For today and cspan 2 booktv so make it all proud just to give a brief sense of how we do things in the next 15 minutes. Im going to introduce just an art. Make sure thereve book will have a discussion. I think the title of this panel is rebuilding or evolution informally in my mind. It is detroit and austin that the beginning and end of all things. That appeals more to my grammatic sense. So jeff kerr is the author of austin texas history. The first was austin, texas then and now. The next was republic of austin. On the most recent one of the reason we are here this morning is seat of empire the embattled birth of austin, texas, which is a history of the founding of boston and the battle in the republic of texas over by this capital would need. Jeff also raised a regular history and he is practicing pediatric urologist at the same time. If we have and the emergence sees. The author will take care of them. Mark binelli is the author of vincennes msi, contributing editor to relate to and mens health mens journal, sorry, mark. So mark was born and raised in the detroit area. He went to university of michigan as an undergrad and got is an essay from Columbia University were mark and i were actually classmates. So its a bit of a reunion for us. His new book is detroit city is the place to be, which is the fruit of three years spent living in detroit after he been in new york, but went back to detroit wanted to find out what kind of place that had become and what it had to tell us about maybe who we all are or what we all are as a nation right now. Mark now lives in new york. He told me on friday if he hadnt had a disk it is detroit landlord, he would still be parttime or halftime in detroit. Im sorry that have been. Im sure you can find some good Housing Stock in detroit if youre really motivated. First, mark is going to read the book and maybe set it up in riga forest. Great, thanks, everyone for coming. Im going to read a very short section. Its pretty self explanatory. Its a description of the neighborhood near. Depopulated. In my front 2 million minutes p. To 700,000 today. So theres a neighborhood that are really no longer neighborhood were barely neighborhood, a couple houses on every block. So im going to read you a little bit about one of those neighborhoods. People like to compare the amount of vacant land in detroit to the equivalent sized pieces. All of paris could fit into detroits 40 square miles of nothing or to manhattan for a slightly shaped boston. Such formulations inevitably lead one to imagine a contiguous land mass separable is a rotten when or possibly some thing beautified like a central park, which of course is not the case. They can parcels were spread throughout the city closer. Two tumors whittling the body. When enough of those happen to cluster together come your urban prairie scum entire neighborhoods marked on the map. The inevitable result of a place built for 2 million less than half that number. An exemplary swath of perry had crept within walking distance of my history. Some called the neighborhood im talking about south pole town, but i started thinking about it is that their shame which runs straight up from Detroit River. On a twomile stretch, once the thriving commercials if you can count the viable operating businesses on two hands. Several of the unrecognizable storefronts having earned busch untouched as a monument to the dead. As a residential streets. They ran schizophrenically from obvious but to beautifully cut separate branches from old wooden bungalows scrapped to the trepidation of venturing into such lonely and forbidding territory. On summer afternoons, the effect noise could be deafening. And now the people sitting on their porches would stare, i learned country was applied here, too. It is not a giveaway for had not come you generally get to stand back, saving of course the doughboys to sergeys dedication to radiating inscrutability mns convinced me to drop the smiling part. Mostly that the masses due to the absence of people in this far more than urban, putting 76 petition of the hills have eyes or Texas Chainsaw Massacre in which nate cityfolk centered on the wrong turbo to find themselves in the business end of a meat hook. The scrappers are everywhere one sunday morning in broad daylight out of a stretcher greatly. The classic ipod types twice the length of his body and loading them out of the basement of a foreclosed home into a white minivan. A few bugs that are a couple wants printers came driving in a pickup truck, overflowing with twisted pieces of metal including what looked to be a number of shelving unit. In another failed its sheen and can fill, tyree guyton, and artists from heidelberg street had a range of venture discarded shoes shape of a river or shortly after he laid at his installation i noticed kids from the neighborhood reading right through the middle lake anglers pier one astros up, they said free shoes. Is at oak grove warned warned me it is hard to find her size or not you care what a few blocks away past the church of the living god number 37, a white pit bull began barking furiously at you from the yard of a home i thought abandoned. When i got closer i noticed a young man and attacker scott staring coldly at me for one of the front windows. I bicycled with a single house festooning the most dead center of one side the street. Dole could turn pharaoh, gnarled trees, despite its isolation from the twostory wood frame house had been neatly maintained with the handsome paint job and a lush garden of rose bushes in her tree surrounded by a picket hands. A round faced man in the berber teacher in bermuda shorts sat on the top steps of the porch had i stopped and said hello. His name is marty. When i got closer he had a cane. They proclaim to the excellent slicker number one dad. Marty stuart miano industry and the napa valley, a sausage plan near Eastern Market closed in 1998. I made frequent deliveries to apple valley teenager while working for my father who sold them sausage casings. Marty and i pondered, to we figured that wed never met back then. I did think the pigs come alive pixie told me, widening his eyes theatrically signified you dont want to know. He told that while hed never butchered it at the karmically unpleasant job of the slaughtered pigs into the web had he gotten into the habit of naming his pics as long as possible although he be wind to move if it got right size. This is our house or generation. Prepare taxes. Thats not happening. Someone opened the gate direct sight of the house. Hes back there . Internet to be the family home. She tended the flowers this afternoon was fun to read back and made supplies. I do as much as i cant she said. The house had been the family for 60 years. 