When Cycling and Storytelling Mingle

On a summer afternoon in Detroit, a few dozen cyclists pulled over on the side of the road and looked for a shady spot to grab a drink of water. They tipped their bicycles over on their sides and gathered on a bungalow’s sun-crisped lawn to listen to a story.

A few years before, Cornetta Lane had learned that a new name was floating around for her neighborhood. The new moniker, West Corktown, nodded to the rapidly transforming Corktown enclave nearby. Lane had always known the four-square-mile stretch as Core City, and the rebranding effort—even in jest, or with the intention of spurring a wave of economic development—felt like a sting. It was a rewriting of a narrative that was deeply personal. “We have an emotional connection to our home,” she says. For Lane, Core City was more than a collection of down-on-their-luck blocks. It was, she wrote on Medium, “a place I learned to ride my bike without training wheels.”