Detroit’s Brewster Projects: What’s Left

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Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson and Mary Wilson lived out their early lives in the Brewster Projects in Detroit, the first federally funded public housing for African Americans. Unfortunately, the abode of these legends of the lyric is falling to pieces. One writer and photographer has compiled an affecting portrait of the projects, which speaks to a larger crisis, and which calls to mind the Katrina photos of Robert Polidori. It resonates with Polidori’s photo montage as documentation of destruction, an iteration perhaps of a former event, but one we have the ill-boding luxury of regarding in real time.

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Rozalia Jovanovic is a founding editor of Gigantic, a magazine of short prose and art. She is the Deputy Editor of Flavorpill and has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and Columbia University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming from Unsaid, The Believer, Everyday Genius, Guernica, elimae, and Esquire.com. She blogs at The Astonishing Egg and is The Rumpus New York Editor.

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The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers our readers may already know and love. We want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.

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