The Border Bookmobile is also a research vehicle, conducting field trips to examine the unique urban conditions in the Detroit-Windsor area. Both Detroit and Windsor share a tremendous sense of historical amnesia as much of the 19th and early 20th century architectural imprint has been lost in both places. We seek not merely the remains of individual buildings, but rather traces of underlying structures that tell us something about how the cities were imagined and organized, abandoned and reorganized, connected and disconnected. Through field research, the Bookmobile seeks to reconstruct or imagine what has been taken out of view, performing a kind of urban archeology of two cities that generated a blueprint for urban planning in North America in the 20th century.
JUNE 15, 2011: A Psychogeographic Driving Tour of the Border Cities
Earlier on this year, the Border Bookmobile and Broken City Lab went on a Psychogeographic Driving Tour of the Border Cities as the culmination of BCL’s How to Forget the Border Completely series. As the Detroit-Windsor area was one of the world’s first urban regions to be built around the automobile, these cities are marked by an array of driving structures–not simply freeways, avenues, tunnels and bridges, but also baroque overpasses, drive-thrus, parking lots and ramps. This endless expanse of pavement and concrete was established in league with the auto industry to enable non-stop driving. But as the city sprawled it also developed new loops and routes in the suburbs thus leaving behind traces of its earlier, protean driving formations. Our driving tour of the border cities was a kind of urban archeology of driving structures, some in use, others entirely abandoned. As psychogeography is a practice based upon the act of walking, our driving tour evolved as an unorthodox version of a dérive to make strange the everyday presumptions of driving culture that we ignore or take for granted when thinking about the urban fabric that connects the cities of Windsor and Detroit. Ultimately, the Windsor-Detroit border crossings have been designed to function as a kind of drive-thru, thus limiting the experience of crossing the border, not only to those with valid passports, but also those with access to cars.
JUNE 25, 2010: A field trip in search of Windsor’s lost and forgotten suburbs
The construction of new suburbs on Windsor’s periphery continues as if the recession never hit while vacancies continue to rise in the downtown core. Although it has become common place to see vacant buildings downtown, the history of Windsor’s suburbs is also beset by cycles of big dreams, disappointments and eventual abandonment (or re-purposing), and there are a number of failed development projects that haunt the suburbs as well. The Border Bookmobile took a field trip to search for the remains of a proposed large-scale development that was slated for the Brighton Beach/Black Oak Park area in the 1920s (then the town of Ojibway).
Now preserved as one of the region’s few protected natural areas, this land was once slated to be the next Gary, Indiana (Canadian Steel Corporation) across from its American counterpart at Zug Island. The map below shows the planned density of the neighborhood which was designed as a kind of worker’s town on the other side of the tracks from a massive steel production facility. The only streets that were partially developed are those running up from the river, parallel to the boundary line of Sandwich town. This map from 1930 shows a detailed plan for a mixed use industrial-residential area that was typical in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The remains of a few roads that were cleared in the 1920s are still visible now and it is possible to find traces of streets that were never fully developed. Chappus Street is particularly interesting as its northern end is blocked off and much of the former roadway is lined by prairie grass, while its southern end has been developed in distinct phases (1950s and 1990s: see images below).
Plans for this development failed in the 1930s as the Great Depression hit, and the area (now encompassing Brighton Beach) has been developed in fits and starts. The southern sections of these streets, across the highly trafficked Ojibway Parkway, were developed in the 1950s and 1990s, respectively. These blocks are now vacant and have been annexed by the Ontario provincial government for its DRIC (Detroit River International Crossing) project which is slated to connect highway 401 to a new customs plaza and bridge downriver from the aging Ambassador Bridge. There seems to be a political stalemate surrounding the DRIC project which is aggressively opposed by the Ambassador Bridge Company. In its bid to shut down the development of a new crossing, the company has taken several blocks of Indian Road hostage, nearly 5 kilometers east of the Brighton Beach site. At the moment, large tracts of property in Windsor’s West End are vacant and boarded up: between Huron Church Road, Chappus Street and Indian road, each site continues to sit in limbo, a testament to the competition for territory and control over the new international span.
