'Summer of Fire': What's happening in Detroit

The Toronto Star

DETROIT — Vincent Clanton is struggling to make himself heard.

He is standing before a two-storey, brick-and-shingle house at 2641 Frederick St. that has just been transformed into a roaring stack of fire with flames curling 10 metres high.

"In this neighbourhood, something is being torched every day!" Clanton shouts above the wail of fire engines and the roar of water. "Something's always burning here!"

But this isn't just any house.

With sturdy front balconies and long windowed rooms, it was built in 1910 to house some of the first generation of working-class families that would transform Detroit — and America — into bulwarks of industrial might.

For that very year — not far from this spot — Henry Ford and architect Albert Kahn opened a cutting-edge, steel-reinforced, multi-floor factory that produced 9,000 Model T's every day.

Historians called it "the factory that changed the world."

It was the beginning of the modern American dream, providing the country with the most sought-after consumer good of the age - the car - and, by providing jobs, the means to acquire it.

Now, as Clanton stands by watching, this house and that dream are going up in smoke.

Detroit is on fire.

Three screaming fire engines have pulled up, followed by two trucks and a squad car. Soon 28 firefighters are trying to keep the blaze from spreading.

This is the Detroit Fire Department's 11,217th run this year and it is only June.

Clanton, a 28-year-old father of three, is frustrated — and understandably so.

His neighbourhood, near Mt. Elliot St. and Warren Ave., is now Ground Zero in what is quickly becoming Detroit's Summer of Fire.

Only last month, this once-proud city battled back from the brink of bankruptcy and today relies on the command and control of the state of Michigan to keep it afloat.

But now Detroit is facing another crisis: rampaging arsonists.

On a recent Sunday night, 14 buildings in this neighbourhood went up in flames. Many of them, like 2641 Frederick, were vacant, the result of a decades-long trend of citizens fleeing the city. A standard residential lot on this block today, if you were crazy enough to buy one, can be had for just $513 — or about 69 cents per square foot.

The exodus has shrunk Detroit from 1.8 million residents in the 1950s to just 714,777 today.

There are 78,000 vacant structures littered across this city, believed to be the highest number per capita of any city in America. They provide convenient kindling for pyromaniacs.

Yet so beleaguered are Detroit's finances, pounded by a declining tax base and corrupt politicians — former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his inner circle will face 38 counts of embezzlement this September — that there was little pity from Mayor Dave Bing the day after firefighters fought the Frederick St. inferno.

Bing announced that 164 of Detroit's 881 firefighters would be laid off.

When the former NBA star first became mayor in May 2009, he promised never to do such a thing.

But that was then.

"I've said I would protect the jobs of police and firefighters," Bing told reporters on June 25. "But fiscal realities have made this untenable."

The layoffs will take effect by the end of the month.

According to city documents yet to be released, those remaining will face a 10 per cent pay cut.

Amid all the smoke and rubble and political wrangling that now dominate Detroit, it can be difficult to imagine what this city once was.

In recent years it has always been about blight. But it was once about abundance.

What Silicon Valley is to the modern era, so Detroit was to its time. But Detroit offered what the Valley has not: made-in-America manufacturing jobs.

Twenty years after Ford produced his Model T, he opened another plant downriver, a mammoth structure that provided 81,000 jobs.

Later, when America entered World War II, Detroit would become the nation's arsenal, producing weaponry on an industrial scale.

And when the world finally emerged from that war, America was its undisputed champion, Detroit its industrial capital.

But it wasn't just about grit. There was glamour and sophistication, too.

As automotive families like the Fords and Dodges and others ascended, their arc coincided with the rising popularity of modern European art, and their acquisitions can still be seen today in the Detroit Institute of Arts on Woodward Ave., rich in French Impressionism, decked out with the murals of Diego Rivera.

Detroit was flush with money and taste.

It had political power, too. Contenders for the office of president of the United States called regularly. The podium at the Detroit Economic Club was a sought-after bully pulpit on the campaign trail.

But standing on the corner of Frederick and Chene Sts. on a summer's night, as fire continues to spread, all that glory and glamour seem far away.

As the vacant house burns and takes another next to it — the last two homes on the north side of this block — another fire starts 300 metres away in a former church at 5317 Chene.

Firefighters on the scene say an arsonist is on the move.

Two more alarms go out, more trucks and firefighters arrive, and so do onlookers. Mounting flames here cast a glow like sheet lighting on the darkening sky, drawing motorists off Interstate 94 like moths to a flame.

Locals emerge from the neighbourhood's remaining homes carrying folding chairs so they can watch in comfort and cheer on firefighters.

"Be safe baby! You be safe!" shouts 46-year-old Lori Young, an adult student at Wayne State University.

Some onlookers remain parked in their cars, sipping cool drinks and munching snacks. Others alight from their vehicles to sit on the curb.

So frequent are the fires, local residents know the firefighters by name.

"That's Ivan Alexander," says 30-year-old Zaphilia Vinson. "And that there is Carl Smith."

The conventional wisdom is that local people set these fires for kicks, revenge or to burn out local crack dealers using the bulidings.

But Vincent Clanton is having none of that — and instead puts forward a disturbing theory.

"Small-minded people automatically go for the stereotype, you know, 'Oh, these people are just bad in the neighbourhood. They just burn their own s--- up and f--- up their own neighbourhood,'" he says.

"But, no. That ain't the case. We live here. We grew up here. Our families are here.

