged "races" rather than recognizing the fact that we all share a common ancestry, directly traceable to the African continent.

Whatever differences we have are a result of cultural development that occurred in separation, this isolation has virtually disappeared in the age of globalization, but it will take some time before we recognize our common humanity and hopefully transcend our tribal nature, sites like "white-history" do nothing to contribute to this goal that is truly central to our survival.

The film was quite good as well...more well intentioned mis-steps that we can all learn from.

Reviewer: Seto-Kaiba_Is_Stupid - - August 18, 2008
Subject: Detroit still sucks
40 years after this piece of garbage was made, nice buildings are still being torn down. Just google it.

Reviewer: Charles_G - - August 18, 2008
Subject: "Modernity," "Progress," and Other Disastrous Concepts
"A new renaissance is changing the face of the city. This renaissance, seen everywhere, is the direct result of considered planning ... [planners are] creating a new concept of urban efficiency." -Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh

This video provides a neat and concise overview of the catastrophically destructive city-planning of the postwar era, visited not only upon Detroit but upon almost every major American city. This vision for planning centered around several key components: the subservience of the city to the needs of the automobile, the rejection of fine-grained urban fabric in favor of massive glass-and-concrete towers set in open areas, and above all, a worshipful attitude toward "progress" and "modernity" which entailed a complete rejection of the ideas, traditions and styles of the past. Driving all the destruction was a quasi-totalitarian planning board salivating over the prospect of federal highway and urban renewal funds.

It is this ideology that is responsible for this 1965 video, in which the filmmakers happily focus the camera on massive highway interchanges and profoundly unattractive architecture which the Mayor tells us -- with apparent sincerity -- is "creating a new image of beauty and function." Notably absent are any images of Detroit's historic, pre-war neighborhoods. The only exception is the Disneyland-like tourist village, confirming the impression that in this "modern" Detroit, the only permissible remnants of the past will be those kept as museum pieces.

Tall new office towers are praised simply for being tall and new, as though that alone was sufficient justification for their existence. In the new Detroit, the mayor boasts, children will be sent to "the most modern of schools," as though the grim, dark and depressing one-story schoolhouse shown in the video will somehow help to educate Detroit's children in a way that the distinguished neo-Gothic, Classical and Romanesque revival buildings of the pre-1945 period could not.

Also notable is the reference to the so-called slums: as the Mayor puts it, "the ugliness, the poverty and sickness of slums." These defects have been remedied, the Mayor assures us, by clearing the slums. Now, certainly it should have occurred to someone in city government that a building cannot be poor, nor can a building really be sick -- these are characteristics of people, not structures. The only remaining characteristic, ugliness, is rather subjective whether applied to people or architecture, and cannot be grounds for condemnation for a building in any event. Yet the Major proclaims all these problems magically solved by the demolition of entire "slum" neighborhoods.

But enough. The video is a catalogue of urban failure, delivered in a naive and optimistic tone that seems almost incredible today (I will not even touch the racial angle, which others have talked about). The damage done by the planners alone will take decades to undo. But for now, visit the web page of Wayne State University, which appears in the video. Their homepage features students not in front of the 1960s-era buildings from the film, but rather a handsome brick and limestone hall from the early 20th century. Appreciation for the architecture and planning of the past, which this country so inexcusably and callously discarded in the 1950s and 1960s, has at last returned and is helping to reinvigorate inner-city neighborhoods through private renovation and reinvestment of historic structures, rather than demolition and destruction. Meanwhile, videos like this should be required viewing for all urban planning students -- as a lesson in the dangers of hubris, and the importance of humility.

Reviewer: smythology - - June 10, 2007
Subject: The beginning of the end.
This film only interested me for comparative reasons. But it also gives me a sense of nostalgic pathos - as do most of the other historical documentaries on what American cities used to be like.

And Frequency, the fact that disgusting white elites decided to level certain neighborhoods barely gives reason to the dystopian state that Detroit has turned itself into. And I'm not ashamed to say this is only due to the steady influx of the black population. To this day, white homes get bulldozed as well (because of renewal programs and newly legislated zoning laws) but I've yet to see their response by means of rioting and violence.

