Disgraced former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick carries himself
a bit like a cool teacher, and for a time in the 1990s he was just
that. He reveals in his new memoir Surrendered!: The Rise,
Fall, and Revelation of Kwame Kilpatrick that he smoked pot
while teaching at Marcus Garvey Academy in Detroit, but he was good
at his job and the kids liked him. Yeah, he was spuriously taking
food stamps as a young man, but, come on, he was getting himself
through Florida A&M and actually graduating. Even in his
mugshot (which, in the media, is often cropped side-by-side with
that of his chief of staff/mistress Christine Beatty) Kwame looks
like he’s about to remind you to get that C-average up so you can
go out for varsity this year, man.
Kilpatrick was released this week from the G. Robert
Cotton Correctional Facility in Jackson, Michigan after serving
fifteen months for “failing to disclose assets and surrender funds
that could have reduced his $1 million restitution to the city.”
He’s free for the moment, but still will face trial on various
other corruption charges stemming from his mayoralty, and may
likely end up back behind bars.
The gregarious son of former Michigan congresswoman
Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, Kwame, 41, writes in the book that what
“brought him down” — i.e. encouraged certain people to dig up his
corruption scandals — was a March 2007 Saviour’s Day event at Ford
Field, at which he warmly greeted Louis Farrakhan. He’s way off.
This isn’t the mid-Nineties, when people thought Farrakhan was a
serious threat to the country. Nowadays, most people view the
Bowtied One much as they view Castro — with their fear and
loathing preserved safely in memory, and without too much outrage
should celebrities choose to hang out with him.
If Kwame feels like he harmed his standing among Detroit
old-timers and marshaled the city’s influential families against
him, then he might have done it a year later, when he tore down
Tiger Stadium. Built in 1912 and opened the same day as Fenway
Park, Tiger Stadium was a cramped “cigar box” ballpark conducive to
high-scoring games and an authentic experience for fans, with all
those quirky “obstructed view” seats. Over the years it grew into a
city landmark, a paternal touchstone among Detroit’s white working
class, tended over by great Tiger owners like railroad tycoon
Walter Briggs Sr. (1935-52) and his son Walter Briggs Jr.
(1952-56), radio executive John Fetzer (1956-83) and beloved
Domino’s Pizza founder and Catholic philanthropist Tom Monaghan
(1983-92).
When Monaghan sold the team to Little Caesars Pizza
founder Mike Ilitch (a laissez-faire baseball owner merely
interested in consolidating his local sports empire, which includes
the Detroit Red Wings) in 1992, the organization took a left turn.
Like a true Democrat (Ilitch
is a major Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid contributor) Ilitch
increased spending and drove his organization into debt. By 2005,
the Tigers carried one of the biggest payrolls in baseball despite
embarrassing ticket-revenue results, and
showed a debt-to-value rate of 84% (third-worst in MLB).
Ballpark security was gutted and sportswriters started observing
homeless people sleeping on the premises. Though Kilpatrick’s
predecessor, Mayor Dennis Archer, proposed a popular $200 million
plan to preserve the stadium, with new lofts, shops, and a swimming
pool, Illitch bristled at the idea, chased off interested
developers and hinted that he’d move the team elsewhere unless he
got a new stadium. After the 1999 season, Illitch’s Tigers moved
out of Tiger Stadium and into newly-built Comerica Park (with
Illitch splitting the new stadium’s $350 million tab with taxpayers
and federal grants).
So Tiger Stadium — the house that Ty Cobb built — sat
there empty and unused in the historic Corktown neighborhood:
Detroit’s onetime west-side depository for Irish potato-famine
victims and later, as the auto-industry provided surrounding
merchant jobs, for the city’s German Jews (few moments in the Ken
Burns Baseball documentary were as funny or moving as when
two old men recalled listening to Hank Greenberg’s Tigers on the
radio during synagogue). Tiger loyalists petitioned the city to at
least find another use for it, and the municipal government seemed
receptive. Archer opened talks with various developers, who pitched
plans for mixed-use condominiums, dog racing, boxing, off-road
racing, professional soccer, and live concerts. Archer also
entertained local entrepreneur Peter Comstock Riley’s plan to lease
the field for his new Frontier League franchise, and thus keep
baseball at Tiger Stadium alive. Peter Zeiler, the business
development representative for the Detroit Economic Growth
Corporation (DEGC) and a major advocate of Tiger Stadium
preservation, told ESPN, “Nobody
wants to shoot Old Yeller.”
