Building Bohemia in Detroit's Cass Corridor, 1964-2017

“Building Bohemia in Detroit’s Cass Corridor” explores the life and death of a Rust Belt bohemian enclave during the late twentieth century to provide a bottom-up perspective on the urban crisis, the post-1960s Left, and the rise of neoliberal urban governance. By studying artists and activists, anarchists and poets, hippies and punks in relationship with their neighborhood, this dissertation argues that a focus on grassroots actors allows us to see beyond the narratives of malaise and decline that frequently color accounts of late twentieth century urban and political history. In newspapers, zines, music, and community spaces, bohemians romanticized Detroit as a place they could be their authentic selves, created sites to explore radical possibilities for different ways of living, and shaped the anarchist-influenced social movements of today. To investigate these stories, I conducted oral histories with scene participants and performed research in their personal archives. This dissertation takes seriously the intellectual work of thinkers often dismissed as fringe and who have rarely been engaged outside movement publications. In the early twenty-first century, capitalists took advantage of Detroit’s bankruptcy to gain swaths of land in the neighborhood, which they razed to build a publicly funded sports arena. Examining the erasure of this community unveils neoliberal strategies for managing and profiting from the urban crisis in Rust Belt cities. Cass Corridor artists and activists fought the decisions that destroyed their neighborhood, and their story reveals the lived experience of Detroiters as business, municipal, and state leaders remade Detroit into a postindustrial city.