Escape to Detroit 7/11-7/14/2008

Roderick and I arrived at the Howard Street bus station in Detroit around 8:30p.m. on Friday the 11th of July for a long weekend with our friends, Nick and Jayke.

Their car being a bit wonky, we were planning on walking a lot over the course of the visit and started that walk down Michigan hopping this and that block as Nick pointed out buildings he particularly like until we passed St. Patrick’s and the being-restored worker’s rowhouse in Cork Town. (Even the trash under the house had been catalogued to give an idea of the lives lived in the structure.)

So we walked. And walked. And walked. We walked past houses that were lived in and massive apartment buildings where missing roofs and trees growing out of the upper floor windows let us know that there was plenty of space available on a fixer-upper basis. Here and there Jewish temples that had been turned into theatres stood in the shadows of skyscrapers built in the 1920’s and empty since the 1970’s.

There are enough churches in Detroit to hold flickering votives for all the lost of the world, but – you know what? - a lot of them are sitting dark. Where has the faith that supported them into being from nothing gone?

(There was one in particular – the Episcopal Cathedral – that was lit and had only a massive stump where it should have had a massive tower. In the beginning of the Great Depression the church was still under construction and it was decided that the money for the tower was better used to help the destitute community. The empty space where the tower should have been became suddenly more comely than any tangible structure could ever be when I heard that story.)

We dumped bags at the apartment on Antoinette near Wayne State’s campus before heading out to the Motor City Brewing Works for a late dinner (470 W. Canfield, 313-832-7000, www.motorcitybeer.com).

The atmosphere was warm as the night and the place was pleasantly busy as we placed out order and headed up to their roof-top terrace to relax and wait for our food. We were hungry, so we decided to try a variety of things: Their Nut Brown Ale, their wonderfully tangy-smoky artichoke dip, cheese sampler (changes regularly, so you get to choose your cheeses from a chalkboard) and three of their brick-oven baked pizzas, all wonderful: The Bronx Bomber (tomato herb sauce, fresh mozzarella, bacon, mushrooms, green pepper, Italian Sausage that did not look like dog food because it was cooked and sliced in house, Pepperoni & onions, $9), The Godfather Part II (pesto sauce, goat cheese, roasted red peppers, roasted garlic & Italian Sausage, $8) and the Maui Wowie (tomato herb sauce, fresh mozzarella, crushed pineapple, Canadian bacon & fresh basil, $7).

On our way back to the apartment after dinner, Nick walked us through the West Canfield Historic District off of Cass (possibly 2nd?). The street is cobbled with granite in a webbed, or fish-scaled pattern from one stone-curbed side of the road to the other. There are trees – both mature and some planted in the last twenty years – lining the street and sheltering the houses in a way that make the short street feel like a green tunnel or a very secluded garden. Most of the homes on this block were built between 1869 and the 1880’s. Some of the homes are private, single family residences, and some of them are still subdivided into several apartments. Regardless of current use, all of the houses in this small historic district are stable and – at the very least – moderately kept or in the process of being restored. From the district markers, street paving, paint colors, gardens, newly planted trees and ongoing work, it is evident that as much planning is going into the preservation of this street for future generations as went into its laying out in 1818.

We caught a Woodward bus to Ferndale (Check out House of Chants for some great clothing options) to see its shopping district on Nine Mile. . . When asked several times (after finding we were not from the area) how we got there and told “by bus,” the response was, “Oh. That’s so. . . big city.” It’s kinda interesting that four white boys bussing or cabbing through Detroit and the ‘burbs is called “So Big City,” because when anyone else travels by public transport, it gets called “Kinda Ghetto.” Just interesting. . .

We walked through the area near the Masonic Temple on our way to meet one of Jayke;s co-workers from The Whitney passing on our way crumbling façades of once-swanky hotels and apartment houses, mostly now empty. I ended not meeting the co-worker because the girlfriend, Julie Zager turned out be very interesting (add a “.com” to see some of her older work).

We wandered through a random junk shop on our way home and then had dinner at the Cass Café (more amazing food with a great atmosphere, 4620 Cass, 313-831-1400, www.casscafe.com). One of us had a sandwich with seared, smoked wild salmon, bacon, mescaline and tomato with a jalapeño/caper aoli. Our waiter combined the unfortunate qualities of slow and stinky so as to add a creeping funk to our table now and then. There are other waiters in the establishment, so I still highly recommend a visit.

