Here’s Michael Wilbon, in a column about the pressure on black high school basketball players to go to the NBA:
But it's not Telfair and LeBron James I'm primarily concerned with... my concern is for the hundreds of boys in Southeast Washington, the Bronx and West Philly and the South Side of Chicago and in Detroit and East St. Louis and South Central Los Angeles who look at Telfair and immediately think, ‘Me, too.’
Notice for every other city Wilbon lists a specific neighborhood or section that's known for being high-crime, but for Detroit, it’s just “Detroit.” Reminds me of when he and Kornheiser got into trouble a couple years ago for saying on the air that the Motor City “looks bombed-out, as though the ’67 riots happened just a few weeks ago.” Makes you wonder if Mike drives an American car.
Speaking of which, now that I work until 6 (or later) every night, I haven’t seen my erstwhile favorite show, PTI, in months. Come on ESPN, what happened to the late-night re-run?
Posted by Stephen Silver at May 6, 2004 08:13 PMhave you been to detroit any time recently (the city proper that is). Outside of maybe Greektown and the brief stretch of the waterfront w/ the Casinos, the place looks exactly like Kornheiser described it. It's rather saddening.
Most of the companies moved out to the surrounding areas to Detroit, out of the city proper. They're still in the "Greater Detroit" area though
Posted by: jaws at May 6, 2004 11:20 PMalso, describing all of west philly as "high-crime, black ghetto" is somewhat inaccurate - west philly consists of many of those types of neighborhoods, but also includes University City, home of UPenn, which for the most part is like Cambridge; as well as such neighborhoods as Spruce Hill, which in addition to being the location of many large, stately Victorian homes of Penn professors, is also the neighborhood of large, stately Victorian houses gone to seed that are now the squats of anarchist hippie-punks.
Posted by: LilB at May 7, 2004 10:24 AM