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DETROIT’S ALTERNATIVE PUBLICATION OF NEWS AND THE ARTS
pa VOL. 2, NO. 6, Dec. 24, 1981-Jan. 21, 1982
Preventing Another | Poletown As speculation increases about plans for the neighborhood south of Poletown, a larger question emerges: exactly who controls city planning in Detroit and what role should the public have in that process?
vom Steeg
by Jeanie Wylie
: Nancy
oo
Ce sTimes
ity residents who live Q directly south of the Poletown area that was evacuated to make room for a General Motors assembly plant are nervous. It seems to some of them that their land would be valuable to either small manufacturers or the city because it is bordered by I-94 and I-75; it’s well serviced by the railroads; it’s close to City. Airport; adjacent to the planned GM plant; and much of the land is already vacant. Three recent meetiags, called to “prevent another Poletown,” have been well attended. Representatives from the city planning department were there to assure
residents that their land wasn’t being considered for any projects, but for many people the trauma of watching 3,500 people cleared out of the GM site in one short year ruins their confidence in city promises.
“The industries—they are so quiet—but they are moving in on us,” Lilhan Cyranski, a Hancock Street resident, recently complained. She says that for years small companies in her neighbor-
hood have been buying up property lot by lot, isolating residential areas. “They'd buy an alley, curb, lots. Inch by inch they were buying the whole neighborhood. They were purchasing homes, then suddenly a fence goes around the lot and it’s called the Boomer Co.” Continued on page 8
The Cops on Hill Street After nearly being cancelled last year because of poor ratings, guess what television program just popped into Nielsen’s list of the ten most-watched programs in the country? _ by Hugh Grady T
here has always been precious little connection between what cops do in real life and the wonders they accomplish in pulp
fiction, movies and TV. There they have reached mythic stature: Marshall Dillon vs. the blackhatted gunslinger; Elliot Ness the incorruptible.
Alternately, cops become foils to the private heroics of their rugged individualistic brothers, the private eyes. You remember Bogart as detective Sam Spade riding them a little in “The Big Sleep” as blundering, slow-thinking plodders who never figured out that they couldn’t beat the system.
Television usually tried to be more “realistic” and fell back on
the “honest cop” epitomized by such characterizations as Joe Friday in “Dragnet.” In-the process, it succeeded in reducing the mythic to cardboard stature, without coming close to getting at
the actual social role of police in America. There is a special relation between the police and the poor that seldom surfaces in the myths
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Dan
Travanteas
Captain Frank Furillo.