http://www.freep.com/article/20120517/NEWS01/205170746/Pastor-recalls-gas-station-attack
Apparently, being a pastor pays well. I guess Rev. Marvin Winans was counting that God would protect him and the $15,000 Rolex watch he was wearing and his 2012 SUV from the gang of young men hanging around the gas station.
Watch your back everybody. The Amish yutes are now roaming Detroit.
When I was working / living in the area, about the only people who would run a business inside the city were Chaldeans (Syrian Christians) who had a very tight knit community. If they had to do something that would get them in front of a jury of Black Nationalists oppressed ex-slaves on welfare who viewed the black run courts of Detroit as a lottery system for making easy free money from evil white slave masters, the people involved cold vanish back to Syria and the business would change ownership to a third cousin leaving nobody to sue. That’s how you had to play the game to survive. No business with assets could risk doing business inside the city unless it was owned by blacks.
Ahhh when Art talks about Detroit It’s almost like he’s actually talking about Stockton . It’s like we’re brotha an sista cities. and did foyle say Utes ??
A geography digression related to this story since I worked close to this location for a few months…
The “Davison Freeway” was built in 1941 – it was probably the prototype for what had been shown off at the 1938 world’s fair in New York and championed by the General Motors and Robert Moses – a limited access road depressed below the city streets to eliminate intersections. Ford’s Model T plant was in Highland Park along with Chrysler Headquarters, and the GM building is just a few miles South on Woodward Avenue (now a state office building).
The other freeways didn’t exist yet – Highland Park was a “City within a City” – as Detroit grew, Highland Park and Hamtramck were surrounded on all sides by Detroit but not annexed – and at the time only Davison Avenue was a through street connecting the parts of Detroit on either side of Highland Park (remember, we’re talking long before Coleman Young ran the city) Highland Park wanted to get that traffic off Davison Avenue without giving a way to get onto the Highland Park local streets (at the time, Highland Park was a very posh neighborhood that didn’t want contact with the “little people” working in Fords plants.
So Davison Road was put in a ditch with the main North/South streets having bridges over the ditch without being connected to it 🙂 Ah, urban planning to the rescue.
Later freeways would be built on either end going north and south, and the Davison Freeway is a way to get from one to the other – 25 years ago when I was working there, it was a horrible road that still had 1941 concepts of things like entrance ramp lengths, lane widths, lighting, signage – pretty similar to the Cross Bronx Expressway in New York if you’ve ever had the pleasure of driving on that.
So once you get west of the Lodge Freeway, the Davison Freeway dumps back onto the old Davison Avenue – a wide “boulevard” that is too wide to cross on foot, so every block there is an unsynchronized traffic signal making it take 15 minutes to go a couple miles before connecting to the Jeffries Freeway, the 3rd North?South freeway.
So that section of Davison Avenue is filled with lots of “suburbanites” (aka “white” people) just trying to get from freeway to freeway without their car breaking down. It’s a little seedy, but because of the very high traffic volumes, moderately safe – and in general the NorthWest part of Detroit is the least dangerous – it’s where the City employees that are required to live in the city (mostly police and teachers) live.
Back in 77 to 81 I lived in Grosse Point Park and worked in River Rouge doing construction in the various auto and steel plants. I remember going to a bar for lunch next to the old Packard Motor plant. You had to look in the window and ring the doorbell to be let in. I think they closed before sunset each day.
We wouldn’t park our car outside the plant for even 10 minutes, it had to be inside the building to be safe.
I had two trips to Detroit last year, shocking how much it has changed, and not for the better.