Being on the wrong side of progress is embarassing...

Just something I noticed following the death of Jack Kevorkian last week --

Here is Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Jessica Cooper berating Kevorkian after he was convicted of second-degree murder in April 1999 for personally triggering the death of one of his patients:

"You invited yourself to the wrong forum," she said in a lecture that was broadcast worldwide. "When you purposely inject another human being with what you know to be a lethal dosage of poison, that sir, is murder and the jury found so.

"Then you had the audacity to go on national television, show the world what you did and dare the legal system to stop you. Well, sir, consider yourself stopped." (Detroit Free Press)

Now, here is former Oakland County Circuit Court Judge (and current Oakland County Prosecutor) Jessica Cooper responding to the news Kevorkian's death:

“I think he brought to light a debate that needed to take place, and one that continues in medical schools and Main Street today,” Cooper said. “And in the last decade or 12 years, we’ve seen the growth of hospice, a movement toward death with peace and dignity, and I think we can thank him for that. This debate will continue in a calm and reasoned fashion. My condolences go out to his family and friends and supporters.” (Detroit Free Press)

...oh, and sorry for sentencing you to 10-25 years in prison!

Collected news, May 14

Burton Theater on Cass closes over a financial dispute with the building's landlord, hope to move to a new location in the fall (Detroit Free Press)

Obama administration allocates $336 million to high speed rail between Detroit and Chicago (Detroit Free Press)

At the Park Shelton, rentals are 100% occupied, the remaining 14 unfinished units are being built for sale, and commercial space will most likely soon be full (Model D Media)

Woodward Light Rail construction now being planned in one phase (Jefferson to Eight Mile), hopefully running in 2015 (MetroTimes)

Le Petit Zinc, 1055 Trumbull

Le Petit Zinc, an awesome French restaurant at the corner of Trumbull and Howard, in the often overlooked southern end of Corktown. Everything I've had here has been great, including crepes and coffee drinks. And there's a patio!

36 Hours in Detroit

From the New York Times:

"No video can portray the passion one finds on the streets of Detroit these days, where everyone from the doorman to the D.J. will tell you they believe in this city’s future. While certain areas are indeed eerily empty, other neighborhoods — including midtown, downtown and Corktown — are bustling with new businesses that range from creperies and barbecue joints catering to the young artists and entrepreneurs migrating to Motown, to a just-opened hostel that invites tourists to explore Detroit with the aid of local volunteer guides . . . No urban enthusiast will want to miss the recovery that Detroit is now attempting."

Collected news, May 5

• Broderick Tower interior demolition is 75% complete (Model D Media)
  

• More on small business activity in Corktown, along Michigan Avenue and in the former Baile Corcaigh space on Trumbull (Detroit News)
  

• First townhome for rent in North Corktown's formerly abandoned Spaulding Court (Model D Media)
  

• Hostel Detroit opens at the corner of Vermont and Spruce in North Corktown (The South End)
  

Holy Trinity Church, 1956

This is such a great picture.

Woman painting Holy Trinity Catholic Church with watercolors on the trunk of her car.

March, 1956

Porter St, Corktown

(photo from the WSU Virtual Motor City Collection)

Street Folk

Art X Detroit, a week-long series of events involving Kresge Artist Fellowship recipients, occurred last week at several venues throughout Midtown. One of the artists involved was Tyree Guyton, founder of the Heidelberg Project (which completely transcends the term "installation art"). For Art X Detroit, Guyton unveiled a new environmental installation called "Street Folks," which consists of thousands of shoes scattered over one block of Edmund Pl. between Woodward and John R. On a fence on the north side of the street, he has attached photocopies of letters from some of the people who donated to the project, telling personal stories about their pair of shoes. It will be displayed until April 24.

