Early Medieval Detroit: The Motor City as a Mirror for Illuminating 5th and 6th Century Urban Shrinkage in Western Europe David P. Powell Villanova University Men fell dead: plague and death took them all, those great men fell dead on the earth. Their fortress fell to its foundations, the city crumbled. Those who could fix it died, men fell on earth. So the courtyards decayed and the tiles slid down from the high hall's roof. The place is broken to piles of stone... -- Excerpt from “The Ruin,” Anglo-Saxon, c. 8th century 1 We might imagine the anonymous early medieval author of “The Ruin” as he walked slowly through the remains of a settlement widely speculated to be the Roman town of Aquae Sulis: modern Bath, England. Picking his way through the brambles and other overgrowth that strangled the ancient streets, he marveled at the “beautiful wallstone” that had “lasted, from one kingdom to another,” even as “a hundred generations of men passed away.” But he lacked the frame of reference to fully make sense of what he saw: his was a world of timber, thatch, and mud, where the most fortunate rulers, those selected by the Lord to disperse His hateful enemies and drive them from His face2, celebrated their victories in great wooden mead halls. This place, once “a bright city over a broad kingdom,” was “cunningly created” by “powerful builders” and was beyond his ken. It was “the work of giants.” Left to ponder how such a mighty place had come to this, he laid the blame at the feet of an appropriately otherworldly force: wyrd, or fate. It could be argued that in the more than twelve centuries since that Anglo-Saxon poet wrote his elegy, scholars have not arrived at many more satisfying explanations for the disappearance or transformation of the Roman town. In some ways, we have the opposite problem to that of the poem’s author. We have much greater knowledge of the historical context, but we lack his ability to examine 1 Translated by Michael D.C. Drout. Full text at http://anglosaxonworld.com 2 A paraphrase of Numbers 10:35: Surge domine et dissipentur inimici tui et fugiant qui oderunt te a facie tua. This Latin verse was inscribed on a strip of gold, perhaps the decorative covering of a scabbard, found by an English metal detectorist in July 2009. The so-called Staffordshire Hoard has been dated between the 6th and 8th century. The site near Hammerwich, a suburb of Birmingham, continues to be excavated by archaeological authorities. http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk 1 the material remains. To the extent that they have not been erased by sixteen centuries of subsequent development, most of them lie buried several meters beneath the cities and towns of present-day Europe. Access to them is usually dictated by the pace of modern development, which typically affords archaeologists a few frenzied days or weeks to descend upon a cleared site—a so-called “rescue dig”— and record its form and contents before it is reburied, or even obliterated, by a condominium complex or office tower. The body of archaeological evidence in this area has been further constrained by scholarly biases that long held our period of interest to be inherently inferior and less worthy of close study than the periods that preceded it. Until the 1970s, when scholarly interest in the transition between the Late Antique and early medieval periods began to deepen, the relevant archaeological layers that provided evidence for the early medieval period were often given a cursory treatment (and were sometimes ignored entirely) in the rush to access classical strata, which were regarded as more interesting and more desirable. The lack of evidence for post-Roman settlement that often appears in the publications associated with these older digs may therefore be a function of a different primary archaeological focus or an inability to discern the sometimes subtle indications of early medieval occupation, such as compacted earth floors and holes for wooden posts.3 When archaeologists do have the opportunity to excavate the majority or the entirety of a Roman town, it is precisely because the ancient footprint of those sites exceeds the size of the modern settlement, if any. The absence of conflict with modern needs means that scholars have the luxury of studying in situ remains at these sites in much greater detail, but the same quality that makes the sites available also inevitably leads to an archaeological narrative of decline and either partial or complete abandonment.4 In places where natural factors have facilitated continuous human occupation into the present day, studies that offer evidence for vital early medieval continuity alongside evidence for shifts in the emphasis and primary functions of civic space remain relatively uncommon. The question of the fate of the Roman town is inextricably intertwined with the continuing great debate over the wider fate of Roman civilization, particularly in the west, where traditional narratives of imperial decline, foreign (i.e., “barbarian”) conquest, and economic collapse jostle for position with more modern historiographical models that emphasize generally benign transformation, fusion between the cultures of the Romanized indigenous populations and