Harry Shiovitz visits his old house at 1956 Elmhurst. He moved his family out in the 1950s as pressure from realtors mounted.
Friday, February 21, 2014
As the moyel finished the ceremonial circumcision, family and friends who had gathered in the living room of the modest home at 1956 Elmhurst chanted in unison, in accordance with the ancient Jewish rites:
“Let this boy be happy in this world, in the goodness of this home, in the holiness of this place.”
Nathan Shiovitz at age 1, with his mother Shirley, taken in front of their Elmhurst home.
N.S.: Over the past 50 years, America’s leading social BS artists, alleged journalists, and media and political leaders have together woven a racial fairy tale, which they have used to suffocate white America: The blood libel, whereby whites are responsible for all (never mind any) of the pathologies that dominate cities with large black populations, and especially those cities dominated by blacks.
Note the damned if you do, damned if you don’t logic that is typical of “civil rights” (black supremacist) thinking: Whites were racist, for keeping blacks out of their neighborhoods, but since white racism is at fault for everything bad that blacks do (read: everything bad that befalls blacks, since blacks only do good), and the blacks defaulted on their mortgages, whites were also racist for letting them in. (Hmm. Where have I heard that?)
This item is part four of an award-winning, eight-part series, “Broken Detroit,” by alleged reporter Cameron McWhirter, all apparently published in one Sunday edition of the Detroit News, on June 17, 2001.
I had downloaded the entire series in 2008, and a good thing, too, since not only has The Detroit News sent it down the memory hole, but you can’t even find it via the newspaper’s online archive. I guess it has served its purpose. That’s yet another refutation of the myth that on the Internet, everything is forever. (I found it on an old backup drive last year, and just re-found it today.)
4: House by house, the faces of Elmhurst changed
By Cameron McWhirterJune 17, 2001
The Detroit News
In the early 1950s, some blacks started to move to Elmhurst. At first they moved to apartments on 12th: Mrs. Lottie Mills and others. The home of Ed Gold’s parents was one of the first on Elmhurst to go to a black family. They sold in 1951 to move near McNichols and Wyoming.
Gold, then only 10, said he didn’t want to move, but his parents, Ukrainian Jewish immigrants with little money, were afraid that blacks would bring down property values. Their modest home — purchased with a down payment from a settlement after Ed had been hit by a car — was the only investment they had.
“The sense was that you’d better not be the last one off the block,” Gold said. “The real-estate agents were out there fanning the flames.”
“Real-estate agents learned to use a variety of tactics to drive sales,” said Cliff Schrupp, executive director of the Fair Housing Center of Metropolitan Detroit. “Money was a factor. But it obviously wasn’t the driving factor. Racial fears were.”
Neighborhood snapshot: The high school senior class
Jim Bush, now 66, worked from 1962 to 1992 for the Detroit Commission on Community Relations, a city agency that tried to monitor and alleviate racial tensions in neighborhoods. Bush lays much of the blame for white flight on short-sighted real-estate agents and the State of Michigan, which allowed the real-estate agents to use racist fears to boost sales.
“Segregation was enforced by the state until 1948,” Bush said, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitional covenants in real-estate titles blocking sales based on race or ethnicity. Bush added that segregation “was allowed by the state until 1968” when Michigan passed a fair housing bill. “It was egregiously unstrategic,” Bush said.
The commission found evidence that real-estate agents had regularly “flipped” blocks, bringing in a black family to look at a house, then scaring whites into selling their homes and raking in the commissions from outgoing whites and incoming blacks. The practice was known as “block busting.” Now block busting is illegal.
“There was a joke going around at the time,” Bush recalled. “What is racial integration? It’s the time elapsed between when the first black family moves in and the last white family moves out.” Bush found that about 4,500 houses transferred from white to black families annually in the 1950s.
The pattern was often confusing and quick. Bush said white community groups would hold meetings where a white real-estate agent would stand up and announce that the block must not sell to blacks. Blacks brought crime. Blacks brought down property values.
Throughout the early 1950s, no one remembers anything violent or awkward that happened as blacks started to show up on the block, but tensions were in the air.
[This can’t be true, but it comports with McWhirter’s racial fairy tale, whereby there was no rational basis for white racial fears.] Any local crime was perceived through the prism of race. Jews today still remember an incident in 1954 when a white basketball player from Mackenzie was stabbed with an ice pick after a game at Central. The player was white. [Oh. So people do remember something.] His attackers were black, according to newspaper accounts of the arrest and trial.
[In other words, in those days, unlike 2001, much less now, the newspapers actually reported on black-on-white crime.]
And so the Jews prepared for an exodus, led by mostly Jewish real-estate agents. On Elmhurst the transition was quiet, but sweeping.
“By ’53, the pressure was on,” said Sperka, who grew up in the neighborhood. “It all happened in those fews [sic] years.”
The Detroit City Directory for 1953 — the year Shiovitz moved — lists 191 people and businesses with phone numbers on the Elmhurst block. Only three apartments were listed as vacant. The 1958 City Directory lists 159 people with phone numbers and 28 vacancies. Only 10 of the names are the same. Names like Rolvitzsky, Sheffel, Katzenstein, Faigenbaum, Abramson and Goldberg were gone, never to return.
These vacancies, a result of the flight of Jews and other whites, caused rents in the area to drop for the first time in years. The lower rents attracted low-income blacks, who had been crammed into substandard housing. Home prices remained stable through much of the 1950s, but many of the houses on the street became rentals.
The buyer of Shiovitz’s house at 1956 Elmhurst promptly defaulted. This became increasingly common in the 1950s as real estate agents eagerly provided financing for blacks looking for homes.
[Previously, in this series:
“The White Devils Made Me Do It! Classic Detroit News Series Blames Whites for City’s Destruction”;
“The Black Conquest of Detroit, Part II: The Jews Played ‘Nice,’ but Got Destroyed, Just Like the ‘Racist’ White Gentiles”; and
“It was the (Jewish) Realtors That Killed Detroit, Not Racist, Criminal Blacks! The Black Conquest of Detroit, Part III.”
See also:
“Growing Up White in Detroit.”]
Posted by Nicholas at 11:27 P.M.
4 comments:
Anonymous said...
Who would believe that in 1950 Detroit had the highest per capita income of any major city in the United States.
Saturday, February 22, 2014 at 12:50:00 P.M. EST
Anonymous said...
Detroit too was the FIRST modern city in the WORLD. Built with the automobile in mind.
Saturday, February 22, 2014 at 12:51:00 P.M. EST
Anonymous said...
Detroit was noted for the very successful Jewish community. Including the gangster Purple Gang. Gone forever now. Gone with the wind you might say.
Saturday, February 22, 2014 at 12:52:00 PM EST
Anonymous said...
"Any local crime was perceived through the prism of race. Jews today still remember an incident in 1954 when a white basketball player from Mackenzie was stabbed with an ice pick after a game at Central. The player was white. [Oh. So people do remember something.] His attackers were black, according to newspaper accounts of the arrest and trial."
This also happened in Chicago during the early 1960's. The predominantly whitey high school basketball team of Calumet BEAT the predominantly negro basketball team of Dunbar. [a whitey team beating a black team at basketball is a big no-no!] After the game a riot occurred in the gym, students fighting viciously.
Two brothers from Calumet wear school colors some time after the game were stabbed TO DEATH by a carload of Dunbar students. That latter actually called the Dick Biondi rock jock and had a dedication done to the "two guys from Calumet". I was actually listening to the radio when that dedication was made.
Such can be and is the nature of life in America.
Saturday, February 22, 2014 at 12:58:00 P.M. EST
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