Live6 Neighborhoods

The eight central northwest Detroit neighborhoods loosely clustered around the Livernois-West McNichols (Six Mile) intersection are the Bagley Community, the Fitzgerald Community, Green Acres, Martin Park, Pilgrim Village, Sherwood Forest, Palmer Woods, and the University District. Located here—in Fitzgerald and Martin Park respectively—are two centers of literary activity, the campuses of Marygrove College--now the Marygrove Conservancy--and the University of Detroit Mercy, and the area has been the home of many writers, among them poets Alvin Aubert, Claire Crabtree-Sinnett, John Ditsky, and John R. Reed and playwright Joanna McClelland Glass (University District), fiction writer and essayist Desiree Cooper (Palmer Woods), poets Philip Levine and Naomi Long Madgett (Bagley), mystery writer and poet Donald Levin (Bagley), novelists Alice Randall (Pilgrim Village and Bagley) and Joyce Carol Oates (Green Acres and Sherwood Forest), and novelist and memoirist Bridgett M. Davis (Sherwood Forest). In addition, the prolific writer of popular verse Edgar Guest lived in the Detroit Golf Club district on Hamilton, just off West McNichols.

In the 1960s the Fitzgerald Community was the home of William Bunge, then a Wayne State University geography professor, whose research into the area’s history and development resulted in a groundbreaking work of urban geography, Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution, first published by Schenkman Publishing Company in 1971 and reissued in 2011 by the University of Georgia Press. Bunge’s work examines the one square mile Fitzgerald neighborhood in the context of the rest of the area, and he raises issues—racial integration, class and status, the erasure of local history, fear of crime, and the impact of machines on community life—that persist in the work of the writers who have lived in the community.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet and former United States Poet Laureate Philip Levine is one of these writers.

Most of his many Detroit poems are set in or near factories and other industrial settings. However, he does

recall the Bagley neighborhood of the 1940s in his memoir The Bread of Time and in several poems published

in the final decades of his life. In 1940 when he was twelve, his widowed mother purchased the newly built

home at 19360 Santa Rosa, north of Seven Mile Road, just as the area was being developed. Levine’s

autobiographical essay “Entering Poetry” describes the neighborhood: To the east were “two blocks of fields

and then Livernois, a wide, four-lane avenue famous for its profusion of used car lots. To the west were two

totally undeveloped blocks, still deeply wooded with maple, elm, and beech and thick underbrush.” Levine

says that he imagined the new “settlement of six families” as “a tiny America, an outpost of civilization between

a vast open prairie and the mysterious darkness of a wilderness” (Bread 79-80).

In the essay, he recalls that in the evenings, after dinner, he would venture into the woods and climb “a large copper beech” with low, almost horizontal branches “and lean back and survey the night sky.” Because the area was still undeveloped, on some nights the stars were “spectacular.” In his “crow’s nest,” inspired by the silence and the stars, he experimented with poetic language, his first communications with and about the world around him (Bread 80-81). The area’s wildflowers inspired his lifelong interest in flowers and gardening, and he records his failed attempt to transplant wild irises from the woods to his family’s backyard and his subsequent modest success with rosebushes and mock orange plants acquired from the garden section of the Cunningham’s Drug Store at Seven Mile and Livernois (Bread 81-5).

In the poem “Blood,” Levine describes how in 1945 with his older brother just returned from the war, he tramped through the grassy fields “on the edge of town” and ventured “into the shaded woods / where I go evening after evening / to converse with the tangled roots and vines” (News 27). In the long poem “Naming,” he recalls a similar moment in the woods when the brothers see “a tight nest of broken eggs, a fresh hole / the field mice made, a wren’s gray remains, / all the small secrets that contain me ” (Breath 52). Later in “Naming,” he describes the gas station at Livernois and Seven Mile, where in May 1945, “rationing over, / you could buy all the gas you could pay for.” Clark, its manager, kicks at a stray puppy as the speaker observes the early morning “sunlight filtering / through a stand of ceremonial elms / just budding out behind the used-car lots” (Breath 53).

Elsewhere in “Naming,” Levine mixes other urban commercial images with those of a fading pastoralism in his description of the next-door neighbor who influenced his love of gardening:

As long as there is earth under your feet

someone must dig into it. I learned this from

Sophie Psaris, who knelt to the cold ground

each March to nurse the wild flags [wild irises] that dotted

the junked fields behind the garage….

Sophie feeds “scraps” to the local rats: “ʻThey have to live too,’” she preaches. The speaker asserts the need for a “heaven / for all stray creatures,” a place with soggy, rotting fruit to sustain the birds and rodents and “fields of newly turned earth” to serve as their burial ground. Sophie is a tireless gardener:

... In the dark

Sophie opens the back gate to let the aroma

of rotting roses flood the world. In my high room

I waken to the bark of a spade on stone.” (Breath 57)

In this early morning memory that contrasts sharply with Robert Hayden’s in “Elegies for Paradise Valley” (See Blackbottom and Paradise Valley), Levine characteristically draws inspiration from the natural world under threat from expanding commercial and residential development. Sophie Psaris joins other urban gardeners—Bernadette Strempek and Tom Jefferson--who inhabit Levine’s Detroit poems, common folks heroically preserving a remnant of the natural environment in opposition to the prevailing consumption of land and natural resources.