64 years my mother bought this house when i was three months old. He lived his entire life watching the neighborhood disappear around them here to barbershops, ice cream parlors, all gone. The neighborhood used to be street he said. He squinted at the thicket of trees across the street. You get used to it though. Its quiet here. Mobile the crazy stuff. I like the serenity of my environment. To me, always a big pass the screen. You just have to be strong and keep god with you. What does the bible say . You are in this world, i said i thought it was that this will did not in it. He nodded right, mate. Later realized they screwed up the quote. Of course to rollina. [applause] one of the things who wants to talk about this morning is the idea of the frontier. Its a frontier that detroit is kind of reverted to win for just the. So with that. Austin is where it is because of one man, miramar amal. In the story and going to read islamize First Contact of the area. Its a story that about 10 years ago watched my interest in writing about local history. See the vampire tells the story of austin excretion against the backdrop of texas politics and to texas giants, sam houston and mirabeau bomar. Details entertaining yet important for a different outcome wouldve left us with a much different modern state of texas. The city of boston was born in 1839, almost at in the early 1840s. For a few twists and turns of history, my current hometown would likely not exist. The southern rockies of the Texas Mountain and we would remember mirabeau bomar rather than seeing houston is the political titan of his age. But it does and they arent we dont. The explanation begins of buffalo hunt. Sna campaigner mast, quickly joined in local custom upon Jacob Harrell and other frontiersmen meant. One morning as lamarr, herrell and the others practiced in herrells cabin, one of the sons burst into the room at the exciting news that the prairie was full buffalo. Quickly a stretch of the outcome commander of the short distance to reroute the income which intersected the colorado river. Two gigabyte they encounter great numbers of dynamic beast wasted no time in shooting as many as they could. With the way but didnt come a buffalo is easy to kill because of very poor vision it reminds untreated eyes on us not to detect danger. The survey hunters stay to find and possesses a vital powerful enough to send a bulk of the animalistic hide, its impossible to pick off large numbers one by one without surrounding them is sensing danger. But they hunted for food from the anglo settler preferred this method. First worth a hundred shows a more thrilling technique, armed with one or more single shot pistols, he charged on horseback through the herd while blazing away at the beast. At the bottom of the ravine, bisecting the perry, and mirabeau bomar chased and shot with his holster pistols largest buffalo one of his companions had ever seen. Later, one of the hunters would be able to gather the man atop the hill at the head of the regime. From the summit stretched a view which would give delight to every painter a mother of extended landscape. The german traveler later described as idyllic while in 1840 mcguirk called it a fairyland. A year after the mice as they, thomas ball wrote home to his brother, i must consider this the most beautiful country ever saw. The most beautiful lance ever held are expected here james jones in 1839 letter expressed equal enthusiasm. We are marching for a beautiful country if they possess a sense of grandeur and magnificence of ever witnessed in any other part of the american continent. Mirabeau bomar, politician, firmer, and military hero was also a poet would imagine him regarding without assigning it a before and have elect on the health was the colorado river. Perhaps he composed a diverse as he gazed upon the woodlands and the perrys shuttle in the waterway. Smiles in the foreground of blackjack, my folks trees. Frame in the mars skier to either side were two beautiful strains of clearwater. In a short span of three years, and mirabeau bomar had escaped personal despair, obscurity and political humiliation to obtain a position of prestige and power. Theyll assume command in embryonic embryonic nation destined for great as. He had just finished a buffalo hunt on bringing down in earnest in a mall, the largest of one companion had ever seen. He now admired with this poetic i which consistently stunned far cruder and less imaginative men than himself. Faced with this aweinspiring vista, Vice President mirabeau bomar announced that they ambitious trained to fellow hunters jacob herrell, while a savory come edouard fontaine, james rice, for Texas Rangers and maybe the slave jacob when he cried from the hilltop, and they should be the seed of future empire. [applause] just to be clear, this is where we are next to the subway. It was eighth in congress right appeared by the starbucks. [laughter] so maybe he was right i guess. Couldve been. Before we get into bigger questions of empire in history and geography, i just want to ask both of you kind of a more personal question, which is am i right in assuming that these books are kind of personally meaningful to you, do you have a personal relationship to these landscapes . You grew up outside of detroit. He went off to new york. Youre living the high life . As the writer in new york. And then he went back in there for three years. And just come youre not from austin, right click rope in houston. Is to have adopted hometown. Hes now written three books. Can each of the talk about mark first in najaf about whats personal about these projects and places. Shortcoming out. Detroit, as many of you probably know is very segregated city. As i said earlier, its only about 700,000 people. The