the newer arrivals, and elements of economic and administrative continuity between the late antique and early medieval periods. In the specifically urban context, this debate usually turns on how changes to the urban footprint manifested during the fifth and sixth centuries. Was the author of “The Ruin” (and any kindred souls he may have had on the continent) wandering through the deserted gravesite of an earlier civilization, or was he merely pausing to reflect upon a quotidian feature of his everyday landscape? Was he a traversing a wasteland, or were the sounds of labor and playing children within earshot, emanating 3 Perhaps the most notorious example of this practice is the late 19th century restorations of the Athenian acropolis, in which virtually all material evidence for the site’s uses after the 5th century B.C. was discarded after being, at best, coarsely catalogued. See McNeal, who charitably labels the 19th century archaeological activity on the site as merely a more recent phase of its use, concluding that “one hundred years later, at least, the tyranny of neo-classical taste…is over.” Ward- Perkins (pp. 7-9) documents more recent incidents of this type, notably the 1970-71 excavations of the Roman forum at Luna (modern Luni), on the northwestern coast of Italy, where archaeologists “innocent of the finer points of stratigraphy” failed to identify the late antique and early medieval levels and lumped all activity through the sixth century into the “first phase” of the forum’s life. A subsequent, more meticulous dig in the only remaining unexcavated portion of the site found evidence suggesting that the formerly public space of the forum had, by the late sixth century, been covered by houses of wood, clay, and dry stone. 4 The Luna dig (see note 3) is one such example; for a much more recent example, see Evans, et al., 2009. 2 from the less durable structures of a quasi-urban populace that had seamlessly sprouted around the ancient stone ruins? How were these transformations experienced by the people living through them? What did it mean to be a resident of a Roman town at a time when the “Roman” descriptor was losing its traditional meaning? Archaeological efforts to determine how these scenarios unfolded in Britain and on the continent continue. In the meantime, an interdisciplinary approach may offer some clues for how to better interpret future discoveries. If we cannot reliably access the material evidence for fifth and sixth century urban shrinkage, perhaps we can supplement the limited information we have with observations of modern urban agglomerations that are undergoing similar changes. This is a provocative idea that immediately runs into various problems of anachronism and scale, and it is almost certainly impossible to completely account for these in any attempt to broadly compare the two settings. It may be possible, however, to identify individual trends and phenomena that are taking place in the modern urban environment, often on a neighborhood level or on other scales small enough to apply to the ancient period, and meaningfully consider whether and how comparable changes might have manifested in the post-Roman west. Far from a fringe exercise, this type of comparison is already gaining traction among academic urbanists. A recent editorial in the journal Urban Geography, which focuses on issues of modern urban policy and planning, encouraged urban geographers to open a dialogue with urban historians and archaeologists. Author Michael E. Smith postulates that a bias in favor of “recentism” may have hindered his field’s appropriate study of urban settings prior to 1850, with consequences for the emerging field of comparative urbanism and its goal of determining “what is true of all cities and what is true of one city at any given point in time.”5 As modern urban planners begin delving into the archaeological literature of ancient Mesopotamia, Angkor, and other sites in search of systematic factors that affected those urban trajectories, it seems appropriate to begin examining what urban historians of those earlier periods might be able to glean from studies of modern urban morphology. Detroit? If the object of the comparison is to study urban shrinkage, it would be difficult to select a more suitable modern subject than the city of Detroit. Detroit’s population has fallen by half from a high of about 1.9 million in 1950. Postwar racial tensions, the growing difficulties of the U.S. auto industry, and the destruction of the 1967 riots are among the factors that are widely acknowledged to have contributed to the city’s population decline, the effects of which are readily evident in Detroit's urban fabric. Entire sections of the city have been depopulated, leaving a hash of abandoned buildings, vacant or overgrown lots, and crumbling infrastructure. Coyotes, foxes, pheasants, and other fauna not seen in Detroit since preindustrial times have begun to reappear.6 Some remaining residents of these areas have taken up semi-agrarian lifestyles, hunting raccoons or raising crops in formerly urban spaces and selling their goods in ad-hoc markets.7 Police and other agents of municipal authority are regarded as either ineffectual or irrelevant. Given the recent resurgence of popular comparisons between Rome and the United States, it is 5 Smith 2009. 