We lived in the city of Detroit until I was about ten.
Remember dimestores? There was a huge one near us that sold pretty much everything. Not like the dollar stores today, where things are all in bins and crammed together. The dimestore had grandeur: high ceilings, large glass windows in front, long glass counters with a salesperson behind each one, attractive displays of the merchandise. They sold jewelry, makeup, household items, toys, books, sewing supplies and patterns, school and office supplies, you name it. I loved looking at the long, colorful strips of suckers (lollipops) hanging from a hook, but as my mother would remind me, I didn't actually like eating them. But the colors were jewel tones and looked beautiful with the light streaming through them.
We moved a lot in those days. My parents had separated, and my mother had moved back to Detroit to be near her family. At first we lived with an aunt and uncle, then rented a room in a house, then moved from apartment to apartment, either because the next one was better or because a landlord had raised rent or refused to make repairs.
When we moved to the neighborhood with the dimestore, there was a beautiful old Gothic-looking red brick house next door to us. It was a huge place, the kind of place that could have been turned into apartments. Three days after we moved in, the wrecking crews came and tore it down to make way for a boxy late-'60s style apartment building with no character whatsoever. It about killed me to see this cool, fabulous house smashed apart. I was seven. I could do nothing to save it. We didn't have a camera, so I couldn't even get a photo of it.
It had once been a grand old neighborhood. Some of the old houses were still there, and a few old buildings with wonderful architecture. By the time we lived there, however, most of the old properties had been divided up into tiny lots with little auto-factory-worker houses. We moved away when I was about ten, and ten years after that, it had become slum. Horrific, what happened to Detroit.