The installation specifically confronts homelessness and the idea of "the streets," which are at the same time a dangerous, welcoming, and ubiquitous presence in all of our lives. Guyton writes:

"The street has no respect of person so there are no guarantees. You may not be on the street today, but you might be tomorrow . . . The shoes are a reflection of people, all going in different directions and yet they are all in the streets. The streets have no closing hours they are open 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, all year long. You have night people living in the streets and you have day people living in the streets but we’re all living in the streets chasing whatever your life calls for. In some cases you don’t know what you’re your life is calling for. In the end, we are all Street Folk."

I found it pretty powerful to walk among this overwhelming field of shoes and think about all the lives that had been lived in them, feeling some sort of vague connection to every anonymous person. Many of the letters posted on the fence contained very personal stories about the shoes' former owners.

However, this was probably my favorite note:





(Photos by Margaret O'Leary)

Whole Foods in Midtown (the media's collective head is about to explode)

Rumor is that Whole Foods is searching for space in Midtown, and I've heard that they've been considering a particular lot on Woodward. Nothing has been officially confirmed, but the Free Press reported on Monday that Whole Foods and the president of Eastern Market Corp. "have held preliminary meetings in Detroit to explore lining up local growers and other potential producers to supply food products to a store in Detroit." And last week, Dave Bing said that "it's not a question of 'if' but 'when,'" according to Crain's Detroit.

It seems a little strange that Detroit would go from having no national chain grocery stores to having a Whole Foods, especially since the store generally caters to the upper-middle class demographic with enough extra time and money to be concerned with eating organic food (earning it the nickname "Whole Paycheck"). Still, if Whole Foods is willing to invest in Midtown, they must see some potential, and it would probably be a dumb move to discourage them. Detroit can certainly use all the help it can get in attracting new residents and businesses, and the very well-known "Whole Foods" name could be great for Midtown's image as a flourishing neighborhood.

In other grocery store news, Eve's Downtown Gourmet opened on Washington Blvd, and MLive writes that it is preparing to "fall right into media cliche territory." Well, at least the cliche is starting to turn positive, right?

Trying to pull something positive out of the 2010 Census...

By now, you've probably heard endless analysis of the 2010 US Census results. In ten years, Detroit lost a quarter of its population and is at its lowest numbers since 1910. The Free Press published a pretty interesting map showing population change over the last ten years by census tract. The official count (713,777 residents) is apparently far lower than anyone expected, and Dave Bing plans to challenge that number. He might be right, because the Free Press article mentions that the Census undercounted Detroit by 50,000 residents in 2000, and the city was successful in getting the number changed.

The Census results are obviously bad news in many ways for Detroit -- on a practical level, the city will lose state and federal funding as well as representation in government. And this is just more glaring proof that the city's epic decline refuses to quit, even into the twenty-first century.

Still, I don't think these Census results mean that Detroit is on the brink of total collapse and that everyone should abandon ship as a quickly as possible. For one thing, I don't think it's necessarily devastating for Detroit to end up with a lower population than it had at its peak in the mid-twentieth century. Large population does not equal a better city. Honestly, I don't think it's that big of a surprise that Detroit lost 25% of its population. You'd be pretty hard-pressed to attract either new residents or businesses to most of the decaying neighborhoods on the far east and north sides. Most of the population movement in these areas is understandably moving out of, not into, the city.

If you look at the Free Press map, the majority of census tracts which either gained population or lost relatively little population are clustered around the downtown/Wayne State/Woodbridge/Southwest Detroit area. These are clearly the areas that are attracting the most attention. If Detroit ended up as a smaller, more dense city with a lot of green space and great public transportation, I think that would be an overwhelmingly positive change. So, the Census results basically validate what Bing has been trying to do -- stop wasting resources trying to desperately fill in a sprawling, disconnected city. Detroit can be smaller and better.

Even Yahoo thinks Detroit is underrated

Yahoo Travel included Detroit on its list of the most underrated cities in the world.

"A new breed of urban homesteader is helping to revive Motor City. Abandoned factories and warehouses like the Russell Industrial Center have been turned into studios for artists and artisans, while gardens now flourish in formerly vacant lots. The exuberant Heidelberg Art Project turns urban blight into a symbol of hope. Detroit's food scene, meanwhile, is taking off. Foran's Grand Trunk micropub, the Eastern Market, Supino Pizzeria, and Slows BBQ are just some of the gastronomic must-dos. Don't forget the city's museums, including the Detroit Institute of Art, home to Diego Rivera's 'Detroit Industry' murals, and the delightful Motown Museum."

