Dry cleaners’ store front, Highland Park, Mich. (photo: DetroitDerek via Flickr.com)


The city of Highland Park has a history rooted in the auto industry. And for many reasons that’s why it is in the condition it is in today.

Highland Park was first incorporated as a city in 1918. It was there that Henry Ford produced millions of Model Ts, and the promise of an unprecedented $5-a-day wage drew tens of thousands of workers from all over the world.

In 1922, Ford Motor Company announced that it would shut down the Highland Park plant and move its headquarters to River Rouge. Three years later, Chrysler opened its world headquarters in Highland Park and stayed there until 1992, when it moved to Auburn Hills to take advantage of tax breaks.

The company took with it 2,000 jobs, 25 percent of the Highland Park’s tax base and 80 percent of the city’s budget. By all accounts, the city has never recovered.

For David Bullock, president of Highland Park’s NAACP chapter and a pastor at a local church, what happened to Highland Park in the face of automotive abandonment could happen to the country at large if the Big Three dissolve.

“This is a test case of what happens when one of the major industries in the nation leaves. Just imagine if one of the Big Three were not viable companies anymore. This would happen across the nation.”

Bullock said that, to keep from sliding into obscurity, American cities need to look past old auto technology and move toward sustainable communities that don’t depend on one industry.

“Right now no one’s saying anything,” he said. “The state has ignored the city. First World country, Third World living conditions. If you showed this to somebody and asked them what country [it was,] they probably wouldn’t say ‘America.’”

Mayor recalls Chrysler crash

The loss of Chrysler crushed the city, according to Lindsey Porter, and he should know. He was first elected mayor the year the company moved. He said he will always recall the moment he got the call that Chrysler was leaving town.

“We got a little over $8 million a year from Chrysler in taxes,” Porter said. “At that time, it took $7 million just to run a decent fire department, and the city had a budget of $13.5 million. So it was devastating.”

Porter is one of those who lived in Highland Park when it was a clean, bustling city full of shops and movie theaters and manicured neighborhoods.

He’s quick to note that people who experienced the city in better times have not forgotten its greatness.

“You can identify a real Highland Parker because it’s a confidence, a pride. It’s more so pride — that’s why it’s so painful when you talk to people that live elsewhere and all they see [here] is the ruins.

“Highland Park was the place to be. Highland Park in its height had 50,00 people in its community. You can imagine all the shopping. I can remember four movie theaters growing up. You had Sanders Bakery here, which was the largest bakery in America, if not the world.”

The city’s population plummeted from 50,000 in the late 1940s to 14,000 in 2000, according to the Highland Park Web site. Witnessing the city’s decline from an upscale town to an impoverished, high-crime area with an unemployment rate of 22 percent has been an experience Porter likens to losing a loved one.

“Believe me, the city being in decline the way it is … we feel it to the effect of losing your grandmother or a parent,” he said. “A lot of times people will make jokes about their home town, but we make jokes to hide the pain.”

Highland Park’s small size and the fact that it is completely surrounded by a larger city, Detroit, has created more problems. Porter called Highland Park’s situation a “logistical nightmare …

“Highland Park has big-city crime, big-city problems but small-city dollars. No one else can make that claim,” he said.

When Chrysler moved, it made one promise to Highland Park: to clean up its industrial infrastructure. It kept that promise, but it never gave the city any money to compensate for the impact of its move, according to Porter.

“There is this rumor that Chrysler gave us $30 mill in cash. If they did, I’d like to know who got it. Out of that exodus there was no money given to us,” he said.

On many levels, Highland Park is now a forgotten city. The idea that it should become a part of Detroit is “more than a notion,” Porter said.

“Being a small city we didn’t have the power or dollars to maintain lobbyists in Washington or even on the state level,” he said.

Bullock, the NAACP chapter president, took Michigan Messenger on a drive around the city to show the devastation plaguing Highland Park today. It stands as what Bullock calls a “test case”; video from that drive follows.