It is arguably Detroit’s most breathtaking ruin, beloved by photographers, journalists, and academics for the easy irony of Ford automobiles parking in a ruined theater on the site of the garage where Henry Ford built his first automobile. What’s more interesting, I think, is how this building represents a sort of unintentional preservation. At least this is not just another surface lot. And with so much of the rest of the historical city lost to development, demolition, and abandonment, there is the deeper irony that fifteen miles away Henry Ford moved so many historical buildings brick by brick from elsewhere around the country and “preserved” them as decontextualized structures in a counterfeit community.
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The nostalgic fantasy of small-town life on display at Greenfield Village is what most of the beneficiaries of Ford’s $5-a-day plan thought they would get when they left Detroit for the small towns surrounding it: they sought a pastoral atmosphere, far from the clanging of streetcars, factories, and crime. “We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city,” Ford said. With his cheap automobiles, anyone with the salaries he provided could escape the dirty city’s ethnic neighborhoods, and (like Philip Roth’s Swede Levov in American Pastoral) cast away their immigrant shadows. With the fresh air and personal fiefdoms found on every new block of the suburbs, anyone could be baptized as an American in that most American of places: the small town. Frozen in time, Greenfield Village serves as the perfect template for this utopia. Aside from the occasional sputtering of ubiquitous Model Ts (the only cars permitted inside Greenfield Village’s walls), the roads are safe for foot traffic. There is no graffiti or crime of any kind. There are plenty of options to buy old-fashioned crafts or dine on historical comfort food. Everything is wholesome and good. And none of it is real.
Like some medieval village, Greenfield Village is surrounded by a ten-foot wall. You must drive there and leave your car in a vast surface parking lot before paying $24 to get inside (parking is an additional $5).
Every night the streets are emptied and the gates locked and guarded. Even the costumed interpreters abandon the village for four months every winter. Henry Ford, the man who famously said, “History is bunk,” spent the last part of his life building an unoccupied historic village without any actual history. It has now existed there for eighty years. New buildings and attractions have been added, but since it was created in the 1930s it remains perpetually and intentionally frozen in the 1890s. This village Henry Ford built has, for eighty years, existed solely as a simulacrum of the world Henry Ford destroyed.
If Greenfield Village represents the sort of wholesome, idyllic (and sanitized) environment that most Detroiters sought in the suburbs, then the city of Detroit has for several decades come to represent its opposite: seedy, gritty, blighted, ruined, overgrown, dangerous, poor, and black. Yet in the era of exurban sprawl, some parts of Detroit have lost so much housing stock they are starting to resemble the pastoral environment Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac found there two centuries before the city became a symbol of American industrial might (three hundred years before it came to symbolize its failure). Today these parts of Detroit look more like the actual world Greenfield Village has always tried to represent than many of its once-bucolic suburbs.
That’s because for the last fifty years, Detroit’s suburbs have been where the action is. One of the reasons metro Detroiters get so upset when journalists and photographers represent Detroit as a city of ruins is the reality that there are millions of people living in safe, well-kept neighborhoods in dozens of prosperous suburban communities. Many Detroit suburbs have walkable, thriving business districts that resemble gentrified neighborhoods in other cities. Southfield has more workers and office space than downtown Detroit. But with big-city amenities come big-city issues of traffic, parking, and overcrowding. And of course, most suburban open spaces long ago gave way to subdivisions, strip malls, and parking lots for shopping malls and big-box stores.
With all the recent development and growth, it is easy to forget that these suburbs of Detroit have their own histories. There was a time before sprawl when these small, historic communities and their citizens provided the lumber for Detroit’s homes and the food for its tables. Last year, I started taking an interest in the histories of these communities and visiting all the historical museums and sites that I could find. There are dozens of historical societies in these suburban Detroit communities, many of them quite active. I quickly learned that in more than eighteen suburban communities, an effort had been made since the 1970s to preserve historical structures that were “in the way of development” through the creation of a series of historic “towns” (basically mini–Greenfield Villages) that surround Detroit in every direction the highways go.
Over the past few months, I’ve visited each of these historic parks to observe and document what so many communities surrounding Detroit did when their history was threatened by sprawl—after all, the drastic and sudden change that sprawl brings to a small town is as devastating to its history and overall character as upper- and middle-class flight was to the city of Detroit. By the 1970s, the suburban pioneers who first moved to these communities were getting older, and it was clear that the small-town atmosphere they sought there was doomed. The newer residents of the new subdivisions were just another kind of immigrant seeking refuge and hope in a new place. And there were millions of them. I was interested in the idea of history each suburban community has preserved and presented in villages where no one would actually work or live and where none of the buildings had been preserved in their original context. What did they want their history to look like? Where would they fit that history now that land had grown so scarce? I photographed each village in the
