Loading ...The last days of Detroit's Chaldean Town
The end could come any day now.
“We need to shut the door and get the hell out of here,” said Joseph Kawa, the 66-year-old owner of J&S Meats, a small, old-fashioned butcher shop on 7 Mile Road. He’s the J in the name. His brother Steve is the S.
Their shop sits in what was once the heart of Chaldean Town, a neighborhood along East 7 Mile at the northern edge of the city. For years, this area was the first stop for many Chaldean immigrants. They bought houses, opened businesses on the main strip and created a thriving neighborhood of restaurants and shops with a Middle Eastern flavor.
“It was beautiful,” said Steve Kawa, Joe’s 57-year-old brother. He stood behind the meat counter wearing the white smock of a butcher, waiting for customers. “We’d stay out here all night, and nobody would bother us. Everyone was very happy.”
All that’s gone now. Of the dozens of little businesses on the 7 Mile strip that catered to the Chaldeans and gave this area its ethnic flavor and its name, only two are left.
J&S Meats is one of them. A restaurant down the street is the other. And they might not be left for long.
“Sometimes I open about 9, close around 5:30, and there’s no customers — not even one customer all day,” Joe Kawa said in a thick accent. “Why I stay? For waste of my time? It’s not worth it. It’s not going to help me in my retirement.”
In fact, he’s been putting some of his $700-a-month Social Security money into keeping the shop open for his brother, for their one employee from the neighborhood and for the handful of customers who still come in every month.
This can’t go on, though. And when they leave, when the last man standing closes his door, this part of town will share the fate of Poletown and Chinatown, and several other once-vibrant ethnic Detroit neighborhoods that survive only in the memories of the suburbanites who once lived there.
For these last two businesses, it’s been a long, painful decline.
“You watch movies?” Steve Kawa asked. “You know when somebody falls off the cliff and they hold onto a rope, and after some time it wears away a little bit until there’s just a thread and it breaks down? That’s what happened. It’s been cut so much you don’t know when it’s going to break. You’re hanging on for your life.”
A new homeland
Catholic Iraqis, known as Chaldeans, began coming to Detroit a century ago. In the 1960s, they began pouring in, some to join their families, some to escape the persecution that this Christian minority faced over the years in Iraq.
Metro Detroit now is home to 121,000 Chaldeans, according to the Chaldean Community Foundation. Tens of thousands of them started their lives in Chaldean Town. And, at one point, a quarter of the area’s Chaldeans lived here.
They settled in the Penrose neighborhood, which flanks 7 Mile between Woodward and John R, where some streets had homes so old they didn’t have driveways because they were built before cars were invented. There was barely space to walk between them. The crowded housing meant a life intertwined with the neighbors.
“They’re built next to each other; they’re close, so it kind of automatically brings people closer since everybody’s bunched up,” Kawa said.
Many were already family. John Kuza came to America as a toddler, living with his parents and nine siblings in a tiny house just south of 7 Mile. His relatives followed and bought other houses on the street. “They were all within reach. Literally, the whole community was right within reach,” the 52-year-old said.
The new immigrants started businesses, brought relatives to work in them and passed them down through their families. By the 1970s, their stretch of 7 Mile was dense with dozens of little bakeries, specialty stores, ethnic restaurants and social halls. The small-town walkability appealed to the newcomers.
“Seventy-five percent of the people who came from the old country, they didn’t drive,” Kuza said. “They came here because they could walk to the meat market, walk to the coffeehouse. That’s why they didn’t want to move, because everything was here.”
Strangely enough, one of Chaldean Town’s earliest and most infamous boosters was Saddam Hussein, the longtime dictator of Iraq.
The priest at Sacred Heart Chaldean Church on 7 Mile, the spiritual center of the community, congratulated Hussein in 1979 on his new presidency, and that flattery prompted the dictator to send the church a check for $250,000. Later, when the priest went to Baghdad and told Hussein of his church’s debt, he got another $200,000, which helped pay off the bank loan and build the Chaldean Center of America next door to the church.
And for that, Mayor Coleman Young awarded Saddam Hussein the key to the city of Detroit. Really.
Then came crack
A few years later, everything changed. The crack epidemic that swept through the city and the crime that followed ravaged the neighborhood.
“The reasons we left Iraq was because of persecution, because it wasn’t going to be a healthy lifestyle for us eventually. Same thing here,” said Kuza, now of Bloomfield Hills. “The neighborhood kept deteriorating, the schools were getting more dangerous. The reason we keep moving our families is to get away from crime, or anything that’s going to harm our family. It’s just the way we are by design.”
Like many immigrants before them, the Chaldeans’ success led them to seek better homes in the suburbs of Macomb and Oakland counties. Many of them moved on while the neighborhood was still solid. But rising crime and falling police response accelerated the exodus.
“If there was stronger police enforcement in the area, it wouldn’t have gone down,” Kawa said. “You call the police, sometimes it took four hours, sometimes they don’t come until the next day. You go to a different area, call the cops, two minutes they’re there, crime solved. Here, they rob 20 houses by the time the police come.”
