To Have and To Have Not

In the movie, Wall Street, Oliver Stone, through his character Darien Taylor, played by Daryl Hannah, reminds us that “when you've had money and lost it, it can be much worse than never having had it at all!”

This fundamental principle is true, not just on a grand, Bernie Madoff style scale. It often plays itself out in the lives of people whose fortunes have been subject to the whims of disruption and transformation, even in the most traditional of businesses.

We should remember that when an industry falls, as the auto industry did in Detroit, it often takes with it huge parts of its city and many other business that have grown up alongside.  That’s the story that my guest Frances Stroh tells in her memoir Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss.  It's a look at the Stroh Brewing Company, and the reality and perils of a closely held family business, and the rise and fall of privilege.

My conversation with Frances Stroh:

Detroit once symbolized America

Every great city has it’s defining era. Not always good, but certainly one that shapes its fortunes and reinforces its place in the urban pantheon. For New York it was perhaps the 50s, for Paris the mid 1920s, for San Francisco the ‘60s and for Hollywood, certainly the 1930s.

For Detroit, the eighteen months from the fall of 1962, through the spring 1964 marked perhaps the apogee and the beginning of the downward arc of that once great city.

A city that came to personify the American experience in the second half of the 20th century. Detroit at the time was the epicenter of music, racial strife, labor and of a middle class that now seems a bygone dream.

Capturing that moment is Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist, and Washington Post Associate Editor David Maraniss. He captures the essence of this period in Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story.

My conversation with David Maraniss:

Pittsburgh vs. Detroit, by way of Cleveland

Just returned from Cleveland and saw a city totally mired in what Richard Florida calls "the great reset."  A city of downtown urban promise surrounded by the decay, unemployment and foreclosers of the current economic crisis.  It's interesting to wonder if Cleveland will go the way of Pittsburgh and continue to re energize, or will it go the way of Detroit.  

John Craig, a former editor of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette nails it in his recent Washington Post article.  Money quote:

Particularly challenging is the state of affairs in the urban core, where population stood at slightly more than 900,000 in 2006, down from a 1950 high of 1.6 million. There’s a critical difference here between the two cities. Even though it has only a third of Detroit’s population, Pittsburgh has more people working in it every day — 298,429 to 241,627. It also has a 1 percent county sales tax that serves as a user fee for regional entertainment and cultural institutions. Thus it’s able to offer area residents more urban amenities and job opportunities than Detroit.

For all its traumas, Pittsburgh retains an urban/suburban/rural coherence. That, coupled with striking architecture and a beautiful natural setting, goes a long way toward explaining why it consistently gets better press than it might deserve, and why, after you examine the region’s economic, demographic, environmental, health and local government measures, you refrain from blurting out, “Why, they’ve been treading water for years!” Which is, in any case, better than sinking.