6 Williams. 7 LeDuff. 3 perhaps not surprising as it might otherwise be to discover that Detroit has already been compared to Rome. A 2005 exhibition at the University of Michigan explored numerous connections between the two cities, many of which can be attributed to the classical aspirations of Augustus (formerly Elias) Woodward, the original planner of the modern city. 19th century neoclassical architects picked up where Woodward left off, and in her keynote essay for the exhibition’s catalog, M.G. Sobocinski explores the roles that the emergence, neglect, and reuse of monumental architecture had in both ancient Rome and modern Detroit. Of course, a city’s space is defined by more than its buildings. In recent years, Detroit has increasingly been defined by its lack of them. If an attempt to compare the urban footprint of Detroit with that of the late Roman town is threatened by the enormous population disparity between the two settings, that threat is at least partially compensated for by the size of the former, which sprawls across almost 140 square miles of former tallgrass prairie, an area larger than Boston, San Francisco, and Manhattan combined. 8 While the urban core and its continued (if somewhat attenuated) monumentality remain the first feature likely to be noticed by a new visitor to the city, it is in the city’s outlying, residential neighborhoods—its vicus, to call them by their Roman equivalent—that the most dramatic changes have taken place. Before examining those changes, however, a brief background on Detroit’s history is in order. Detroit: a capsule history An 1805 fire that destroyed Detroit’s colonial-era fort and its surrounding settlement cleared the way for a planned reconstruction on 10,000 acres of federally granted land. The plan was based on an orthogonal street grid, centered on a public square, the “Campus Martius.” The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 connected the city, via Lake Erie, to the burgeoning cities of the eastern seaboard and to the American phase of the Industrial Revolution, igniting a growth process that accelerated with the arrival of the railroad and the first great era of immigration from Europe. Between 1830 and 1890, Detroit’s population swelled from about 2,000 to more than 200,000 while the city’s primary industry allowed it to anoint itself the “Stove Capital of the World.” This heavy industrial base made Detroit a natural setting for the ambitions of Henry Ford, who introduced his Model T automobile in 1908 and opened his first assembly line production facility the following year. Fueled by the new industry, population growth continued to accelerate. When Ford opened its first plant, there were just over 400,000 people in the city; twenty years later, there were more than 1.5 million.9 The abundance of open land made it economically feasible for Detroit to grow outward as eastern cities grew upward; while the latter spawned high rise apartment towers, Detroit’s workers lived in a vast low rise city of small, single family bungalows, tightly packed into uniform blocks.10 Through the 1920s and 1930s, an increasing proportion of these homes were occupied by black workers who had migrated from the southern United States to escape the tyranny of Jim Crow. Their name they gave to their chief neighborhood, Paradise Valley, can be seen as both a fulfillment of Detroit’s promise and as an ironic acknowledgement of the gap between their standard of living and that of their neighbors in adjacent white enclaves. 8 Mallach, et al, 35. 9 Sugrue 23. 10 Sugrue 22. 4  White Detroiters did not generally welcome the influx of blacks, and as their numbers grew, an ad hoc but powerful system of segregation increasingly divided the city into white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods. Attempts by blacks to cross these invisible borders were met with militant resistance. In March 1950, with Detroit near the peak of its population and postwar economic boom, a poster summoned residents of a white neighborhood of an “emergency meeting” to respond to an “invasion” by a black family who had just purchased a home in the area.11 White men, women, and children participated in campaigns of violence against the property and occasionally the persons of blacks who dared to cross neighborhood color borders. As the city’s black population continued to rise, however, white residents gradually gave up the territorial battles and moved away. Detroit’s population declined by 180,000 between 1950 and 1960. In 1967, as the domestic auto industry was confronting its first stiff headwind from foreign competition, a massive, almost exclusively black riot erupted near downtown Detroit. The riot lasted for five days, resulting in 43 deaths, more than 7,000 arrests, and the pillaging or destruction of more than 2,500 buildings.12 The televised images of a black mob looting storefronts, only some of which were owned by whites, reinforced ideas of a black “takeover” of Detroit and helped make segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace a heavy favorite in Detroit’s remaining white enclaves during the 1968 and 1972 elections. “White