Before Detroit, there was the strait. That ribbon of water running between Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie. The Odawa and the Huron, who had been paddling around here for centuries, understood it: whoever holds this bottleneck holds the Great Lakes. And whoever holds the Great Lakes controls half the continent.
Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac lands here in July 170112. A Gascon aristocrat and former commander of Fort de Buade, he has smelled a good deal. He plants Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit on the north bank3, named after the Comte de Pontchartrain, France’s Minister of the Navy. But Cadillac couldn’t care less about the glory of the Sun King. What interests him is the fur business. And above all, land.
His stroke of genius: handing out land in narrow ribbons running perpendicular to the river. Plots 200 feet wide and 3 miles deep, an adaptation of the French seigneurial system to the New World4. Every settler gets direct access to the water (transport, trade, life itself) and a strip of land reaching deep into the woods. Every lot is worth its weight in gold. From day one, Detroit is a city designed as a fractional real estate product, cut into tradeable strips.
Within a few years, it takes off. Wheat fields eat into the forest. Settlers bring over their families, Cadillac ships in women from Montreal and Quebec. Huron and Odawa villages huddle around the fort to share in the trade. Canoes loaded with pelts come down from the upper Great Lakes. In this world where the French of the coureurs de bois mingles with Algonquian languages, Detroit becomes the lock on the fur route.
But above all, the land grants are resold, subdivided, haggled over. A secondary market is born. Notarial deeds pile up. Land ownership becomes the real power. Cadillac understands before anyone else that the real wealth is not what passes through Detroit, it is Detroit itself. The land. The title deeds. The real estate.
In 1710, Cadillac is appointed governor of Louisiana. His controversial management will earn him accusations and a brief spell in prison in 1717. The city he founded will outlive him, but it is about to change hands like a title deed.
1760. New France has been crushed. Major Robert Rogers arrives, the French flag comes down, the Union Jack goes up. Scottish merchants move in. No more royal land grants: make way for commercial transactions.
Legal chaos sets in. A British court tries to make the common law coexist with the Custom of Paris, the French customary law. A French settler sells his land to a Scottish merchant. Under which law? The lawyers rub their hands. Detroit becomes a land registry nightmare.
In 1796, the Americans finally take possession after thirteen years of limbo. At the turn of the 19th century, 2,500 people are crammed in. Owners rent out rooms, attics, cellars. Every square foot is monetised. A city with no plan and no reliable records, where every transaction rests on dubious paperwork. All it needed was a spark.
11 June 1805. The (false) legend has it that John Harvey, a baker on Sainte-Anne Street, left his pipe lying near a pile of hay. The spark becomes a blaze. The west wind turns the blaze into an apocalypse. Four hours later, Detroit no longer exists.
All that remains are a few stone buildings near the fort and a warehouse on the wharf. But the worst of it is the total erasure of the land records. The town archives, the parish registers going back to 1703, the notarial deeds, the property contracts: a century of paperwork gone up in smoke. Nobody knows who owns what any more. Property lines? Gone. Mortgages? Vanished. Easements? Forgotten.
Judge Augustus Woodward, who arrived a few days before the fire, sees a blank page. Drawing on Pierre L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, he sketches avenues radiating out from circular squares. An American city, not this tangle of alleys inherited from the French. But above all, he gets to redraw the property map from scratch.
The motto Detroit adopts at the time says it all: Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus5. We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes.
Congress passes a special act on 21 April 18066: every owner who lost a home will receive a new lot (up to 5,000 sq ft), but not necessarily in the same place. The Woodward plan reshuffles everything. Speculators pour in from New York, Boston, Philadelphia. They buy up the victims’ claims for a pittance and bet on the future lines of development. Plots are traded, split, merged.
Detroit rises from its ashes, but as a fully financialised city. Every square foot has a price, an owner, a creditor. Land becomes paper, paper becomes value, value becomes speculation.