They also suggest that you not miss Cafe D'Mongo's.

The article's comments section provides a nice example of the way in which people feel the need to make ridiculously uninformed, hyperbolic comments about Detroit. A user named "pkr" has this piece of knowledge to add: "There may be some really nifty new features in Detroit but you'll be robbed or killed getting to them. Detroit + Late night Friday = murder\death\kill"

Keep that in mind. If you're in Detroit on a Friday night, you will be murdered.

Cafe D'Mongo's Speakeasy, 1439 Griswold

Cafe D'Mongo's on the left / Downtown Synagogue on the right




Fireplace at Cafe D'Mongo's (photo by Margaret O'Leary)


This place is truly bizarre. Located on the northernmost block of Griswold, next to a synagogue and across the street from a strip club, it looks like some cramped combination of diner, jazz club, and Victorian parlor.

Go here on Friday night, because it's closed every other day of the week. This is the kind of place that is able to quietly thrive in a city that has a fraction of the respect but twice the personality of its contemporaries.

More on brownfield and historic preservation tax credits

An article in Saturday's Free Press discusses some specific consequences of eliminating Michigan's tax credits for the redevelopment of brownfield sites and historic properties.

Gov. Snyder hopes to get rid of these tax credits (along with others), which have helped to finance the redevelopment of abandoned structures, to "create a more level playing field" for business in Michigan. Snyder is always saying that the future of Michigan is strongly tied to the future of Detroit, but he seems to ignore the fact that older cities like Detroit are at an automatic disadvantage when it comes to economic development. For most of these projects to work, an extra investment is needed.

The article lists five major projects which will almost certainly be scrapped if these tax credits are eliminated:

1. Shopping center at Old Redford High School
2. Retail/residential project at Uniroyal industrial site on Jefferson, next to the Belle Isle bridge
3. David Whitney Building
4. Gateway retail center at Woodward and 8 Mile
5. Several properties near Capitol Park

Corridor Stories

"People Live in the Cass Corridor" is a series of short stories inspired by Douglas Ekman's five years living in the Cass Corridor, a neighborhood which was considered ground zero for urban decay in Detroit. Ekman took a job in advertising at Chrysler in 1977, and he and his future wife moved into a rowhouse near Second and Willis, decades before the Corridor was given the more friendly designation, "Midtown." The stigma worked hard against the neighborhood and prevented most suburbanites from doing any more than pass it on the freeway, but Ekman found "a very close-knit community, not unlike any small town made up of people... good people who through no fault of their own attempted to live their lives in the eye of a storm."

These stories, loosely based on Ekman's five years in the Cass Corridor, both confirm and shatter the neighborhood's bad reputation, illustrating the complexity beneath the very one-sided story that is told about the decline of Detroit's (and America's) urban areas.

Another interesting aspect of this project is that the stories are not available in print - Ekman made studio recordings of himself reading each of them, and you can listen to the audio recordings for free at http://www.peopleliveinthecasscorridor.com/. Single stories or the entire album can also be purchased on the website.

Cutting off brownfield and historic preservation tax incentives could halt development progress

Gov. Snyder's proposed state budget ruthlessly eliminates state tax incentives for a number of industries and projects in favor of lower overall business taxes. While the incentives for filmmaking have gotten the most attention, the elimination of state tax incentives for the redevelopment of brownfield sites and historic preservation may be the most crucial issue for Detroit.

The brownfield credits apply to "brownfield sites," which the Michigan Economic Development Corp. loosely defines as "properties that are either contaminated, blighted or functionally obsolete." These incentives, along with others for the preservation of historic properties, have been responsible for many high-profile redevelopment projects, including the Book-Cadillac and Fort Shelby. As I wrote earlier in a post about redevelopment around Grand Circus Park, the redevelopment of the Broderick Tower was literally made possible by state tax credits.