flight” continued apace, and by 1980, the city had lost one third of its peak population.13 The low rise city that had grown up in response to mid-century population pressures grew increasingly vacant. Agents of urban reconfiguration In the view of urban planners, a proliferation of vacant, unmaintained homes is a central cause of so-called urban blight; they are a disease of the city’s form. They attract squatters and scavengers, who pose a threat to the legitimate occupants of nearby homes through the introduction of criminal activity, or, more commonly, accidental fires. They gain notoriety as “bad parts” of town; places to be avoided for fear of the possibility of misfortune or foul play, even if the overwhelming majority of them are genuinely deserted. In this regard, among others, they resemble the disabitatio of medieval Rome. The upheavals of the fifth century, punctuated by the Visigothic sack in 410 and the Vandal sack of 455, reduced Rome’s population from around 400,000 to about 100,000 by the beginning of the sixth century. The military efforts of the emperor Justinian to restore the western half of the empire were devastating to Italy and reduced the city’s population to as little as 30,000. These clustered miserably on the flood plain of the Tiber, between the Vatican and Capitoline hills. The population loss stabilized in the late sixth century and had recovered to somewhere between 50,000 and 90,000 by the time Gregory the Great assumed the papacy in 590, but the great third century walls of the Emperor Aurelian were now much too large for the shrunken city. 14 As Gregory pondered the moralia of Job and quarreled with the ineffectual Byzantine bureaucrats of the Palatine Hill over how to best provide for the city’s remaining residents, the majority of the intramural city was overtaken by nature. The bulk of the Colosseum sat in the malaria-breeding miasma of a swamp. The dense ruins of late imperial Rome, 11 Sugrue 230. 12 Sugrue 259. 13 Sugrue 260-65; DAAHP Timeline. 14 Krautheimer 57-70. 5 from the great bath complexes of Trajan, Caracalla, and Diocletian to the tenements that once housed most of the city’s teeming populace, eroded beneath a creeping cover of vegetation. Home to dragons and evil spirits, such as the shade of the Emperor Nero (!), it was not a place you wanted to go. 15 In both medieval Rome and modern Detroit, however, abandoned buildings also functioned as a consumable resource, one eagerly exploited by any remaining residents. In the scary disabitatio of Rome, the natural decay of the urban ruins was helped along by the depredations of church-building monks. In Detroit, buildings are stripped of their wires and piping, which yield copper and other sellable base metals. The use of Detroit’s abandoned structures as a quarry for valuable raw materials is not limited to the resale market; in some cases, it seems, Detroit residents are making use of spolia in the same sense that early medieval town dwellers reused marble and other materials from unoccupied Roman structures. The author of a July 2009 message on a prominent Detroit online forum boasted that friends had scavenged some floor panels from the abandoned Packard automobile plant and were using them to finish the floors in “a communal space that will be a headquarters for local artists.” In the view of the spoliators, they are improving the city by reclaiming items of beauty from obscurity and making them available for public admiration.16 It is easy to imagine the 12th century agents of Pope Innocent II employing a similar rationale as they transferred Ionic capitals from the 3rd century ruins of the Baths of Caracalla to the church of Sta. Maria in Trastevere.17 For those who have continued to occupy the depopulating areas, the vacant buildings and lots themselves represent an opportunity for a species of “spoliation.” A New York architectural design firm has coined the term “New Suburbanism” to describe the collective phenomenon of multiple “entrepreneurial homeowners,” each acting according to self-interest, acquiring and clearing adjacent lots to create larger lots for themselves. The end result: “a gradual rewriting of the city’s genetic code: a large scale, unplanned replatting of the city” that replaces densely packed rows of houses with quasi- suburban estates.18 A similarly “genetic” change might be said to have been wrought by Christianity in the Roman urban landscapes of the fifth and sixth centuries, where classical monumentality funded by local elites—the neoclassical majesty of Michigan Central Station, now fallen into disrepair, comes to mind—had given way to a smaller scale, sacral landscape defined by churches, shrines, and more open intramural spaces.19 Where Detroit’s old occupation patterns persist, residents are increasingly taking traditional municipal responsibilities, such as security, into their own hands. Jefferson-Chalmers, a ¼ square mile neighborhood to the east of the urban core, relies heavily upon an oral information network and the unofficial patrols of a 63-year-old former police officer to restrain the activities of its criminal elements. Police response to emergency calls is slow, if it takes place at all, and the police department readily admits that it no longer able to provide adequate coverage to the area. 20 15 Krautheimer 317. 