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GIRLS
    FROM THE
    PROJECTS
    As we look back through the funnel cloud of time, it is clear that the only common ground other than their legacy that the three Supremes ever really shared was a fifteen-block grid of south-eastern Detroit framed by the massive Cadillac plant within the Hamtramck Street beltway to the north, Hastings and Woodward Avenues to the west, St. Aubin and Dequindre Streets to the east, and the wide expanse of Warren Avenue to the south. This teeming concrete landscape bore the name of the Brewster-Douglass housing development, one of the first of its kind built in the bowels of America’s inner cities, a prototypical sprawl of apartment homes, gardens, parks, and parking lots, all visible from a distance only through a dusky curtain of smoke belched from the rooftop smoke stacks.
    The Brewster-Douglass Homes—known otherwise as Brewster-Douglass, BD, or, in the most frequently used shorthand, “the projects”—were home to all three Supremes-to-be in the mid-’50s, when they were junior high school girls. But had they never been thrown together by Fate, they might not have spoken to each other for the rest of their lives. As it was, they barely knew one another beyond a timid wave and an inner thought of: Gee, I wonder what that girl’s name is.
    Such was life in the projects, where the crush of so many people—
    15,000 at its apogee—brought so much turnover that in this great bustle of nameless faces and faceless names, one’s next-door neighbors could be total strangers.
    Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard lived in separate divisions of the projects, which were like different cities. Which is why, 7

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    8
    THE SUPREMES
    as every few years one building or another has been blasted into rubble as part of some sort of city urban renewal plan, the overall identity of the projects has remained intact and seemingly immune to any real change, even as they have visibly decayed. These days, off to the south-west, the “new Detroit” is taking shape, most notably in the parabolic dome of Ford Field and the adjoining Comerica Park, and the glass palaces of the Renaissance Center down near the Detroit River. But if you tip a glance anywhere beyond these cosmetic bandages, the red-brick cadaver of the projects creeps into view; a closer look reveals the boarded windows and abandoned, scarified skeletal remains of other downtown buildings evoking bombed-out Beirut.
    Brewster-Douglass was plagued by crime and corrosion even during the time the Supremes—and a few white families, including that of future comedienne Lily Tomlin—occupied the grounds. Conditions deteriorated even further in the late ’60s, and ever since there have been around 500 arrests on the premises each year. Recent renovation attempts have been halting; in the early 2000s, the Detroit News ran a story headlined “Unsafe, Unsanitary Areas Rile Residents.” It began: It’s not just the sight of used condoms and needles or the smell of urine that leaves Bettie Washington breathless, it’s the 13 flights of stairs she’s forced to navigate when the elevators break down at the Brewster-Douglass housing project off Interstate 75, near Mack. . . . “They have to do something about me not needing to walk down these steps all the time,” said the 55-year-old, who depends on a wooden cane to support a bad knee. “There’s a lot of old people in here. Some of them can’t come down.”. . . [R]esidents complain about trash-filled stairwells, broken elevators and windows, fungus, clogged gutters and faulty furnaces.
    It wasn’t like that in the ’50s, when an address at Brewster-Douglass could actually inspire a sliver of envy. This was a holdover from the founding mission of the projects, which were conceived as a refuge from urban rot. When ground was broken for the Brewster Homes in 1935, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt came to sink the shovel and dedicate the first