Over the rest of our visit we had Brunch at The Whitney, pondered items at MOCAD, (Their exterior neon reads: “Everything Is Going To Be Alright.”), trotted through the major galleries of the DIA, ate at Slow’s BBQ in/near Cork Town (Good sandwiches and *amazing* mac ‘n cheese), crawled through the Mines-of-Moria-like depths of the abandoned Detroit Train Station (most of the “NO Trespassing” signs had been stolen by scrappers) and spent the final day packing, sipping coffee and preparing for a return to home in Saginaw.

As we rode the bus north, I had to wonder: Why is it that Detroit has so much of its architectural heritage intact awaiting more optimistic times and individuals to make an investment? (It is interesting to note that some of the buildings that have been host to only taggers for thirty or more years are seeing rehabilitations into housing, retail space and academic usage.) Why has Saginaw been precedentially so eager to demolish any building not of immediate use? Stating that empty buildings are dangerous just doesn’t make good sense when said buildings are not sitting hard by a schoolyard or collapsing onto a sidewalk.

Do some digging through newspaper clippings and local recollection: Many buildings demolished fit neither criteria (i.e., the former Feige building that was once part of the Tower Block on Genesee near what is now Health Delivery), but were downed, regardless, at significant cost to the city, property owner or both.

The districts of Detroit that are currently seeing a slow revival have one interesting item in common: They all contain buildings that can be converted into affordable housing and interesting retail space. Without said buildings, initial development is far less likely.

I look at the building-speckled fields that represent Saginaw’s downtown district, and have to wonder, as well: Where are businesses supposed to operate out of? Where are the young people a community needs for continuity supposed to live? Tents? I don’t think a 21st-Century Hooverville is such a good idea, but what other option remains? Sadly, it would seem that the only viable option is building inferior facilities in areas other than the city center.

Detroit may have shopping carts full of political and economic messes aplenty, but it *does* have one or two vital things going for it: The city has a vibrant network of subcultures in every economic bracket and contains enough amazing, or even just average and utilitarian, architecture still standing that its districts will be able, in time, to achieve economic recovery while Saginaw is still talking about Urban Blight and attempting to address the issue of recycling building materials long after the buildings themselves have been quickly demolished and the lots grown over and forgotten.



Detroit: Watercolor, pencil, charcoal on paper. Collection of Tina Holtz.
SPM

Demolition of the Symon's Building

Demolition of the Symon's Building

The crane's neck
skeletal
swaying in a concentrated dance
above the arcing shell
of brick and blinded windows
seeing only shadow, gaping cold

Each graceful movement
ends with a momentary pause
and then the hollow clack
like footsteps in an empty room
as the unseen wrecking ball
takes dull, unhungry bites
from the red and black carcass

Daily they continue
yet i never see people,
only the slow, dancing machine
and pale, intermittent billows
of dust

Each evening i watch
as the sinking sun
sets fire to the window sockets
and pulls gold from destitute brick

They have altered my sunset
opened up more of the sky
and reshaped the mood and spirit
of the russet and purple veils of cloudlight

I wake each morning
expecting it to be gone
but those walls are stubborn
and as difficult to kill as the wind

Yet in one thing man always persists:
the destruction of progress or
progress of destruction
we care little which–
Armies march not to make war
nor to make peace
Armies march to march
the rest is inconsequent residue–

So i am shocked at my surprise
of coming home one evening
to watch a fading sunset
behind a flat and sterile field of brown
stretching away, brickless and silent,
to the old river that washes our memories
like dirt from a child's face.

–Marc Beaudin

(Originally published in The McGuffin)
This and other works by the author can be found at http://www.crowvoice.com

And all that was left. . .

*This* was once a home . . . This shell on Tuscola this past spring. Now all that's left are shards of broken glass, a single carved chair leg and gaping holes where wiring and plumbing were ripped out of the walls by scrappers who moved in as soon as the last family moved out. And now the house is to be torn down.

You have to look under the orange shag carpet and behind the crappy panelling to see what was once here, but that isn't so far to be allowed to see what isn't here anymore, (and I don't think Superman could've done better).

The house once had oak on its floors, high oak base boards, and thick oak mouldings surrounding massive oak pocket doors and large, well-placed windows.

I decided to pause for a second as the woodwork was being disassembled, place a hand on the worn-smooth newell cap and reflect on the people who once lived here.

There were random keys and a century-old dime under the first tread (under which the carpenters had signed thier names in a Spencerian script), and piles of wood shavings from the finishing of the stair that had gotten sealed in before the first family carried their possessions up these stairs with thier faux-Chinoiserie bannisters.

I did a complete walk-through before the volunteers began removing doors, hardware, base mouldings, stairway, etc. In less than two weeks all raditors and heavy plumbing had been scrapped; you could see the marks where the heavy objects had been drug over the floorboards. . .

