Chris Gerben grew up in the metro Detroit area in the 1980s and '90s, and even as a child he noticed a lot of major shifts in the city.
“We were a steel mill town and in the mid-80s is when a lot of this kind of emptying out of the city was happening,” Gerben says.
He remembers going to at least three different elementary schools because teachers kept getting laid off.
From the peak of Detroit’s auto industry until Gerben was born in the '80s — roughly three decades — the city lost over 200,000 jobs. That's more than during the Great Depression. It also lost over half a million people.
Gerben now lives with his family in Chicago and he wonders if what happened in Detroit happened across the Midwest in the same way. How did deindustrialization hit Milwaukee? And why was Chicago seemingly spared?
“If you don't know any better…it would seem like, ‘oh, [Chicago] is privileged in some way,’” Gerben says.
Deindustrialization shaped the Midwest in ways seen and unseen. For a limited series called “Curious Midwest”, Bubbler Talk is partnering with WBEZ in Chicago and WDET in Detroit to answer listener questions about the connections between our cities.
We look back at how things differed across these three cities when it came to the industries that built them up, and how each city dealt with the fallout.
The Motor City
Over 100 years ago, the “Big Three” – GM, Ford and Chrysler – made a home in Detroit, which led to more cars being built in the Motor City than anywhere in the world.
These factory jobs attracted the first wave of the Great Migration — African Americans leaving the rural South for the urban North, starting in the 1910s — as well as immigrant workers. Marsha Battle-Fillpot said her dad, Joe Von Battle, was one of those early workers coming up from Georgia.
“The auto industry here allowed for a relative prosperity that was unprecedented,” Battle-Fillpot says. “It's sort of not viewed like that with all the bells and whistles of say a New York, but this place is no joke.”
Von Battle was laid off from the auto plant when white workers returned to the factory after World War II. This gave rise to the axion, “last hired, first fired” with regards to Black workers.
“He was so despondent about having to have faced a reversal like that, he vowed at that point he would never work for another man,” she says.
With the prosperity of the auto industry, Von Battle decided to start his own business. In 1945, Joe’s Record Shop opened. It was an instant hit. In the first two years, he had a stock of over $100,000 worth of records.
But in the ’50s, the Big Three started pulling out of the city, moving to the suburbs for cheaper land.
This began before the "Rebellion of '67," five days of racial unrest in late July 1967 during which 43 people died, hundreds reported injuries and police arrested more than 7,000 people.
“There's a whole narrative that says, well, Detroit was basically doing okay until 1967 and all the whites left, and then Detroit fell into decline,” Battle-Fillpot says. “That's just so wrong-headed. There's no statistics that bear that out.”
During the rebellion, Joe’s Record Shop — a symbol of Black art and opportunity that defined the time — was looted.
“When my father walked back into that store…and he saw the destruction, I really say that my dad really died then,” Battle-Fillpot says. “He tried to reopen after that even, but he was just unable to gather it back altogether.”
Today, the Big Three's headquarters are still in metro Detroit, but jobs in the city never bounced back.
The Machine Shop of the World
The story of industry and its demise echoed in Milwaukee: the home of beer and brewing, heavy manufacturing and iron and steel. Industry here was more diverse than Detroit’s all-in plan on the auto industry. And with a bustling port, and growing rail system, Milwaukee was critical.
“Blue-collar in Milwaukee meant middle class,” says Adam Carr, a public historian and artist. “That's entwined with the history of socialism here: that the worker was not a chump in Milwaukee.”
Carr points out the soil and native plants now growing at Three Bridges Park – an old brownfield turned into a sprawling park, filled with walking paths built over a freeway that cut through the city.
It exemplifies the city’s indigenous roots, its peak in industry and the decline.
The loss of jobs and wealth in Milwaukee, specifically Black and brown Milwaukee, went down just like in Detroit. Urban renewal and redlining stunted generational wealth — a history the city is still dealing with. Like Detroit, industry jobs never bounced back.
“I heard someone say, pie in the sky in Milwaukee was the factory job,” Carr remembers. “We thought the gravy train would never end. And, I think we haven't found exactly who we are after industry yet.”
Both Milwaukee and Detroit are figuring out what comes next. But if there is a Midwest city that at least appears to have figured out its next chapter, it’s Chicago.
The Second City
In Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood, built on a graveyard of old industry, you’ll find the University of Illinois Chicago’s Cuppa Hall and the Great Cities Institute.
Matt Wilson is an associate director here. He has studied the long shadow of deindustrialization in Chicago. He says historically, the city had a lot of the same advantages of Milwaukee and Detroit: natural resources, a bustling port. But what separated Chicago was the rail system. As the country pushed west, Chicago became a major hub.
“Chicago still has that identity of the crossroads, a lot of goods flow through here,” says Wilson. “It's really easy when you go on the river to see barge traffic, and when you go to any of the ports that are around the city, you see the large-scale movement of goods.”
Industry varied in Chicago. The famous Union Stock Yards was considered the meatpacking center of the world. And if there is a reason why Chicago stayed on top, it’s because in the 1980s, the city pivoted.
“Chicago needs to compete with other cities to attract jobs in corporate headquarters,” Wilson says. “It needs to bring in tourism, and, you know, make sure all the hotels are filled and that there's a nightlife.”
Tax incentives and tax dollars were funneled to rebuild downtown — but not other parts of the city.
“The neighborhood of South Chicago, on the southeast side of the city, it feels like from the sort of historical archives I've read that the center of gravity was the steel plant,” says Wilson.
In South Chicago, you had Pressed Steel, Republic Steel, Wisconsin Steel and of course, U.S. Steel. These plants were the source of middle-class employment, and stabilized the housing market and retail and commercial businesses.
“Both my grandfathers worked [in the plants], my dad worked there and I worked there,” says Michael Lisecki, who grew up in the South Chicago neighborhood.
“It was like everybody worked in one of the mills, whether it was U.S., Wisconsin, and I mean it was devastating when we all got laid off,” he says.
Lisecki started working in the mills when he was 18, making better money than he ever dreamed possible. Three years later, he was laid off, and the neighborhood was never the same.
Chicago pivoted earlier than other cities, which does separate it from Detroit and Milwaukee. But no matter the city, deindustrialization left a hole. The work is happening to build something new, and it’s clear the bones of the past are still with us.
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