Clean and Bright (Daily Planet email #1038)
“A dramatization of aluminum!” In 1959, Detroit architect Minoru Yamasaki designed the Reynolds Great Lakes Sales Region Headquarters in Southfield, Michigan, a midcentury “jewel on stilts,” created “with the intent of focusing the attention of the people, particularly the automobile designers, in the Detroit area on aluminum.” In keeping with the optimism of the times and its exuberantly-limitless use of materials, a gold-aluminum screen of interlocking rings wrapped the exterior of the three-story showpiece structure, which was raised on slender pilotis, bordered by a reflecting pool covered in water lilies, its perimeter of offices surrounding an open central core, flooded in daylight.
Reynolds Metals began 1919 as the U.S. Foil Company, supplying packaging materials for the Reynolds’ family cigarettes. World War Two, a housing boom, and the invention of Reynolds Wrap soon turned it into the third-largest aluminum company in the world. The business was bought by Alcoa in 2000 and is today part of Pactiv Evergreen, a New Zealand holding company. They left the Southfield building in 1984, which became a Bally’s Total Fitness and then a Vic Tanny and finally vacant for a decade and change. That’s why there’s a desolate boxing ring in the sunlit, molding atrium, curtained by small lockers, trespassed by urban explorers. The historic site went on auction in 2023, with a starting bid of $65,130.
Just up the road, along the service drive of the Lodge Freeway, is the former site of Northland Shopping Mall. Yes, there was also an Eastland, Southland, etc., all equally successful in their day, but this one has miles of tunnels that were used for deliveries and nuclear bomb shelters! Today, the mall is closed and partially razed, but by using Google Maps you can click along its ring road until the portable fencing stops you. Ha ha though, I can travel back and forth in time and see fence, no fence, fence, no fence. Look, here’s a woman crossing the empty parking lot in 2008, on her way to …what? The last remaining place in the food court? The liquidator store that ran for a few years? That market research company, down that darkened hallway, it’s legit, really, but the customers aren’t so qualified anymore. Anyway, it all closed in 2015.
A brief history: long after the Western Interior Seaway regressed and finally reunited the two halves of North America, and shortly after the great prehistoric salt seas receded leaving behind their strata of sandstone and limestone, mighty glaciers scrubbed the land for two million years, carving the basins of the Great Lakes and shaving smooth the flat plains of Southern Michigan. Upon this sedate scene arrived the peoples of The Three Fires: Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi — who hunted mastodon, bison, and giant beaver through lush fruit groves and dense forests. Then the French came, followed by the Jesuits, and soon after the British with their usual ways. The first European immigrant child was born in Southfield 200 years ago, the son of Mr. George White and his wife, presumably. Today, 24 million square feet of office space means Southfield triples its population during office hours.
Is it wrong to feel bad for Southfield, the self-proclaimed Center of It All and her post-industrial travails? Is it wrong to lament the fading, elegant remnants of endeavors whose time has come and gone, and gone some more? Is it wrong to feel nothing much for the tribes of people that lived here throughout their centuries and were pushed away to make room for what, exactly, if anything? Is it wrong to feel love for the Earth, rising, from a distance so great that it dare not speak its name? Whose wrong, what wrong? Oh Alcoa, oh John C. Lodge, oh bauxite ore, oh kids on bikes, eating sweet of the flavors that are no more, no more, anodized and anodyne.