16 “ruxy17,” DetroitYES forums 17See Kinney, Dale. “Spolia from the Baths of Caracalla in Sta. Maria in Trastevere.” The Art Bulletin 68, no. 3 (1986). pp. 379-397. 18 Armborst, et al., 2-3. 19 Loseby (2006) provides the best recent overview of this process. Also see Jill Harries, “Christianity and the city in Late Roman Gaul” in The City in Late Antiquity (John Rich, ed.), Routledge, 1992. 20 see “Street Fightin’ Man,” Metro Times. 6  Official acknowledgement of these limitations has been slow in coming, but as visions of restoring Detroit to its former industrial might move into the realm of fantasy, city authorities have very recently become willing to entertain the idea of formally surrendering control over formerly urban areas. Detroit mayor Dave Bing told journalists in February 2010 that the city “cannot support every neighborhood,” adding that failure to contract would mean that “this whole city is going to go down.”21 The obvious early medieval parallel to this officially sanctioned contraction is the construction or modification of defensive wall circuits to accommodate smaller urban footprints, a phenomenon observable in Paris, Bordeaux, Périgueux, Clermont, and many other towns in late Roman Gaul.22 Within the modified city limits, what Bing calls Detroit’s “stable” neighborhood communities, places like Jefferson-Chalmers, are expected to benefit from increased official attention and largesse. This configuration of village-like accretions separated by empty interstices within a single urban organism bears a remarkable resemblance to the phenomenon of città ad isole, or polynuclear settlement, that is found in many examples of the early medieval urban setting.23 The American Institute of Architects, in a recent report that provided recommendations for “a new paradigm for urban vitality” in Detroit, included an urban form schematic that also resembles the medieval città ad isole, with the notable difference that the haunted disabitatio areas of the medieval period are now economic “opportunity areas.” (see Fig. 1). Indeed, such opportunities did eventually materialize in the medieval disabitatio, though they did so on schedules unlikely to satisfy the desires of modern urban planners. Hyperlocal economic development and other changes that take place in response to the unforeseen exigencies and opportunities of everyday life promise to keep Detroit’s urban planners on their toes. In partially depopulated areas of Detroit, the increased irrelevance with which residents view the officially defined parameters of their environment is visible from outer space. The Briggs neighborhood of Detroit offers a typical example of the granular process through which depopulation has transformed the urban landscape. A 1961 aerial photo shows a mostly residential neighborhood comprised of orderly rows of houses situated on the 100 x 30 foot lots that were the standard for 20th century Detroit. The same neighborhood, photographed by satellite in 2007, has been radically transformed by the disappearance of most of its housing stock. The paved alleys that provided rear access to the vanished homes are falling prey to erosion and vegetative succession, as are many of the sidewalks. For foot traffic, at least, these municipally sanctioned arteries are less important than the crooked “desire lines” that have been worn through now-vacant lots by residents traveling directly between points of interest. (see Fig. 2) These organic processes are strongly suggestive for the fate of the “orderly,” orthogonal street grids of the Roman era. As the monumental sites they embraced fell into disuse, became quarries for building material, and eventually disappeared, the Roman street layouts lost much of their meaning for the people who still lived among them. They increasingly competed for use with the “desire lines” of early medieval people, some of which became main thoroughfares that rivaled or eclipsed the Roman layout. The end result was the crooked, seemingly helter-skelter street plan of many medieval 21 MacDonald. 22Loseby 2006. See also Johnson, Stephen. “A group of late Roman city walls in Gallia Belgica.” Britannia Vol. 4 (1973), pp. 210-223. For a vivid example from the Roman east, see Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity (Johns Hopkins, 1997), pp. 339-340. For a contrast with the classical Roman period, see Stambaugh, The Ancient Roman City (Johns Hopkins, 1988), particularly Chapter 11, “City and Suburbs.” 23Early medieval Lyon and Toulouse are two of the best known examples of this settlement pattern. See Wickham, 591-692. 