entire match or area to include the suburbs is 2 million to 3 Million People depending where you cut it off. Growing up in suburban detroit and spending a lot of time in the city as a kid, got my parents were talking immigrants. My father was a knife sharpener, so i was in the city all the time. He always sought a very special place in my heart. Seeing the way detroit has been portrayed over the years in films and media, i always thought i would write about the city in some way. I thought it would take the form of a novel. Then around two dozen nine, beginning 2009 with the World Economy seemed to be about to collapse in detroit in particular, the Auto Companies were on the verge of bankruptcy, i went back for Rolling Stone ran a features writer and the article just about the Auto Industry. And while i was back there, i sold journalist coming from not only over the country, but the world really looking at detroit is sort of a metaphor for everything that it got wrong and were coming into town for a day or two and were writing what i thought were superficial portraits of the city. So for me as a native, i started thinking how may be i could bring a more new ones hopefully to the story, really spend some time there. Not only write about, you know, the assertive crudeness, most most obvious dark side of what goes on to a postindustrial city, but also bring out things like the weirdness of the place. Its a very strange and darkly funny place. I wanted to most of all bring out the stories of people who still live there. A lot of the photos you see at detroit on mine are shots of old factories that have been a man and for 40, 50 years. You never see any people in these photos. I really want to hang around and talk to people who live there and get their stories. So that was my goal. Im curious coming and you have old friends who were still there that you hung out with . Were there elements of the debris fell back into your life at all . Or was it really this new detroit that you are interested and click my parents and my brother are still there living in the suburbs, so that was just great for me personally. I moved into the city proper. The one funny day. The warehouse buildings where its been kind of converted. It was the very beginning of this little tiny justification in the Downtown Core. Though when i first arrived, the first neighbor and that, one of the first things he told me it was about how he would carry his gun when he walked his dog and i should be careful in the neighborhood. It wasnt exactly then. When i got there, i remembered making deliveries for my father to one of the shops on that street when i was a kid. So they were little connections like that would have been throughout my reporting. I would meet somebody who knew somebody i knew, things like that. So my question is why do you love austin so much and find it so much more interesting in houston . [laughter] yeah, my mother so complains that i write too many negative things. I live here about 12 years before i really started it or in the citys past. Ive always loved history. I heard the story about the buffalo hunt and came to this intersection and was trying to imagine it. One thing led to another and i started taking pictures of Historic Site and it was my sunday triggered my thinking about a book. He told me half in jest that i should read a book and i think he was really trying to get you to shut up at the dinner table. But i got to thinking about the stuff i had discovered and learned and these were about sites that i was driving on a weekly basis but it previously know nothing about. It seemed to import than other People Living in austin and perhaps in texas because this is a city most texans eventually visit should know those stories. My first book was an attempt to spread the stories. That made me realize what a rich history there really is here over the past 180 years. And writing these books, i think it is important in order to understand where we are and where we might want to go, where weve been and who the people were that shaped the events that we experience every day now. It was interesting. Jeff and i were talking before this and i commented. Im from massachusetts and i grew up in massachusetts senator drenched her hunched over with history by americans and news and then when i moved to boston, it felt a little bit scammed on the history. What was your response coming from houston . Well, from houston in houston it seemed to me growing up there really wasnt any history there. Houston is always seem to need to be a city about making money. If theres an Historic Site i can make money on, ill tear it down. Whereas i think its a little bit different here in austin and things do change. Theres just a very rich history here. I am amazed going around in telling these stories how little of the true details of it and the importance of it on our life now that people that have been here for a long time really now. I wrote down a sentence that really struck me for marks the couch applies to both of these books. He said the frontiers unless the ricin has protected to those at the facility for conjuring utopian images. I wanted to ask both of you kind of what the frontier means in the context of the cities youre writing about. I guess in terms of both what is appealing about the frontier and also may be what is scary. So mark, detroit as frontier, postmodern frontier. Sure. Detroit is a very old city. It was founded in tina one as a french trading post recently. This really for the first hundred years or so come even longer really, was just the frontier. It was the middle of nowhere, kind of a scary place to go. The sentence that he had just read means sort of commenting on what detroit coming in now, one of the things detroit has become today in the sort of national this idea that everybody has gone. Its a city thats been left behind by not only business in capital, that humanity come in another 700,000 people left there, which is something people tend to forget. Extruded by some people at the new frontier. Its a relatively lawless place. Theres lots of cheap land. There are lots of abandoned buildings. About 70,000. The year i moved back, there was a big news story about artists buying houses in detroit. One sold for like 100