I’ve given tours of the old neighborhood to Automotive News colleagues, an industry guest from China and a relative from Belgium.
Yes, they’ve been astonished to see firsthand the urban devastation they had known only through photos. I think they’ve been just as surprised to see the pockets of vitality that mark parts of the city and give a richer dimension to a complicated historical picture.
The Belgian visitor was my late cousin Luc Versichele.
Five years ago, we took a break from our driving tour for coffee and pastries — Brussels sidewalk café style — outside a bakery called Sister Pie.
We sat just a few blocks from the site of the home that nearly a century earlier housed my father, his parents, his grandparents and other relatives. I remember the sounds of hammers and power saws providing an audio backdrop, thanks to construction on a retail strip that is now home to one of Detroit’s celebrated new restaurants.
Signs of strength go beyond there. Our Lady of Sorrows, where my grandfather’s funeral was held, stands tall as New Liberty Baptist Church. Up Van Dyke Avenue, Dakkota Integrated Systems has built a plant on the site of the former Kettering High School. And across I-94, supplier Flex-n-Gate opened a plant in 2018, billed then as the city’s biggest auto investment in 20 years.
As for the auto factories mentioned above? The historic Packard site is still in ruins — more than 60 years after its closing. But automaking continues to thrive in the Jefferson and Conner area, as it has since a Chalmers factory was established there around 1907. This year, Stellantis opened its new Mack Assembly complex, next door to Jefferson North.
Just three years ago, it looked like General Motors’ Detroit-Hamtramck factory was doomed — just as Dodge Main, its neighborhood predecessor, had been four decades earlier. Now the plant has new life as Factory Zero, where GM will build electric vehicles.
My great-uncle’s Belgian Gazette folded a few years ago, having long since served its initial purpose of delivering news of a World War I-ravaged homeland to a community of immigrants.
