This diagram and map from Charles Waldheim (Stalking Detroit, Waldheim et al, 2001) of Downtown shows the growing gaps in downtown development over the years. They help to illustrate the reality of Detroit’s decline and the dispersion (sprawl).  Detroit’s “urban core” was critical to its early development from “frontier town” to city. Downtown became rife with poverty, drugs, and murder in the 1970s and 1980s – pictured aboce (1994) and from historical data the decade of the 1990s wasn’t much better. In a few years (2016)  it will be almost stunning to look back at the last 100 years of downtown Detroit and see how it rose and declined.