I understand the need for a balanced budget, but it seems that many of Snyder's proposals would set Detroit and Michigan backwards, leaving us to rely entirely on the hope that his "good climate for business" idea is going to pan out. Nancy Kaffer and Daniel Duggan of Crain's Detroit write that the elimination of these tax credits "could slow or stop the flow of redevelopment projects in Detroit," and the article quotes the vice president of board administration of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., who says that "it's hard to think of a big project that hasn't used the credits."

With all the progress that's been made recently on these projects, the idea of cutting off the state tax incentives seems very misguided.

The Silent Impact of Robocop

The Robocop statue has been a pretty divisive topic. I'm not really sure how I feel about the symbolism of Robocop, or that so many people outside Detroit donated money, or that a group of people who have been in Corktown for only a few years are building a seven foot statue in their backyard.

Either way, while you might think it’s stupid, the Robocop statue fundraiser has accomplished what you had probably not even thought of attempting: raised thousands and thousands of dollars for a Detroit project. I certainly did not think $50,000 would be donated to the construction of a Robocop statue, especially in less than a week. Some people claim that this is not impressive because one businessman in California donated half of the money. In response, I would say that it's almost equally amazing to raise $25,000 in less than a week. So, it seems like this is a challenge. If you think you could spend that money on something better or more creative, start your own fundraiser or present your own plan, because the possibility is clearly out there.

A Hamtramck artist may have just proven this point without even realizing it. The Detroit News writes that “Marianne Burrows was irritated with the recent online fundraising campaign to create a statue of the sci-fi movie icon and launched her own $50,000 drive for something she thinks is more useful: an art park.” The goal is to provide $2,000 and some empty land to 25 artists.

The irony is that Burrows apparently would not have come up with the idea of raising money for this project if she had not been pissed off about the Robocop statue.

And, in defense of Robocop, when I was thinking of ways this $50,000 could be better spent in Detroit, I was thinking of maybe feeding malnourished children or buying new textbooks and supplies for DPS students. But again, I’m not personally making the effort to raise money, so more power to Marianne Burrows for pursuing her own idea.

I don't think the Robocop statue will make or break Corktown, and if it ends up convincing a lot of people to visit Detroit for the first time so that they can discover that it's much more than a place with a Robocop statue, I think that's a good thing.

It is definitely possible that this only happened because the idea of a Robocop statue is kind of stupid and therefore spread quickly on the internet. In the end, if it turns out that people are more willing to donate money to a statue of Robocop than to more useful things, I think that says more about humanity than about this statue.

Mick Vranich, "Radnik Pisar"

Last year, I was at a used book sale in Livonia and came across a copy of Radnik Pisar by Mick Vranich. Although I was not familiar with Vranich, I was in the middle of a poetry/small press phase (it happens), so I was pretty excited to find a book by a Detroit poet.

The book was published in 1983 by 2x4 Press in Detroit. The author bio on the last page reads, "Mick Vranich was born in 1946 downriver from Detroit. At eighteen, he was a general laborer at Zug Island; at twenty, a scrapballer and hooker at Great Lakes Steel; later, a squaring shear operator at Ford Stamping Plant. Other jobs include driving 130,000 miles delivering car parts in San Francisco, where he wore out three trucks. His first book, Salad Surreal: Discernible by Distortion, appeared in 1971. Vranich presently lives in Detroit and makes his living as a carpenter."

A note on the first page says that "Radnik Pisar" is Serbian for "Worker Writer," and Vranich definitely seems to embody the persona of the introspective laborer, alone with his thoughts. In "Scrapballer," he describes the beginning of the night shift at the steel mill, when he cleared his mind of thoughts of home and "poured a cup of coffee from my thermos and lit a cigarette and watched the steel spooling."

