Retired journalist: City of Detroit held back by 'nostalgia poisoning'

Retired journalist urges Detroit to shake off its 'nostalgia poisoning'

Nancy Derringer believes one way of using the past to move forward is at Michigan Central Station.

GROSSE POINTE WOODS, Mich. (FOX 2) - If you know a thing or two about life in Detroit, then you know some things are just iconic - from the Woodward Dream Cruise and treasured Boblo Boat to Motown music.

"I just don’t think it needs to be the soundtrack of Detroit. There’s some great music being made in the city today," said Nancy Derringer.

The retired journalist says she likes Motown music but when she recently wrote an opinion piece that appeared in the Detroit Free Press, she said Detroiters need to let go of things that are holding the city back.

Derringer's thought-provoking piece ponders if dwelling on the past is crippling the possibilities of embracing the newer great things happening now and in the future for Detroit.

"Detroit has a particularly bad case of what I consider 'nostalgia poisoning,'" she said. "A lot of people just cannot stop looking back to the good ole' days instead of looking forward."

In the opinion piece, Derringer, who is from Ohio, and whose longtime work has appeared in a number of publications, says it’s time to let go of Maurice Salads, Hudson’s and even the Dream Cruise.

In one segment in the Freep's column she wrote:

"There’s honoring history, and being mired by it. Sometimes a sharp break with the past is absolutely what the doctor ordered. Our Maurice salads, literal and figurative, are killing us …

"At this point I have to stop and reassure angry readers that of course I respect history. No one’s advocating we tear down the Penobscot Building."

"Old people, their Dream Cruise is old 60s muscle cars," Derringer said. "Some day we’re going to have kids who grew up in the 80s. What’s their Dream Cruise going to be? I just think there’s a better way to live your life than always be looking on the rear-view mirror."

But some argue in order for a city to know where it’s going it has to know where it’s been.

"It is important to continuously move forward," said Rebecca Salminen Witt. "And if you re-frame the idea of nostalgia, to not something that helps you hold on to the past and hold you back, but something that propels you into the future. So that you understand where we’ve come from, so you can understand where we could go that’s how to use nostalgia in a way that is productive for everybody."

Derringer believes one way of using the past to move forward is at Michigan Central Station the former train station.

"It’s not a train station anymore it’s something else," she said. "Repurpose the past - don’t relive it."