![]() The sun glinted off the Detroit River, which separates the city from Canada, and winked back from the skyscrapers in Detroit's compact business district. From the air, the urban sprawl seemed as intricate and harmonious as a Persian carpet. I found myself unexpectedly drawn to my old hometown, and resolved that night to come back to the city and write about it. I knew that the auto industry was in bad shape that the 1967 riot had sent whites fleeing to the suburbs in droves that the city was now mostly black, and that the national press referred to it as ''Murder Capital, U.S.A.'' Beyond that, Detroit held little interest for me.īut the fires of Devil's Night sparked my curiosity. In 1967, I moved to Israel, and for years I rarely thought about Detroit. I stopped trying to figure out this city a long time ago.'' ![]() The gawkers cheered the firemen and jostled one another happily.Īt dawn, on the way home, I asked my friend what it was all about. Flames raced through the brush and into abandoned buildings. Some parts of the city look like pasture land. During the last 30 years, the city has lost almost half its population, and there are entire blocks where all but one or two houses are boarded up and vacant. Detroit is a city of one- and two-story homes, most of them built on narrow lots. The fires raged on and on, more than 200 that night (and, I later learned, almost 400 in the three-day Halloween period). At every stop, people gawked at the flames and passed around bottles of whisky and thermos caps of coffee. Police helicopters circled overhead and fire trucks, sirens blaring, raced from one conflagration to another. From early evening, fires flared throughout the city. By 1986, Devil's Night had become a prelude to Halloween in Detroit in the way that Mardi Gras precedes Lent in New Orleans, and even my friend's dramatic description did not prepare me for what I saw. The bizarre outburst turned into an annual tradition. When it was over, the papers reported more than 800 fires. Houses, abandoned buildings, even unused factories burned to the ground in an orgy of arson that lasted for 72 hours. ![]() Two years earlier, in 1984, for reasons no one understands, America's sixth largest city erupted into flames. But it had been 20 years since I had lived there, and a lot of things had changed. ![]() When I was a kid growing up in Pontiac, just north of Detroit, it had been a time of harmless pranks -window soaping and rolls of toilet paper in the neighbors' trees. ''People try to burn down their own neighborhoods. ''Spend the evening before Halloween with me and I'll show you something you've never seen before,'' he promised. We were introduced by a friend who works for a local radio station. It was in the Fall of 1986 that I first saw the devil on the streets of Detroit.
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