Sahir Gappy came to Chaldean Town from northern Iraq, where the term “war zone” isn’t thrown around lightly. But even for him, the crime and violence in the neighborhood became too much. At one point, the burglar alarm at his business was tripped so often in the middle of the night he stopped going into work to see what happened.
“When people want to live in a neighborhood, the first thing they ask is, ‘Is it safe?’ ” said Gappy, 58, now of Orchard Lake Village.
Nakia Yousif just moved away after decades here. “She was scared here,” Kawa said, translating her animated explanation. The 66-year-old moved to Sterling Heights barely a year ago. It became unbearable here, she said, for an older woman surrounded by criminals who prey on elderly people. She drives in now only to buy spices at J&S Meats.
Chaldeans like these who remember the area’s heyday are saddened and infuriated by what it’s become. It didn’t have to die like this, they say.
“It’s a shame in this goddamn city to have a neighborhood like this one end up being the way it is,” Gappy said. “And the only reason, the biggest reason, is the crime.”
A few still believe
There are some still here who hold out hope.
Nida Samona grew up in the neighborhood when her family immigrated to Michigan in the 1970s. “It was the true sense of community,” said Samona, senior vice president of operations for the Arab and Chaldean Council. “You knew people, you knew your neighbors, and they weren’t even all Chaldean. There were white people and black people, too. But it was a very homogenous community that worked beautifully together. There was a real safety net because they all knew each other or watched out for each other.”
Her organization opened a nonprofit facility on 7 Mile in 1997 offering services like counseling, health care, social services, job training and language classes. Ten years later, they built another learning center nearby. Both are open to anyone from the area, Chaldean or not.
“Long after people were leaving the city, we stayed and invested a lot of time and money in that area, because we believe in that area and that community and the city of Detroit,” she said.
Her efforts are just the latest to revive this area. In 1999, the city had the idea to stem the decline by investing in and promoting the neighborhood, and came up with the name Chaldean Town to mark it as a destination — like a Middle Eastern version of long-successful Greektown.
There would be colorful banners hanging from light posts, declaring the area’s new name. An annual ethnic festival on 7 Mile would close the street to traffic. A Chaldean Town Development Authority would oversee the neighborhood’s progress.
But like a lot of plans in Detroit over the years, the grants never came, the idea faded away and the strip continued its free fall.
Samona, now of Bloomfield Hills. still refuses to give up on the old neighborhood.
Where there are whole streets with no houses anymore, she sees a future of new duplexes. Where there are empty storefronts, she visualizes a walkable neighborhood that can be restored. Her group has spruced up the sidewalks and won small grants to make little improvements. And though 7 Mile is dead, she points to the collision shops and auto lots and liquor stores and dollar stores in the area that are still owned by Chaldeans.
She thinks this neighborhood could still be an ideal starting place for the ongoing wave of Christians fleeing Iraq. Just like the wave that brought her and her family here years ago.
“I’m there often, and I drive up and down those streets often and kind of reminisce about that beauty and hope that as an immigrant you’d assimilate and be a productive part of society.” Those memories motivate her to keep believing things can be better.
“I know what that once was,” she said. “And what it could be.”
Last man standing?
There’s no menu at Sullaf Restaurant. The entrées are whatever the cook makes that day.
“All my customers, they know what I have,” said Khidar Mikha, the restaurant’s 64-year-old owner. “I don’t have too many items.”
He serves food the way it was at family dinners back home, he says. There’s kabob, made of beef tenderloin. Lamb shank that falls off the bone. There are stews and sauces using old country spices, and lots of bread and rice, all of it fresh and made to order. Hot tea, brewed long and served in a clear glass cup, is free after a meal.
Mikha has owned the restaurant on 7 Mile for 19 years, first down the street, now in this building. He, too, started his new life in this neighborhood. He, too, moved.
“This here very bad area,” said Mikha, now of Warren. “No people. Everybody move. Sometimes when people have money, they go to area that is better.”
Yet, in contrast to the meat market, he still draws dozens of diners a day. Though nearly all the Chaldeans moved away, many still drive in every day to work in the collision shops and auto lots on the fringes of the neighborhood. And his restaurant is the only place for them to eat around here.
“It’s good old wholesome food,” Kuza said, as he sat down with friends for a multicourse lunch featuring a dozen Old World dishes spread out over a long table. “There’s not many places that serve our food. It’s usually Lebanese in Detroit. It looks the same, but it doesn’t have the same spices, the same taste.”
He’s been gone from the neighborhood for nearly four decades. And he still drives back every week, just to come here.
That’s why Mikha thinks his restaurant will be the last business left here on 7 Mile — because it’s the last link to the past for people who grew up here. As long as he stays open, he’ll have customers coming in.
“I am OK here,” he said. “I like my job. I like my people. I come here, I see my friends,” he said, standing in the kitchen of his crowded restaurant. “I am happy.”
John Carlisle
DETROIT FREE PRESS
Columnist John Carlisle writes about interesting people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle.