Tweet   the notes that come with this film which in itself is a collection of archive films are of interest and are repo’d below; Subject: Urban Paradox This is a collection of largely home movies from the 40s and 50s of life in and around Detroit one of the world's greatest cities and most important in those days and especially during WW II.  We see downtown streets thronged with people, automob More..ile plants, the Vernor's Ginger Ale plant, Vernor's was, and is, the most distinctive ginger ale ever made, vibrant neighborhoods, grand movie houses including United Artists on the day 'Anatomy of A Murder' premiered in the Detroit River, one of the country's grandest urban parks. Detroit Public Schools in the late '40s were regarded as among the nation's best and department stores, the downtown Hudson's, was the world's tallest and country's second-largest department store. We are meant to be reminded how far the city has fallen in the last 60 years. From a population of nearly 2 million in 1950, Detroit now has about 920,000 people. While Cleveland, St.Louis and Pittsburgh have lost an even bigger percentage of their populations over that span, they were never as large or iconic a city as Detroit. These films unwittingly offer hints of why Detroit would fall so far so fast. The scenes of the auto plants cannot help but call to mind the decline of American industrial manufacturing, of course. But that is not the whole story. Detroit, in its heyday, was among the most rigidly segregated cities in the country. The only black faces you will see here (apart from an occasional pedestrian) are shown at a neighborhood celebration for an arriving (or departing, it's hard to tell) church pastor. A film produced by the Detroit Police Department (one of the few with sound) shows the training of a young officer, 'Joe'. None of the police officers shown is black, even though, in the early '50s when this film was made, blacks were almost 40% of the...