Then, in 2001, Detroit elected 31-year-old Kwame
Kilpatrick: America’s first “hip-hop mayor.” Not yet born when
Denny McLain pitched the Tigers into the ‘68 World Series against
the Cardinals, Kwame ignored Zeiler, tabled Comstock Riley’s plan,
and set about demolishing Tiger Stadium. He may have started
listening to Cleveland State urban affairs professor Mark
Rosentraub, who publicly argued that no ballpark had ever been
redeveloped after a new stadium was built, that demolishing the
park would cost only $4.5 million (according to John Adamo Jr. of
Adamo Demolition) and that the city could make quick money
auctioning off seats, lockers, and dirt from the playing field.
“The nostalgia market — you can do very well” Rosentraub said. So
Kilpatrick traveled to Las Vegas in 2003, and again in 2004, to
pitch the Tiger Stadium lot to retailers like Wal-Mart and Kohl’s.
Though Tiger Stadium preservation movements intensified, and
despite the park’s listing on the National Register of Historic
Places, Kilpatrick continued to pursue demolition plans.
By early 2008, demolition was a foregone conclusion, and
it came time for the city to hand out a contract. By then, insiders
noticed that most big-money city contracts were going to Bobby
Ferguson, the son of legendary Detroit contractor Homer Ferguson,
and a family friend to Mayor Kilpatrick. Kwame had recently held up
a $50 million sewer-lining contract until the winning bidder agreed
to pay Ferguson, and then inflated the contract to a ridiculous
$137 million so that Ferguson — who did no work on the project —
could walk away with a $24.7 million cut. Everyone knew that Tiger
Stadium was going down, and that Bobby Ferguson was getting the
demolition contract. So when a lone, still-unnamed official at the
DEGC spoke up against the burgeoning plan — citing the fact that
Ferguson was not low bidder on the demolition project —
Kwame Kilpatrick tried to get the official fired. The official
stood his ground, prompting Kilpatrick to send
his staffer Kandia Milton to the DEGC office to ask for that
official’s resignation. Ferguson lost the contract, but demolition
went forward — after the new contractors agreed to finance the
project by selling Tiger Stadium scrap metal.
The wrecking ball hit on June 30, 2008, and demolition
concluded the following September. The opening scene in the HBO
series Hung painfully depicted the process, and Detroit’s
own Mitch
Albom played Philip Roth-on-Newark in the pages of Jewish
World Review. Comstock Riley publicly mourned: “Tiger Stadium
deserved better.” It did. If Red Sox fans suffered an 86-year curse
merely because owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees to
finance his Broadway show No No, Nanette, then “Kwame’s
Curse,” borne of crooked dealings and blatant disregard for
tradition, will likely be much worse. In a sense, Kwame’s
destruction of Tiger Stadium marked the defining moment of his
mayoralty, the day that Detroit officially changed
forever.
Beginning from the city’s industrialization, Detroit’s
political machine — like Philadelphia’s — was Republican, and the
mayor was usually a nationally-prominent businessman, like
entrepreneur Oscar Marx (1913-1918), railroad-tycoon James Couzens
(1919-1922) or Albert Cobo (1950-57) a Burroughs Corporation
executive who the company “loaned” to the city of Detroit for
mayoral duties. Everyone was somebody’s son or nephew, and
everybody was a Republican. With the auto industry booming,
Detroit’s GOP machine governed with firm popular
support.
The machine broke down with progressive crusader Jerome
Cavanaugh’s historic 1961 election as a Democrat, his marches with
Martin Luther King Jr., and the devastating 1967 race riots. As the
North Side Irish of Chicago drifted out to the suburbs of Evanston
and Oak Park and started commuting to Wrigley Field, so too did
vast numbers of Detroit’s conservative city-Irish leave Detroit,
and Tiger Stadium with it. All of Detroit’s past seven mayors
starting with Cavanaugh have been Democrats.
Kwame Kilpatrick — the son of two Baby Boomer Detroit
politicians — was the first second-generation leader of Detroit’s
Democrat political machine. His six-year mayoralty, then, holds
historic significance. With his cool-teacher antics and sappy
business dealings, mediocre Kwame — his funny little grin usually
plastered on his chubby little face — proved, simply by occupying
the mayor’s office, the existence of a relatively-young postwar
political machine. His demolition of Tiger Stadium made perfect
sense. Kwame was the living embodiment of New Detroit, and so
naturally he tore the symbol of Old Detroit to the
ground.
Kwame will return to U.S. District Court in Detroit next
summer to face further public corruption indictments in an ongoing,
taxpayer-funded legal saga. “Assault” even appears in the litany of
charges against him (apparently he shoved an investigator
delivering his friend a perjury subpoena). Regardless of the
outcome, Kilpatrick will be impossible to ignore in the annals of
city history (though not for his criminality, for which he’ll stand
out like “Waldo”). Little Kwame bridged the influence of Detroit’s
liberal political machine into a new generation, and burned the
last proud vestige of prosperous, conservative middle-class
Detroit.