"We sit up at night and talk about this all the time. For a series of fires like this, guys around here don't even have the resources to pull anything like this off.

"I think people who are far above our heads have something to do with this," says Clanton.

"People on Facebook are saying the city is trying to expand the downtown. That would make sense - get rid of all this nonsense, all these vacant abandoned buildings and rebuild, remodel."

This notion, that powerful interests are paying arsonists to burn down Detroit's blighted neighbourhoods, is gaining ground here.

Richard Manley and Charles Brantley, who have just pulled in from the I-94 to watch the fire, take this as a "given."

"I guess they figure it's cheaper to burn it up than to bulldoze it," says 30-year-old Manley, who lives and works in Highland Park, a municipality that is part of greater Detroit.

Mathematically, he has a point.

If the city's demolition squads were able to tear down more than 3,000 buildings a year — an extraordinary number that would require dismantling at least a dozen buildings every working day — it would take Detroit 25 years to rid itself of this detritus.

Brantley concedes he has no proof but he too believes arsonists are being paid so that private interests can buy tracts of land at deep discount prices, then sell them profitably once downtown Detroit grows.

"Once the market comes back, they can make a lot of money."

"I mean, fire happens - but not in one area all the time," he says.

"I hate to say it," adds Manley, shaking his head, "but I believe there is going to be more of this this summer. I just have a feeling."

As fires spread, so does another notion: that Detroit is becoming a tale of two cities: on the one hand, a downtown core that is benefitting from corporate investment and redevelopment, and then the rest of Detroit, which looks a lot like this neighbourhood, blighted, burnt out and slowly vanishing.

As Manley and Brantley speak, the drama at the one-time church on Chene continues to unfold. The south side of the church is now roaring with flames and 23 Company arrives and puts up a 30-metre aerial ladder to beat down the fire.

That's when Willie Brown begins to panic.

He has owned the D'Elegance Bar next to the church for 20 years, the last remaining business on a block that used to boast hardware and grocery stores. He and manager Bryan McCall bolt across Chene and march through a vacant lot of hip-high grass to get a better look at what could be their dwindling dream.

McCall is angry.

"You know what that new chief said?" he shouts. "'Let the abandoned houses burn!'"

About the same time Mayor Bing announced he would cut off street lighting in Detroit's sparsely populated areas, fire commissioner Donald Austin stirred even more controversy saying firefighters should contain vacant buildings on fire and let them burn.

Not everyone agrees with that.

"Let me put it to you this way," says battalion chief Jack Wiley, who is working the fire: "Our new commissioner might say 'Let 'em burn,' but when I look around and see that people live in these houses, I don't want to let them burn because it's just liable to spread.

"These firefighters are providing a service to the city and they're going to do their job regardless. They'll put out fires no matter what happens."

In 35 years on the job, Wiley has fought "thousands" of fires in Detroit.

"Stuff like this would normally happen over what we used to call 'Devil's Night,'" he says, recalling a notorious Detroit tradition that regularly took down hundreds of homes and businesses in the days leading up to Halloween.

At its peak during the three nights from Oct. 29-31, 1984, more than 800 fires swept through the city.

In 2011, after a concerted campaign, that number declined to 94.

But this summer surge of 2012 has Wiley concerned.

Aside from the old Devil's Night, "this fire-starting thing is the biggest thing we've ever had," he says.

Next day, in the third-floor operations room at the Detroit Fire Department's downtown headquarters, senior chief Mike Gallo is blunt.

"The past week has been horrendous. Our guys are getting beat up. And as far as these vacants are concerned, 99 per cent of them are arson."

With so many fires in Detroit, you'd think that arson investigators would have a field day. But statistics suggest the fire marshal's arson department is either incompetent or overwhelmed.

In a city where firefighters made more than 27,000 runs last year, of which 3,000 were confirmed cases of arson and thousands more labelled "suspicious," the arson department made just 78 arrests.

Clearly no other firefighters in America face the same challenges.

In a single week in June, firefighters battled about 30 structural fires per day. In Los Angeles, a city with four times the population of Detroit, firefighters face just 11 daily.

"We have guys from New York City who come down here and they say, 'We don't have any kind of fires like this,'" says Gallo.

Nor is the situation expected to get better.

The average age of Detroit's buildings is 80 years; the average age of Detroit firefighters is 45.7. And the city's firefighting equipment - much of it already more than 10 years old - is breaking down from overuse.

Gallo says firefighting is a young man's game and the department needs a strong cohort of fighters in their 20s. But budget constraints have prevented that. "New" hires are usually transferees from other departments in the city, usually older personnel, he says. He estimates the department hasn't had a new "outside" hire for years.

"You've got old buildings, old men and old rigs," he says. "They (city officials) have to come up with some new ideas here."

Gallo cuts the conversation short. Another fire has come in.

How will Detroit cope in the coming weeks and months?

Few here really know.

Battalion chief Dave Lyon, 56, knew the cuts were coming. Even still, he had difficulty getting his mind around it.

When he started with the department in July 1977 — 35 years ago this month — Detroit had more than 1,500 firefighters.

Now by month's end that number will drop to just over 700.

"I don't think what we have right now is enough," says Lyon. "I'm at the end of my career and I feel for the younger guys. They've got a tough deal. They want to cut their pay and they want them to pay more for medical."

Meanwhile, Detroit's fires aren't letting up.

The night sky flickers. The flames continue.

Copyright 2012 Toronto Star Newspapers Limited