This is just the icing on the cake. You can read more about it here:

http://www.amren.com/918issue/9108issue.html

Also, here is an interesting "photographic essay" on Detroit's ruins:

http://www.white-history.com/hwrdet.htm

Reviewer: Paul Wicks - - March 5, 2006
Subject: I Knew the Writer
My father worked for Jam Handy, in Detroit, and was a friend of Bob Casemore, who is credited as the script writer for this film. It's interesting to note that my father and Bob Casemore were polar opposites, in their political views. Bob Casemore, (like me, curiously enough) represented the liberal perspective. I can attest to the genuine love he had for Detroit, and *all* it's people.

Three years later, when the riots and National Guard response changed our perceptions of Detroit, our naiveté had gone missing.

The aguments about what percentage of the population was white or black goes nowhere until you notice that these numbers change radically in a matter of a few months. Most of those who could afford to, moved to a nearby suburb. It's not that this wasn't already a trend for the prior decade, but there was a... punctuated equilibrium in 1967.

If you'd looked at the various populations in the Detroit metropolitan areas, you'll see all the same people, in the same ratios, just living further apart.

By 1978, I'd moved back into detroit, which was still devistated and had a little further to fall, at that point. But it was cheap, convenient, and multicultural. I was living a somewhat tarnished version of Bob Casemore's dream for Detroiters.

Bottom line: This film is not so much a white-wash, as it is the hopeful world-view of a well meaning and good-hearted writer. It just sounds suspect, when spoken by Detroit's Mayor, Jerry Cavenough. Another friend of my father's, Loren Estleman, wrote a book about Detroit, Mayor Cavenuagh, and this period of time called Stress. See: http://www.twbookmark.com/books/79/0446403679/

Reviewer: frequency13 - - February 11, 2006
Subject: Review and response
This is a fascinating piece for a number of reasons. Not the least reason is the effort of the mayor and filmmakers to put the best face on a city *already* drowning in racial tension (just how long can a city confine its black people to the worst neighborhoods?) as well as economic and population decline--nearly 300,000 people less lived in Detroit in 1965 than did in 1950. We must remember that the postwar boom for Detroit lasted less than a decade--Packard, Studebaker and Hudson all folded in the recession of the mid-1950s. Interstate highway construction combined with the politics of race to lead whites with means to begin to depart for the suburbs immediately after the second world war. Sugrue does a magnificent job in his book "The Origins of the Urban Crisis" to disprove the commonly held view that the city's decline began with the rebellion of 1967. Clearly, this is a city already declining at the time of filming.

That said, Slang, I was appalled at your comment of "accurate". I did not take an official count, but it appeared that roughly one out of ten participants in the film were non-white. Most often, these were black people filmed walking in crowds. Detroit was to become a majority black city by the early 1970s, but it's proportion of blacks had already swelled to 35% by 1965, (44% just 5 years later) far higher than the proportion of blacks shown in the film. Therefore, the film is *far* from an accurate portrayal of the population of the city. As for the "distain" that you mention, it's clear that you are disdainful of Detroit in it's current vestige and not disdainful of 1965 Detroit. I won't speculate on the reasons for your opinion, but I would point out that the behavior of white elites (both locally and nationally) in the 1950s and 1960s was indeed disgusting. Detroit's most notable example was the destruction of Paradise Valley by highway construction, "urban renewal", and other projects sold to well-meaning ignorant liberals by venemous racists. One such liberal, the mayor, mentions the "condeming and clearing" of a neighborhood for construction of the DMC in the film. The ignorant might ask, "Gee whiz, why can't those blacks stay in their neighborhoods?" Oh yeah! The government bulldozed their houses and businesses!

Again, the piece is fascinating, but it is best watched with "accurate" knowledge of Detroit's history.

Reviewer: slang - - December 27, 2005
Subject: Remember the city, date....
Spuzz this was filmed in 1965 and accurate. It was not a black dominated populous when filmed. Not curious, accurate.