When I came up from the cellar, Sarah was standing exactly where I had left in the center of the dining room. She told me she couldn't go down there with me because she was too afraid the ghost of a dead baby would come up from behind and touch her (She has issues with babies, this girl).

This is when I raised one eyebrow, pointed a glass doorknob at her and and said, "Look, in my other-other life I'm a bartender, and do have any idea how many people try to touch you as they get drunk?" I said I'd take dead babies any day over a linty old man with a pitcher of beer in one hand and my backside in the other . . .

Sarah still wouldn't go into the cellar, but did agree that there are worse things than dead babies in this world.

SPM

The Storm

The huge storm after Jazz on Jefferson gave me an idea that came out as a charcoal/pencil sketch laid over in watercolor of the Warren Avenue entrance to our neighborhood. (Paper mounted on mahogany panel.) The piece was planned slightly differently so far as details, but rough weather at the timed art battle hosted by the Magic Bean on State Street changed the end product.

The sky began churning and lowering in the late afternoon of a very, very hot day for a town this far north. The clouds were tinted the colour of greenish lead and were rolling under themselves like waves on a muddy beach and the temperature held as the humidity rose.

Without warning, water - not rain in drops - but flood water, dropped from the air as if God were a child emptying a bucket over an unsuspecting anthill. At the same time, winds began twisting, pushing and pulling simultaneously under the cover of the blinding downfall.

The storm lasted less than ten minutes and the rain and wind stopped almost together . . . What a change ten minutes of no-rules play can make:

Across from Art Sample on Michigan, a massive tree had been twisted until its trunk burst and the rest of the tree dropped onto the porch of a house nearby; the porch was flattened and the corner of the house dented slightly like a box of cereal that got dropped. (On the bright side, a Bonneville was crushed beyond recovery, making the world a prettier place.)


Crossing the Court Street Bridge, the tops of all the tall trees on Ojibway Island looked like coral with the tips broken off . . . Turning down Washington one could hear sirens coming from so many directions it was difficult to know where to look.

Thompson in front of the New Amadore was blocked by a fallen tree that had crushed the fence while the beautiful white house with its enfolding porch across the street had had the mature tree that once kept it sheltered twisted and dropped onto the house - breaking the roof of the porch in the middle and digging out the attic gable on its way down.

The corner of Warren and Thompson - in front of our apartment - was obstructed by a tree that had been snapped in the middle and swung like a bat to knock the top of the nearby power pole cleanly off dropping the lines into the street below amongst the tangled limbs.

Weadock, Park, Cherry, Sheridan, Owen, Jefferson, Warren, Millard . . . all either blocked by fallen trees or littered with more leaves and limbs than the autumn would ever bring. And the immediate district is now without power and likely to stay that way for a couple of days.

If is odd to think that so many trees are damaged or gone when only a couple days before during Jazz on Jefferson everything was so lovely. The trees are probably the greatest loss since the district has no policy to replace missing trees . . . some of those taken by the storm are old enough that we won't see young trees grow big enough to replace them in a lifetime.

SPM

Taking the Pulse

The sun is shining, the suddenly warm wind is lightly jollying the green out of every dormant thing. The neighborhood is filled with sounds that make me pause and consider the silent, other-worldly fastness of the winters here when windows are closed and layered over with storm windows and heavy drapes, and when we forget how green the world can be.

Barking dogs, blurred discussions, laughing children, squealing brakes of busses and the rumble of passing cars with thier snatches of radio noise froms the seasonal pulse of the district.
SPM

Cock-a-Leekie Soup

We had Chris Marcott, Fran, Jacki, MaryLynn, Elizabeth & Floyd, Nick Piotrowski, Self, Roderick and his sister, Jenny (who, in passing, is *such* an odd creature) to our place on the corner of Warren and Thompson. . . With soup one can always have company because soup feeds an army. This is my version of a British classic, and is a crowd pleaser. . . I decided the name was enough reason to work with this recipe and the test-group liked it.


3 Strips bacon, cooked and crumbled
1 whole chicken, quartered and skinned
3 leeks, sliced on the diagonal
1/2 yellow onion, sliced thinly
3 cloved garlic, minced
3 bay leaves
2 fists full button mushrooms, sliced thin
1/2 stick butter
1/2 tsp fresh ginger, minced
1 1/2 c. white wine, (Louis Jadot 2001 chardonnay preferred)
1/2 tsp. black pepper
2 soup cans of chicken stock
1 soup can of beef stock
4 medium parsnips, scrubbed and thinly sliced

Simmer all in a pot for the afternoon on low flame, pull and bone chicken when tender, discard bones, return meat to pot and serve.
SPM