The crew behind the "60 Minutes" story on Detroit that aired Sunday discuss their assignment in a short video that was posted on the show's website.
"Was it worse than you were expecting?" an interviewer asks Bob Simon, the veteran journalist who anchored the piece.
He responds: "It was. It made me think of Mogadishu. Just completely wrecked. I mean, just abandoned houses all over the place. Burned-out houses. It looked like it would be a nightmare to live there.
Dan Gilbert, the Quicken Loans founder who is featured in the "60 Minutes" report, also thought it was worse than he expected.
Simon's report, that is.
After the show, Gilbert tweeted: “Expected more of @60minutes.” Is a ‘me too’ story of mostly ‘ruin porn’ news? A city’s soul that will not die was the story & they missed it.” More than 200 followers retweeted his reaction.
Simon's daughter, Tanya, above, served as producer on the report, he explains. It was not her first time in the city.
"I had been there a few years ago to do a story on Eminem," she says. "Something about Detroit stuck with me. I could never put my finger on what it was and why I wanted to go back. There's something about the heart and soul of that place that just kind of sticks with you. And maybe the grit people have, and the determination they have.
"You feel like an outsider there. People treat like you that. There's a little bit of defensiveness and a little bit of an attitude of 'We heard it all before.'"
During the crew's visit, Simon discovered that one of the two cameramen, Greg Andracke, left, had grown up on the East Side, the son of a Ford Motor Co. tool-and-die maker, recalls he grew up at 5146 Sheridan, near Gratiot and Van Dyke. He recited his old phone number: WAlnut 3-7870.
The crew convinced Andracke to return to his childhood home on Sheridan Street to see what had become of it. What he found was emblematic of the city's fate: Andracke's neighborhood had been destroyed, and his childhood home was the last one standing on the block.
In the 1950s, "it was sort of like what you would imagine would be the ideal neighborhood in a Hollywood movie," he recalled. "Now I come back and it's just empty fields."
In this video, Andracke remembers the Detroit of his youth, in a series of photographs he took as a young still photographer at Wayne State University, including some of the 1967 riot. He estimates that organizations like CBS News have sent him back to Detroit on assignment about a dozen times in the past 35 years.
After Andracke recalls the joys of bicycling under the canopy of elms that once covered Sheridan, the interviewer asks him what he is thinking.
"I'm thinking that it's a place to be from," he says. "I've always said that about Detroit. Couldn't wait to get out."
