America on the road to perdition

James Doran

James Doran drives from Wall Street to Detroit to discover how the American Dream turned into a nightmare

After passing the glittering glass and steel headquarters of General Motors and the newly built Motor City Hotel and Casino, the city’s infrastructure seemed to disintegrate before our eyes. Empty factories lined routes 75 and 94 as we left town, all of them former bit-part players in the now dying auto industry. The post-industrial desolation was so complete that it hardly seemed real. How could so many factories and warehouses lie empty and vandalised in one city? Where were all the people?

In the distance we spotted a man sitting alone on a dining chair in the giant parking lot of an abandoned factory. So we left the Interstate at the next exit and went to look for him.

As we picked our way through the back streets of inner-city Detroit, past burned-out houses, abandoned cars and more empty factories, Bill Conn’s warning seemed all the more apt. After crossing the railroad tracks, we drew up alongside the huge ruined plant where the man we had seen from the road sat motionless, staring up at a wall of countless broken windows.

Anthony Boyce, 55, now earns a living guarding the empty factory his friends used to work in. ‘Ten years ago this place was booming. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Back in ’85 I used to work for General Motors fitting radios and the cruise-control switches to the dashboards of cars. But they moved the factory somewhere else and that was that. Now I do security. Although what they’re guarding this for, I do not know. There’s nothing here.’

As he surveys the apocalyptic scene before him, Boyce says he no longer has any idea what the American Dream might be. ‘I thought it was the auto industry, you know, with jobs and pension and health insurance and what-not, but that went pop. Now they say they are building condos everywhere down here, but I don’t know who they think is going to buy them. I guess that’s another type of dream.’

We saw many sides of life on our journey across the north-eastern United States, from the unbridled optimism of youth to the jaded resignation of those who have seen the product of a life’s work drain away before their eyes. One thing they all agreed on, though, is that Americans have been funding their dreams on cheap credit for far too long and they can’t keep up the payments.

So now it’s time to wake up, America, for this Dream of yours has become a nightmare.