HAMTRAMCK, MI – There may be no more interesting small city anywhere than Hamtramck, famous as a historically Polish enclave, yet now majority Muslim, a place where you can hear half a dozen languages and the most densely populated place in Michigan, even though it has less than half the people it once did.
Hamtramck, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary as a city this year, may, indeed, have more good stories than people. Prohibition-era gangs flourished here. Billie Holiday and a host of major stars performed here. Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Durante came to drink and hang out here. Presidents, lots of ‘em, have campaigned here, and in 1987, Pope John Paul II even came to visit.
Hamtramck has flirted with success, come close any number of times to total disaster, and yet remakes itself and endures.
While its mayor is still Polish, today there are far more Yemeni, Bosnian, and African-American inhabitants, and the city is run daily by a former Monroe County legislator, City Manager Kathy Angerer, who commutes from Dundee to the little city embedded in the heart of Detroit. “I think Hamtramck has always been on the edge of prosperity, and then something knocks them back.
“But they are very resilient,” she said.
“I was born here in 1950, and I intend to die here,” said Greg Kowalski, who in a very real sense is the heart, soul and historic memory of Hamtramck. A longtime journalist who has written 10 well-reviewed books about the city, he is currently the director and, to a large extent, the creator of the Hamtramck Historical Museum.
“The only other place I can imagine living is Manhattan,” with its bustle and ethnic diversity, said Kowalski. Eventually, he said, “I want to be cremated and have my ashes spread on the railroad tracks at the south end of town,” so he will always be part of the place.
His grandparents all came to Hamtramck in the early years of the last century from lands that are or once were part of Poland. Once, the place was two square miles of mostly farms cultivated by German immigrants. The city’s namesake was not Polish or German but a French-Canadian American Revolutionary War hero named Jean Francois Hamtramck (1756-1803) who ended up in Detroit.
While he never actually lived in Hamtramck, his bones were moved there in 1962. The only other graves in the city are a small Jewish cemetery on the grounds of an auto plant, even though the city has never had many, if any, Jewish residents (that’s a story for another day.)
But though he himself is Polish-American to the core, Kowalski celebrates and takes pride in the city’s growing diversity. His fascinating and fast-growing museum, in a large building on Joseph Campau Avenue, the city’s main drag, includes a series of large and beautiful murals, each celebrating a different group in the multiethnic quilt that makes up the modern city.
“I want this to be a different kind of museum,” he said, “one that not only celebrates the past but which reaches out to and involves the community, and celebrates immigration,” and is a source of information about the immigrant experience.
People, including some who haven’t lived in the city for decades, have a fierce loyalty to it. One man visited the museum and complained about the condition of the rest room. “Here,” he told Kowalski, handing him a check for $5,000, “fix it up.”
They did.
Getting newer immigrants to take part in celebrating ethnic diversity has been a challenge, however, Kowalski noted. While there has been little or no friction between Muslim and Christian residents, “We are a city of tribes,” who often distrust others, and especially governments, he said.
While the delayed census results are expected to show a population of 23,000 or so, the historian thinks it is probably several thousand higher, with some immigrants managing to successfully dodge last year’s overburdened census takers.
Hamtramck, a place of tidy, well-kept small houses with postage-stamp lawns, has in recent years also been a magnet for young artists and actors, because of its relative affordability.
But the city itself has sometimes had a rocky time staying solvent. Hamtramck underwent a couple bouts of emergency management in recent decades, and then survived the 1980 closing of Dodge Main, the city’s traditional main employer.
That was replaced by General Motors’ Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant, which provided the city with some jobs and a good chunk of tax revenue – until GM announced in late 2018 that it, too, would end production in Hamtramck. “That cost us about $800,000 a year,” City Manager Angerer said.
City workers were laid off; Hamtramck, which once had hundreds of municipal employees, is down to about 80. But like many other cities, it is saddled with annual pension obligations in the millions of dollars. Fortunately, GM is now retooling the plant, now renamed Factory Zero, to produce electric vehicles.
Greg Kowalski believes strongly that the city’s best days are ahead. When he fell on the ice and broke his arm a couple of winters ago, two neighbors, one Yemeni, one Bosnian, rushed to help him.
Today’s immigrants may not have rushed to learn English and assimilate as quickly as earlier generations did. It’s not unusual to see women on Hamtramck streets in burqas.
But there are signs that things are changing. The other day, he saw a young girl in a burqa – “and bright blue tennis shoes.”
American culture, as it has with immigrants for centuries, is at least making an impact on the kids.
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(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
