Word: poletown
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...sign above a brick archway in the basement of Immaculate Conception Church in the Poletown neighborhood of Detroit reads GM-MARK OF DESTRUCTION. It is a wry twist on the "mark of excellence" slogan of the General Motors Corp., but none of the few dozen mostly elderly and Polish-American homeowners gathered in the room last week were laughing. Members of the Poletown Neighborhood Council, they are engaged in a battle to save their neighborhood as the city of Detroit prepares to raze some 1,500 private homes, schools and businesses in order to make...
...Poletown's plight is, of course, not so simply put. When the GM plant is completed in 1983, it will employ 6,000 workers in a city where unemployment is at 18%. It will also contribute an initial $8.1 million a year in tax revenues to Detroit and the enclosed city of Hamtramck, where only 15 months ago the huge Chrysler assembly plant known as Dodge Main was closed. The GM factory will also offer new hope to a decaying city that has hemorrhaged hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past decade and currently faces a record budget...
...found. Mayor Coleman Young lost no tune in taking GM up on its offer. After examining a dozen possible sites, the city finally decided to offer GM a 465-acre tract that not only included the shuttered Dodge Main plant but also swallowed up the surrounding 250 acres of Poletown. GM insisted that the new plant had to be built and in operation by early 1983, so Young took advantage of a recent Michigan law allowing a city to acquire land for use by private enterprise. Detroit began a crash program of forcing home and business owners to sell their...
...Hoffman household last week when Craig Hoffman, wealthy New Jersey farmer, was brought home from jail. Brooding and resentful were the Polish mill workers of Manville, N. J. when they heard of Hoffman's release. Six weeks ago (TIME, Sept. 2) four ragged children from Manville's Poletown, two little Kolesars and two little Klementoviches, made an expedition to Farmer Hoffman's cornfield to snitch a few ears of corn for a "roast." As they crept through the tall corn rows a gun was fired close by. Johnny Kolesar, riddled with shot, died that evening...