There, in the middle of the road, at the very point where Detroit morphs into Grosse Pointe Park, was a large, opulently decorated Christmas tree. Next to it, a collection of just over half a dozen smaller trees stood, taking up the rest of the width of the street.
The street had been sectioned off. They could not drive through. “We’d heard about it on the news, but it’s something else to see it in real life,” Rice said with some bewilderment. “To me it says: ‘Detroiters stay out! Don’t come in. You are not welcome here,’” Williams said.
The couple may not have been crossing international boundaries, but they did try to cross the increasingly visible line dividing Detroit and its collection of suburbs – one of the most shocking in America.
What they were witnessing for the first time was the latest installation in a succession of barriers erected over the course of 2014 by Grosse Pointe Park at the very point where Kercheval Avenue, a formerly busy commercial thoroughfare, goes from Detroit into the more opulent suburb.