7 European towns, only some of which preserved, often as minor streets, ghostly elements of the monumental Roman city plan. The most important commonality that emerges between these settings is the absence of a sufficiently powerful or interested state authority to constrain the impulses—a word used here without its negative behavioral connotations—of individual residents. The people and their daily routines themselves become the reference points for the new urban infrastructure, which grows up around them: the urban space is democratized. Conclusions That there are noteworthy parallels between the shrinking cities of post-Roman Europe and late 20th century Detroit seems beyond dispute. The question for ancient historians is whether a more concerted, rigorous use of this comparison and others like it could help to advance our understanding of the Late Antique and early medieval urban setting. The enormous role that ethnic and racial conflict has played in Detroit warrants at least a brief reconsideration of how comparable tensions could have led to communal conflict in early medieval Europe. It has become conventional wisdom in the social sciences that “race” is a modern concept with no pre-modern antecedents, yet most scholars of the ancient world agree that the Romans and their neighbors perceived and acted in response to ethnic differences, even if the underlying definitions of ethnicity were relative and prone to great shifts over time. The existence of predominantly Jewish enclaves in Roman cities and towns is well established. As Germanic peoples became more visible in Roman towns, could these ethnic identities have been the basis for community identities on a neighborhood or street level? Were the fifth century Gallo-Roman migrants who flooded into southern Gaul from the cities of the north, such as Salvian of Marseilles, war refugees, or was there an element of “white flight” in their decision to move? There is no written evidence to suggest anything of the sort, but we should not rely exclusively on an argumentum ex silentio. On the other hand, the relatively minor role that direct violence had in the abandonment of Detroit neighborhoods is useful in confronting any remaining historical interpretations that involve human tidal waves of axe-wielding Germans driving the Gallo-Roman populace before them like frightened sheep. The residents of fifth century Gaul could not watch reports of a sack of Trier on the evening news, but the widespread acceleration of “white flight” apparently caused by the relatively local 1967 riots is a lesson in how an urban population that perceives an external threat can be moved to drastic measures without the presence of actual danger. More controversial than either of these ideas, surely, is the suggestion that continued observation of the neighborhoods in post-industrial Detroit can provide ancient historians with clues about the trajectories of their ancient counterparts, especially if such clues are considered in the absence of any corroborating evidence from the written or archaeological record. The distinction between the results of such research and pure conjecture is a subtle one, to be sure. However, collaboration with modern urban geographers and practitioners of other relevant social sciences may help limit the impact of resulting errors while preserving the value of any insights gained. If those fields extend a hand to archaeology and ancient history, we should eagerly grasp it. 8 Afterword Detroit’s situation is an understandably sensitive topic for its residents, and the increased outside attention the city has received lately has not always been welcome. Journalists and photographers attempting to document the changes described here are often derided by locals as aficionados of “ruin porn” who are primarily interested in shock value. I therefore feel it necessary to state that in writing this paper, it is not my intention to disparage the city of Detroit, to present it as the subject of an eschatological narrative (e.g., “The Decline and Fall of Detroit”), to use Detroit as a mascot for the waning of American preeminence, or to undermine the aspirations of those seeking to bring about Detroit's renewal. It is rather to explore, with as few preconceptions as possible, the changes to Detroit's form over the past 50 years and to determine whether they may provide historians and archaeologists with a mirror, however distorted, for illuminating ancient urban transformations that have been almost totally obscured by almost sixteen centuries of subsequent development. This exercise does not deny the possibility of a vibrant future for Detroit any more than it denies such outcomes for many of the cities that Late Antiquity bequeathed to the Middle Ages and, eventually, to the modern world. If the comparison proves valid to any extent, Detroit's advocates should see the successful adaptations of those ancient predecessors as grounds for optimism. David P. Powell Villanova University March 2010 9 Appendix Fig. 1. “Schematic representation of future urban form concept for Detroit.” Mallach, et al., 23. 10 Fig. 2. Briggs, a residential neighborhood just over one mile from central Detroit, as seen in aerial photographs from 1961, top, and 2007, bottom. (Top photo: DTE Energy & Wayne State University; Bottom photo: Google Earth.) 11 Bibliography Wayne State University. "DAAHP Timeline." Detroit African American History Project. http:// www.daahp.wayne.edu/timeline.php (accessed February 19, 2010). "Detroit---Stove capital of the world." University of Michigan News Service. http://www.ns.umich.edu/ index.html?Releases/2001/Jul01/r070901c (accessed February 20, 2010). Armborst, Tobias, Daniel D'Oca, and Georgeen Theodore. Improve Your Lot!. 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