No, Murphy, I'm not.
Those of us growing up in nearby white suburbs were told it was a race riot, and for at least a couple decades afterward, 8 Mile might as well have been a 14-foot brick wall. Given the distribution of wealth, white flight & racial fears decimated downtown business, and city has never recovered.
In the meantime, smaller cities like Ann Arbor and Royal Oak began filling the role that Detroit would normally have filled in a major metropolitan area. Over a 20-year period, Ann Arbor's downtown are became almost completely filled with the restaurants and galleries that white suburbanites flock to on the weekends. (You could shoot a cannon through many of them during the week -- there are far more than the local community can support.)
There are some terrific community leaders (e.g., Mike Ilitch, Little Caesars/Red Wings/Tigers owner) who helped fuel a resurgence in Detroit's arts community (e.g., through the restoration of the Fox Theater), but it's hard to reverse such dramatic structural changes. Having been fed the mythology about race and murder since I was a kid, I had the same image of Detroit most others have (the image you get from the movie scenes where the run-down abandoned sections are used as a backdrop) until I was in my 30's. The Hart Plaza area is beautiful, and hosts a lot of festivals during the summer, including the largest free outdoor jazz festival (over Labor Day Weekend) www.detroitjazzfest.com My Mom, 2 women friends and I found ourselves the only white faces among thousands at another outdoor festival on Woodward a few years ago when we stayed much later than the other white folks. The music was too good to leave, and it was, truly, so non-threatening that we didn't notice the other whites (who had been 1/3 to 1/2 the crowd during the day) were leaving until long after they were gone.
The worst part of the Kilpatrick fiasco is the lost promise. He had fueled an optimism about the city that had already led to a flood of money that paid for restoration of the riverfront area -- en.wikipedia.org . I hope the optimism doesn't leave with him. Detroit deserves a lot better.
