Detroit earns a significant salute Tuesday from New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, who sees working streetlights as a meaningful sign of "the city's slow recovery."
Tuesday's New York Times column.
Never mind "plucky hipsters from Los Angeles or Brooklyn colonizing abandoned spaces, opening pickle companies or tilling little urban agriculture plots," he writes in an 1,100-word column.
Forget articles acclaiming "Detroit as the next Berlin," adds the New Yorker, who suggests instead appreciating that "the last of this city’s 65,000 new streetlights blazed on" last month.
Let’s hope that if anyone writes a history of Detroit’s rejuvenation, a chapter is devoted to the lights returning.
Like picking up the trash, fixing potholes and responding to emergencies, these efforts signal that no matter where you live in Detroit, you are no longer forgotten — that government here can finally keep its basic promises
Kimmelman cane to see for himself and speak with Duggan, whom he calls "a strong mayor."
The mayor voices optimism about interim U.S. Census Bureau data this year. "After generations of white and black flight, there’s hope the numbers will reveal, for the first time in decades, the population holding steady or even rising," The Times says.
LED replacement lights are cost-saving, Kimmelman notes, and new aluminum wiring isn't valuable to scrappers, whose stripping of capper wire created blacked-out blocks.
The new lights are "spread all across town," he adds.
The project cost $185 million, paid by the city and the state. The Public Lighting Authority of Detroit, backed by the mayor, received a critical assist from the Obama administration: Experts from the Department of Energy advised local officials to swap out the old, costly, broken-down sodium lamps, which vandals had been stripping bare for copper wire.
They recommended LED technology. Investments by the Obama administration in advanced, energy-efficient lighting have driven down costs, making LEDs feasible for a city like Detroit. Three years ago, nearly half the 88,000 streetlights in the city were out of commission. The more potent LED lights allow the authority to replace those 88,000 old fixtures with 65,000 new ones . . .
The whole thing came in under budget and on time. When was the last time anyone could say that about a major infrastructure project in Detroit? “An example of how good government should work,” as Lorna L. Thomas, chairwoman of the lighting authority, put it at the switch-flipping ceremony.
-- Alan Stamm
