Soon after the city of Detroit filed its $18 billion bankruptcy case in July 2013, Jerry Rosen found that he had filled up a legal pad with notes, leaving only the tabula rasa of the cardboard backing. On this blank slate, Rosen, who likes to doodle, drew a box around “ART.” Dollar signs danced over arrows pointing to “State” on one side and “Pensions” on the other.
The art in question was the collection of the municipally owned Detroit Institute of Arts. It was the city’s greatest asset, and emergency manager Kevyn Orr had already hired Christie’s to appraise its value. By his scrawling, though, Rosen — who was chief judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan and chief mediator in the case — had mapped out a way to effectively recapitalize the collection, which would be leveraged to save the pensions of city employees, to activate philanthropists, and to send creditors away feeling whatever they did.
“I felt very strongly there’d be nothing left of Detroit but dust and legal bills” if the collection were sold, Rosen explains in a phone interview. “I was trying to find a way to leverage the art collection without selling it.”
The art stayed in the museum as Rosen worked “the rope line of people that we had to get on board.” Those people became a source of inspiration through their sacrifice and avoidance of rigid barriers in their negotiations process. “All demographic backgrounds came together to rescue an iconic American city.”
With the court’s chief bankruptcy judge, Steven Rhodes, presiding through 16 months of excruciating complications, and with Rosen’s surefire mediation and dealmaking, the “plan of adjustment” was established in October 2014, saving the city and the art. In fact, even Rosen made a contribution to the collection — his original sketch now hangs at the DIA itself.
Rosen likes espionage novels, and his next step was literary. After New Year’s bells rang in 2015, he spent about five months wrestling with a tangled plot and colorful characters. “It was cathartic,” he says. “I needed to sort of get it all out.”
There followed “half-hearted” attempts to find a publisher, but the work sat for years. Then, as the case’s 10-year anniversary drew near, he shared the manuscript with R.J. King, the editor of DBusiness, like Detroit an Media magazine, who encouraged him to publish it.
Even after the long delay, Rosen thought the writing “stood up pretty well.” He kept the first-person narrative — “I wanted to write it as it was at the time” — and updated the epilogue.
The result is Grand Bargain: The Inside Story of Detroit’s Dramatic Journey from Bankruptcy to Rebirth, published by Media (grandbargainbook.com).
“It’s the first telling from the inside of how Detroit was rescued from the brink of oblivion,” Rosen says.
In a cover blurb, Mayor Mike Duggan writes, “Gerald Rosen will go down as a very important figure in Detroit’s history, and anyone who reads his book will understand why.”
For his part, Rosen, 73, says he is disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assertion that “there are no second acts in American lives.” The bankruptcy “set the stage” for a revitalization of Detroit. Leaving the bench in 2017, Rosen co-founded the JAMS Detroit office with three partners, providing judicial arbitration, mediation, and alternative dispute resolution services. Rosen even serves on the national board of JAMS.
And now there’s the matter of book promotion, and perhaps the decade-long seasoning will pay off. He reflects on the too-frequent examples of polarization, dysfunction, and incivility in society. “We need a story about people coming together.”
This story originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our will be available on Dec. 9.
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