In a section of another long poem, “Burned,” Levine combines memories of all his childhood neighborhoods—Dexter-Davison, Highland Park, and Bagley—from the vantage point of post-1967 Detroit, the “least favorite city” in America: “bombed and burned from the inside / by its own citizens.” He remembers the “small climbing roses” blooming in spring with “hardier ones” hanging on beyond the blossoming time, their “blackened petals” still available for the “tiny crystals glistening” in the late fall, and the resilient begonias and “wild iris— / flags we called them.” He then adds:

Poking among these ruins for rocks

for the garden, I unearth bricks

from a familiar fireplace or a slab

of stone that crowned a hearth, remnants

of my lost neighbors.

Here the poet plants carrots and radishes, knowing “something will come from this root and wood / thickened ground” (What 52). He imagines his lost neighborhoods as still fertile ground for the poems he now sets in the earth.

In “History,” Levine confesses to swiping a sprig of lilacs for his mother on a 1951 spring evening from the median on Outer Drive (Last 12). His essay “Class with No Class” (Bread, 91-115) describes his high school experience of tutoring a failing Hampton Elementary School student from a wealthy Sherwood Forest family, an experience that cemented his already jaded view of wealth and privilege.

Detroit’s Poet Laureate Naomi Long Madgett resided for many years in the Bagley neighborhood at 18080 Santa Barbara, where she composed poems and managed Lotus Press. She responds to the urban crisis of the 1980s and 1990s in “City Nights” (Abandon 227-8), showing that despite what media reports might say, Detroiters live rich, fulfilled lives. Amid the symptoms of urban maladies—barred windows and doors, dogs howling at sirens— she asserts:

There is nothing you can tell me

about the city

I do not know. (Abandon 227)

Sirens and howls become mere interruptions of the quiet coolness of a summer evening with “the faint suggestion

of moon shadow / above the golden street light” and sleeping grandchildren in the upstairs bedroom. Madgett

recalls a front porch conversation that repeats old family myths about “Grampa Henry,” an “Indian woman,” and the

Detroit River. She then mentions still more signs of Detroit’s “hopeless” situation: news reports of soaring insurance

rates and crime. The poem concludes, however, with a vision of stability and security:

...the front porch is cool and quiet.

The neighbors are dark and warm.

The grandchildren are upstairs dreaming

and we are happy for their presence.

Madgett’s poem does not deny the existence of threatening forces but resists simplistic and sensationalistic view of Detroit life.

For the character in “Night Coming” by Desiree Cooper, however, news-generated fear reinforces her newcomer’s anxiety about Detroit crime, creating a sense of foreboding even in relatively affluent Palmer Woods. The story focuses on Nikki, originally from Atlanta, who marries Jason Sykes, “a well-heeled Detroiter.” They become members of Detroit’s “large, tight-knit black upper class” (Know 46) eventually purchasing a home in Palmer Woods, the “integrated, ritzy neighborhood where Jason had grown up” (46). Although Nikki has a “privileged” background, she has “a hard time comprehending the wealth that the stately homes in Palmer Woods represented” (47).. She puzzles over the servants’ stairway: “Why would we need that nowadays?” (47). Jason jokes that it could function as “a secret escape route,” reinforcing her fears of “an intruder” that hover over the rest of the story.

One evening, waiting alone in the house for Jason, she reflects on the stream of crime reporting on the news, considers “the way the different social classes bumped up against each other in Detroit,” and recalls her amazement at the numbers of children and adults knocking on the door on Halloween (49). The recollection of these harmless intruders temporarily alleviate Nikki’s fears, but her insecurities about Detroit, her marriage to Jason, and her pregnancy foreshadow a suspenseful ending.

The threat of urban crime also inspired Joyce Carol Oates, who, after her Green Acres home was burglarized

in 1964, wrote a short story, “The Thief” (Johnson 113). (The story uses some of the details of the break-in but is

otherwise unrelated to any specific location.) She and her husband Raymond Smith had moved from a Palmer

Park apartment to the four-bedroom colonial at 2500 Woodstock Drive in 1963, after arriving from Texas in 1962

(Johnson 102). Oates had been hired to teach literature and writing at the University of Detroit (now the

University of Detroit Mercy), and Smith had been hired at Wayne State. According to Greg Johnson, the young

couple was excited about their first home purchase; they installed a patio and planted grass, trees, and shrubs.