DSKruse I think you are letting your distain for the Detroit of today cloud your memory of Detroit then.

Fantasic movie, real treat.

Reviewer: Spuzz - - April 18, 2003
Subject: Detroit: It's many secrets..
In this curious film, dating to 1965, Detroit is shown to be the cosmopolitan center of the universe, yet burying it's many secrets in a whirlwind of curious information. Narrated (badly) by the mayor at the time, we are introduced to him as he's sitting at his desk, seriously figuring out what fo do with his hands as he's talking. He narrates the piece so blandly and boringly that it's hard to get caught up into what he is saying. May aspects of the city is covered, hammering down time and time again how 'modern' it is and the 'newness' of everything. Also covered, it's implication that it's a city of great racial and melting pot harmony, while it's great curiousity is, even though Detroit has one of the most highest density of black people in the country, yet there's not a black person to be found in the film. What kind of harmony is that?

Reviewer: DSKruse - - March 10, 2003
Subject: Not quite the Detroit I remembered...
Boy, aren't we glad that the 1968 Olympics were not held in Detroit, especially after the riots of '67?! I can just picture those National Guard helicopters hovering overhead while shielded cops with attack dogs and fire hoses lined up around each of the sporting venues. And if the sculling events were held on the Rouge River, the contestants would have to navigate around the beer cans, dead carp, and sewage spewed out by the factories and mills. I always felt sorry for the people of Windsor, who typically were downwind from the polluting factories. Detroit was "a city on the move" at that time, all right...the working middle class was moving to the suburbs to escape their run-down neighborhoods. And with all due respect to Mayor Cavanagh, relations between the racial and ethnic groups was deplorable during those years. Still, it was fun to see pictures of the town of my youth. Thanks for making it available!

Shotlist

worth noting: Nice nighttime aerial shots of Detroit in the beginning.

¥ 3:08:72- 3:17:45
Aerial view of complex highway system (comprised largely of overpasses and underpasses). Cars occupy every part of the system.

¥ 5:22:52- 5:45:47
Camera starts with view of a downtown street where a bus and some cars go by. It then pans up a tall, wide office buildingÑa hideous early sixties structure. Cut to a frontal view of the building.

¥ 5:46:04- 5:56:38
Excellent pan of a "modern," urban school situated near large office buildings. Children walk by the single level structure.

¥ 6:10:81- 6:27:49
Driving POV through several affluent Detroit residential neighborhoods.

¥ 10:10:79- 10:18:20
Pan of Wayne State University's(?) enormous, brown hospital and the road beside it. It looks like a prison.

¥ 10:59:98- 11:14:50
Montage of crowds walking on downtown side walks. Mostly white people but some African-Americans.

¥ 13:01:59- 13:11:34
Aerial pan of "Detroit industry"Ñbillowing smoke pollutes the air. This looks like an enormous industrial plant of some kind. It lies by the river.

¥ 13:12:42- 13:45:35
Montage of Detroit's industry. Start with an image of a parking lot outside of an auto plant, cut to excellent image of cars going towards the Chrysler plant (there's a huge CHRYSLER sign), cut to a view of the General Motors building (nice sign on the top of the building), cut to quick pan of an industrial plant, cut to several images of slicker, cleaner industrial buildings, cut to several shots of industrial warehouses, and finally cut to the Ford building.

¥ 14:06:22- 14:26:59
A car passes a sign for the Metropolitan Beach. Cut to an image of the beach, and then to an several overviews of many people on it.

¥ 14:27:71- 14:35:11
Nice view (from behind the front seat of a convertible where three people sit) of the entrance for the Detroit Zoo. We approach the large entrance where there are information booths.

¥ 14:55:73- 15:03:65
Excellent image of crowds of children playing in a public swimming pool. The camera pulls back to offer a wider view ÑAfrican-American children cluster together towards the front of the poll.



DETROIT MICHIGAN CITIES DOWNTOWNS URBANIZATION URBAN PROBLEMS ECONOMICS MIDWEST GREAT LAKES INDUSTRY