The United States of Allah: It Happened in My Neighborhood, Yours Is Next
If you want to see what’s left of the house I grew up in, check out this brief video I shot a few years ago.
When I was a kid growing up in the Warrendale section of Detroit in the 1970s, the Polish presence was everywhere. Warren Avenue was “the Strip” of our turf, and it was littered with family businesses with difficult names like the Jarzembowski Funeral Home. There was the Kozy Korner, with Kozy being short for a name I can’t begin to spell. The houses were mostly small, two- or three-bedroom homes that began growing in the 1940s.
I grew up on Ashton Ave. The Herman Gardens projects were across the Southfield Freeway, easily viewable from my bedroom window. They were built to house servicemen returning from WWII. By the 1970s, Herman Gardens was becoming one of the most dangerous projects in Detroit. As kids, we would play outside at night in the dark (Detroit was too broke to install street lights). When a police chopper showed up over Herman Gardens, its searchlight beaming, looking for a “perp” — which happened frequently — we knew it was time to go inside.
FACT-O-RAMA! TV’s Judge Mathis grew up in Herman Gardens. He was a member of Detroit’s Eroll Flynns gang.
Kowalski sausages were sold everywhere. Most of the kids I knew at Saints Peter and Paul Elementary School had last names like Jablonski, Hejka, Szuper, Balinski, Zmuda, and Polchlapek. I could name more, but as my school days friend Melissa stated, “It would be easier to say who didn’t have Polish names — Ballard and Downey.”
Many of the kids’ grandparents lived in a nearby Polish enclave called Hamtramck.
FACT-O-RAMA! I might be the only media person in the world who can pronounce the name Hamtramck (ham-TRAM-ick). Now you know.
As in Warrendale, bars dominated the street corners of Hamtramck. Paczki could be found everywhere around Easter time. Most of the town spoke Polish. Every Catholic went to church.
Dearborn is a largely Middle-Eastern-dominated city across the southern and western borders of Warrendale.
A good friend I grew up with, whom I’ll call Hoppy, remained in Warrendale until 2015 and only moved after some gang-bangers took a potshot at him as he was shoveling snow. In true Detroit style, he snarled at them and returned to what he was doing, but the message was clear: it was time to go.
In the years since my family left, Warrendale has become a ghetto.
It was already dangerous in the ’70s. All the kids in my neighborhood had been robbed, beaten, or stabbed. Hoppy had a gun stuck in his face two different times at Cody High School.
McMURDER-O-RAMA! Detroit’s infamous “Murder Mac” McDonald’s is located on Joy Road and Ashton Ave., roughly an eight-minute walk down the street from my former home.
The last straw came in March of 1977. One day, as we were eating dinner, an ambulance pulled up in front of our house. The 19-year-old kid next door came out of his home wearing a white button-down shirt covered in blood. He’d been pummeled while on leave from the Air Force. My dad slammed his fork full of Hamburger Helper on his plate and declared, “That’s it. We’re moving!”
No less than 70% of the houses on my old block, including Hoppy’s, are gone. So is Melissa’s, which was just under a mile to the west. Most of the houses still standing, including mine, are empty.
The demographics of my neighborhood have changed in the 58 years since I was born. Warrendale went from mostly white, Polish people, to almost soundly black, to largely Muslim, most of whom are Yemeni. Ditto Hamtramck.
Many of the churches are gone. So are most of the bars. All of the Polish businesses have long since vacated. The once omnipotent Kowalski sausage has been replaced by halal meat. If you want to buy paczki today, you need to head to Sterling Heights.
Hamtramck, which was run by Poles for 100 years, is the first town in the United States to have a Muslim mayor as well as the entire city council.
FACT-O-RAMA! Hamtramck voted last year to allow animal sacrifices at home.
