I grew up in Detroit in the 1960s and remember most those yellowish-gray skies from pollution from the auto and other plants. Grimy brown rivers and streams and the smell of petroleum and incinerators. It was normal up until the movement to clean up our world. People think pollution is bad today but I am sitting in my house looking south toward Detroit at the beautiful sky and thinking about the clear Detroit River and knowing that it was the hard work of people in the 1960s and '70s that has gotten us to where we are today.

This view is looking north, and just beyond the downtown office buildings and hotels there is the Detroit River. Windsor, Ontario is on the other side of the border, and I grew up there in the 1950s. I had evening swimming lessons at age 9 in the winter of 1956 at the Windsor YMCA. Afterwards we had a snack at the Chicken Court next door. When I emerged from the Y there was a strong sulfur aroma in the cold night air from the use of coal for industry and home heating.

This photo turned out to be cruelly ironic: the attempted relocation of Black residents was met by a clash between White opponents and Black supporters. The resulting "Sojourner Truth riot" led to 220 arrests -- with 109 charged, only three of them White. Settlement of Sojourner Truth was halted, leaving many of those moved from the slum Siegel photographed with no place to live -- doubly displaced. Detroit then mandated segregation in public housing, with "racial patterns of a neighborhood" not to be altered. Sixteen months later came the Detroit race riot of 1943.

Every school I ever attended used venetian blinds; I've passed by some that use shades, but have never seen one that used curtains for its windows (what a genteel time ... long gone!)

The juxtaposition of buildings on the skyline - Hudson's to the right of the Penobscot Building (and the Book-Cadillac even further right) tells us this is northeast of downtown, though perhaps not as far out as the mentioned Sojourner Truth Homes (the full name of the school remains tantalizingly just out of reach). This appears to be Adelaide Street, the school - Bishop - was a noted landmark, tho the orginal building had burned in 1936. (Curiously, despite the area being frequently targeted for slum clearance, the school, as well as the buildings in the foreground, endured until c. 1970, surviving even a freeway ramp that ran next door..literally.) The SJTH were just opening when this was published, not without headlines (of the wrong kind.)

Clean white curtains in the school house windows, and no trash strewn in the streets. Air looks terrible -- all those factories I guess. Those are mostly gone now. While the house in the lower right looks dilapidated, it looks better than much of Detroit did for many years, perhaps until recently.