“The only negative feature of their quiet new neighborhood,” Johnson notes, “was Joyce’s troubled awareness

that the area was racially segregated,” and she observed to friends that neighborhood integration was a

serious issue in the city (Johnson 102-3).

Within a couple years, as Oates’s writing career grew and her teaching was recognized at U of D and after Smith

transferred from Wayne to a more secure position at the University of Windsor, they bought a new home at 3460

Sherbourne Road in Sherwood Forest. Remarking on the surroundings, she wrote to a friend, “ʻWhy should anyone

bother typing’ in the midst of such beauty?” but admitted that “ʻmy typewriter clatters on’” (Johnson 135). The couple

enjoyed entertaining in their more spacious new home, and Johnson records one party with faculty colleagues that

led to a touch football game on the street (135). Here, she experienced the traumatic aftermath of July 1967, and here

she wrote Expensive People and most of Them, her National Book Award-winning novel about the Wendall family’s

decades-long pursuit of the American Dream in Detroit. In 1968, Oates joined her husband on the University of

Windsor faculty, and the couple sold their Sherwood Forest home and relocated across the Detroit River to a home

on Riverside Drive. Nevertheless, she reflected that Detroit, “ʻmy great subject, made me the person I am,

consequently the writer I am—for better or worse’” (Johnson 151).

Most of Them is set elsewhere in the city: Southwest Detroit near the Ambassador Bridge and Ste. Anne church and school, Corktown, downtown, Palmer Park, and the suburbs of Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills. However, the University District of the mid-1960s exerts considerable influence on the aspirations of one character, the twenty-six-year-old Maureen Wendall, who— seeking escape from her abusive, impoverished life— recalls a walk she took the previous fall “up around Gesu Church. . . a neighborhood of large brick homes.” The narrator reflects her amazement:

These large homes! these lawns! And in each house people lived, families lived, mothers and fathers and

children, going about their lives as if such living, in such homes, were nothing extraordinary. It astonished

Maureen to realize that these people did not comprehend their own lives. They did not comprehend the

distance between themselves and Maureen, who was walking through their neighborhood pretending to

have a destination. (433)

The homes and the people in them, especially the young mothers and their children playing in front yards, inspire Maureen. She observes two young women in conversation and dreams of joining them: “a young mother talking out on the sidewalk casually” as if this is “nothing extraordinary.” While walking by, she recalls, “she stared at the women. Her envy was not hatred but something like love: she loved them. This was as close to love as she could come” (433). Thereafter, she sets her sites on marriage and endeavors with single-minded purpose to emulate these women.

"I want a house on Parkside," demands Goldie Sparks (G.S.) in Alice Randall's Black Bottom Saints (148). The five-bedroom Tudor mansion and its fruit tree-filled yard at 15390 Parkside. represent the fulfillment of Goldie's aspirations, This home becomes the first dwelling of Goldie's niece, "Colored Girl," who is based on Randall herself. Her protagonist, Ziggy Johnson, considers Parkside the "Monaco" of Detroit, "a sunny spot for shady people" (145). Randall's first memories include the apricot and maple trees, barbecue, and wading pool of this since demolished home where she spent her first five years (1959-1964) before her parents moved to 17532 Indiana in the Bagley community where they lived until 1968. Randall attended Greenfield Peace Lutheran School, 7000 Outer Drive near Greenfield, St. Phillip Lutheran School, 2884 East Grand Boulevard, and the Ziggy Johnson School of the Theatre, 315 East Warren (Randall, Email).

For Alice Randall--as for Levine, Madgett, Cooper, Oates, Madgett, and others--these central northwest Detroit neighborhoods represent the fulfillment of dreams and become useful settings for revealing conflicting impulses in Detroit life and American culture.

Frank D. Rashid, professor emeritus of English at Marygrove, has lived in the University District since 1983.

Works Cited

Bunge, William. Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution. University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Cooper, Desiree. “Night Coming.” Know the Mother: Stories. Wayne State University Press, 2016, pp. 43-54. Rpt. in Detroit Noir. Edited by E. J.

Olsen and John C. Hocking. New York: Akashic Books, 2007. 122-138; also in Best African American Fiction 2010. Edited by Gerald Early and Nikki Giovanni. One World, 2010, pp. 84-93.

Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. Dutton, 1999.

Levine, Philip. The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography. Knopf, 1994.

———. Breath. Knopf, 2006.

———. The Last Shift: Poems. Ed. Edward Hirsch. Knopf, 2016.

———. News of the World. Knopf, 2009.

———. What Work Is: Poems. Knopf, 1992.

Madgett, Naomi Long. “City Nights.” Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001. Wayne State University Press, 2001.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Thief.” The North American Review, vol. 251, no. 5, 1966, pp. 10–17. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25116463.

Accessed 12 Feb. 2020.

———. Them. Fawcett, 1996.

Randall, Alice. Black Bottom Saints: A Novel.. Amistad, 2020.

———. Email. 18 August 2021.