It took a visit from a friend to open my eyes to\u00a0the (literal) darkness of Detroit’s streets. Earlier this month, my dear friend Iain spent part of his Spring Break visiting me in Detroit (you read that right.. Spring Break in Detroit!). Soon after his arrival, we embarked on a brief 10-minute walk from my house to a local bar. Making our way\u00a0down the street, Iain asked me an\u00a0unintentionally provocative question.<\/p>\n
“Jessy,” he inquired, “are there no streetlamps here?”<\/p>\n
The moment gave me pause. Then I began to laugh, a bit raucously, and somewhat hysterically. I’d walked down this street countless times before and honestly had never realized there were\u00a0no streetlamps<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>to be seen.\u00a0<\/em>If you’ve always lived in cities with well-lit streets, like I had, the idea that I hadn’t noticed the lack of light on\u00a0this street\u00a0might seem absurd. It was.\u00a0Yet somehow, after just half a year of living in Detroit, unlit streets had become somewhat of a normalized experience for me. I hadn’t even thought twice about it.<\/p>\n Iain’s visit helped me realize how much I have immersed myself in the city (perhaps to the point where I no longer bat an eye at unlit streets, haha).Walking together through the streets of Detroit, I surprised even\u00a0myself with how much I had absorbed. As we went from neighborhood to neighborhood, I couldn’t help but identify\u00a0every building we passed, discuss every initiative\u00a0and non-profit I was familiar with, and divulge every cultural anecdote\u00a0I had picked up along the way.\u00a0Every point became a point of interest. Every\u00a0angle\u00a0brought new perspective.<\/p>\n Before my internship in the D back in the summer of 2012, I never imagined I could learn so much from a being in a\u00a0place<\/em>. Yet Detroit is truly a city like no other. Walking down Detroit’s beaten paths, you often can’t help but wonder\u00a0about those who trod on them before you. You sometimes can’t help but see the socioeconomic disparities between groups of people. And you regularly\u00a0can’t help but imagine all that the space\u00a0could be.\u00a0Living in Detroit, we are not only made to think about\u00a0development,\u00a0history, politics, community, culture,\u00a0crime, oppression, race, art,\u00a0urban planning,\u00a0inclusion and innovation… we are\u00a0part<\/em> of the evolving narrative.<\/p>\n While not all of\u00a0Detroit’s streets may be bustling, or occupied,\u00a0or even illuminated, one thing is for certain:\u00a0every street has a story to tell. And, as residents of Detroit, these stories shape us as much as we shape them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It took a visit from a friend to open my eyes to\u00a0the (literal) darkness of Detroit’s streets. Earlier this month, my dear friend Iain spent part of his Spring Break visiting me in Detroit (you read that right.. Spring Break in Detroit!). Soon after his arrival, we embarked on a brief 10-minute walk from my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":185,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/185"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13057\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}