James Morris is the owner of DSE, a downtown Detroit T-shirt business. He hadn't noticed that his city had filed for bankruptcy and he doesn't particularly care. "There hasn't been a moment when Detroit wasn't dealing with problems. Now it's just official," he said.
The facts of Detroit's dissolution are astonishing: 76,000 homes and buildings in once-prosperous neighborhoods abandoned; vast factories crumbling like monuments to America's manufacturing heyday. But on the weekend following the city's symbolic admission of defeat, there was defiance in the air and a sense that Detroit can turn the corner.
"This was always a place of great community," said writer and publisher Cary Loren. "The car industry's gone and it's not coming back. Capitalism has failed us, but so what? We'll just go on to the next thing."
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