Vranich's writing style is some mixture of vague abstraction and the intense straightforwardness of Charles Bukowski, and it's usually very visual and chaotic. I don't want to try to speak for Vranich or make some grand statement about what he's trying to communicate, but I can say that the world often seems very hostile, lonely, and paranoid in these poems. Some take place from inside the home, sensing an unwelcoming world outside, and in others, the conflict and confusion seems to come from inside the poet's own head. That working class Detroit imagery permeates many of them, as in "Invade the Will," when Vranich is "walking on ice to the beer store / with a bag full of cans."

My favorite is a very brief poem called "Saxaphones in the Sunlight" --

"i think i'll take a walk
it's very bright outside
i know i have the ability
to walk in the streets
i have seen me there
i hear saxaphones in the sunlight
i hear warnings outside the door."

***

Vranich worked as a carpenter until February 2010, when he was seriously injured in a fall at a construction site. He died on March 29. Photos from the April 4 memorial can be seen at Tribes of the Cass Corridor, and the Metro Times printed some remembrances on March 30.

Streetlight Giraffe

2nd Ave and Canfield

Grand Circus Park Revival

Grand Circus Park is experiencing a bit of a rebirth with news over the last couple months that three buildings on its south end are undergoing major redevelopment.




2007 photo of Grand Circus Park. The Broderick Tower is the taller building with the Verizon ad, which covers up the much more visually pleasing whale mural. To the immediate right is the David Whitney Building, and to its left is the Madison Building. Photo by Mike Russell, available under a Creative Commons license.


1. The Broderick Tower is being renovated by Motown Construction Partners and will have 127 apartments with a restaurant and lounge on the first few floors. Construction is expected to be done by September 2012. Although there have been attempts to rehab the Broderick in the past, this time the developers have more solid funding sources, including historic tax credits, according to Buildings of Detroit.

2. Across the street, the David Whitney Building is being purchased by a group of investors called the Whitney Partners on a loan from the Detroit Development Authority. There will be retail space on the first few floors along with some mixture of commercial and residential units. The building was constructed in 1915 and designed by Daniel Burnham, the architect/urban planner who did such minor things as creating the master plan for Chicago. According to the Free Press, "plans include restoring the Whitney's original classical architectural ornament that was stripped away a half-century ago." (Detroit Free Press)

3. The Madison Building was purchased by Quicken Loans, who will "rehab its upper floors into a hub for high-tech start-ups" (Model D Media). Quicken Loans has been pushing for development in Detroit for a while and moved its headquarters downtown last year.

Woodward Light Rail construction could begin by the end of the year

The Draft Environmental Impact Study for the Woodward Light Rail project was just released and can be downloaded at the project's website. This is the first draft of the federal environmental impact study, which needs to be completed before federal funds can be used for the project. The report is broken up into several sections and provides an extremely detailed analysis of the possible impact of a list of factors, such as noise and vibrations, on buildings and neighborhoods along the route. Also, if you go to the "Public Documents" section of the website, you can download maps of the proposed route, including three potential Downtown routes for the south end of the track.

According to Model D, the final version of the report is expected to be submitted in May after the public presentation and review of the first draft. Hopefully, construction will begin at the end of 2011. The public comment period goes until March 14, according to the project website, and formal presentations are being given on February 12 at 11am and 4pm at the main branch of the Detroit Public Library.

Like I said, this is actually happening.

Robocop at the Imagination Station

A few days ago, someone in Massachusetts sent a Twitter message to Mayor Bing suggesting that Detroit build a Robocop statue. Bing responded with a polite "no, thank you." Amazingly, a debate is now raging over the merits of a Robocop statue, and it kind of seems like this is actually going to happen. Some people have taken up the cause and are attempting to raise money and find a suitable location for the proposed seven-foot monument. The project's website is http://detroitneedsrobocop.com/, and as I write this, over $5,200 has been donated, which is 10% of the goal amount.

At the moment, the Imagination Station has offered a piece of their property as a home for the statue. The Imagination Station is a non-profit that recently purchased two abandoned homes and some other land on the edge of Roosevelt Park in Corktown. The group's mission is to renovate these two structures and eventually turn the property into a combination public art space/media center/artist residency program.




