A few miles east of Detroit’s gleaming new ballpark and glittering new casino hotels, a few miles west of the sprawling mansions lining Grosse Pointe’s Lakeshore Drive, north of the General Motors assembly plant, south of the Daimler-Chrysler assembly plant, and just west of the regional airstrip known as City Airport, you’ll find a five-acre parcel of land known as Fletcher Field. At first glance, Fletcher could be pretty much any park in urban America: it has a baseball diamond in one corner, an asphalt basketball court in the other, a large swing set, and a bright-red jungle gym. It has two electric-blue plastic picnic tables and one spring rider, origin unknown, in the shape of a dolphin. As of last year, it has mowed grass. As of last month, it has a small garden of flowers and a few stalks of corn, guarded by a cheerful scarecrow salvaged from the wreckage of a nearby home.

Zoom out, and the perspective changes. Fletcher lies at the heart of what is perhaps the most dangerous section of what is perhaps the most dangerous city in America. Once a working-class neighborhood, its residents employed in those nearby auto-manufacturing plants, the City Airport neighborhood, as the area is known, has crumbled. As the plants closed—and as Detroit’s overall fortunes plummeted—residents (white, then black) fled the neighborhood. The exodus was under way before the 1967 race riots convulsed the region, but it accelerated in their wake, exacerbating the misunderstanding and mistrust between the two races that were trying, unsuccessfully, to share the city. Today, homes that haven’t been condemned or destroyed by arson have been left to rot, some of them transformed into drug houses—cocaine and, later, crystal meth. The neighborhood school has disintegrated from the inside out, its windows shattered by...

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