One of two abandoned homes being re-purposed by the Imagination Station. Photo by Margaret O'Leary.





Looking down 14th Street towards Michigan Avenue. The photocopies on the facade of the abandoned Roosevelt Hotel, which stands on the lot next to the Imagination Station, spell out "Face the Station." This block has been seeing a lot of activity in the past several months. Photo by Margaret O'Leary.


This whole Robocop statue idea is very surreal. Honestly, I'm having a hard time deciding whether it's a good idea or not. It's hard to tell whether a statue of Robocop would be a quirky addition to Corktown or just a joke that's been allowed to go way too far. Still, I think this is a testament to Detroit's uniqueness and endless possibilities at this point in time. I can't think of another city in which you can say, "You need a spot to build your Robocop statue? How about you put it in front of the two houses I'm converting into a community media and art center?"

Boston-Edison and EEV get a housing incentive program of their own

Continuing with the trend of housing incentives, the city plans to use federal stimulus money to move Detroit police officers into inexpensive houses within the city limits (Detroit Free Press). The funds will cover basic renovations, and the houses will cost between $500 and $1,000 a month with a $1,000 down payment. A test version of the program is going to start in two fairly stable neighborhoods, Boston-Edison and East English Village.

When my family lived in East English Village twenty years ago, police officers were required to live in the city, and quite a few lived in our neighborhood. In 1999, the residency requirement was dropped by the state, and at least half of Detroit's police officers and firefighters now live in the suburbs. East English Village is still a strong neighborhood with few vacant properties, which is why it could be one good starting point for getting people to move back to Detroit. I think providing these incentives for officers to live in the city can have a number of really positive effects - it would ideally improve relationships between officers and residents of Detroit and will cause officers to become more invested in the neighborhoods they serve. And, outside of police-citizen relations, it can help the city as it continues to try to fill in gaps in these relatively stable areas.

We are definitely seeing a trend in both the city and employers attempting to entice people to move back into the city or to move into the city for the first time. The hope is that once these core neighborhoods start to fill in, the progress will be exponential as an increasing number of people become personally interested in the city's well-being.

The Midtown media blitz continues

An article in today's Free Press profiled Susan Mosey, the President of the University Cultural Center Association and a multitasking advocate for Midtown over the last few decades who has been involved in everything from beautification to building preservation to fund-raising for development projects. Scott Lowell, the co-owner of Traffic Jam & Snug, says she is "probably five-eighths of the reason the neighborhood looks the way it does." Mosey is also involved in the Live Midtown program.

Something else I learned -- Apparently the coordination between WSU, Henry Ford Health System, and the DMC on the Live Midtown program is part of a larger project called the Midtown Partnership. The goal is to get 15,000 people to move downtown or downtown-adjacent (Corktown, Midtown, Woodbridge, etc.) by 2015, a plan which is appropriately named the "15 by 15 initiative" (Crain's Detroit).

Woodward Train Revisited

The Woodward Light Rail project is, by most accounts, actually going to happen. After an environmental impact study is complete, construction will begin on the first half of the line, which will extend from the river to West Grand Boulevard. The project is funded through a combination of public and private money, and Dave Bing is adamant that it's going to get done (literally, he said, "It's going to happen").

When people first hear that a light rail line is going to be built on Woodward, they are generally pretty skeptical. Detroit is promised a lot of things that never come to fruition, such as the constant succession of planned renovation projects for abandoned buildings. And, of course, it's easy to look at the People Mover and conclude that Detroit is not serious about mass transit. It would be great if we could build a world-class train system to carry passengers and spur development up and down Detroit's major avenues, but it can seem more like an urban planner's dream scenario than a potential reality for city at the brink of total collapse.

But I urge you not to be so pessimistic about mass transit in Detroit. The People Mover is far from the height of the city's transit planning. Detroit's streetcar system, which obviously included a Woodward line, operated nineteen routes at its peak in the middle of the twentieth century. So, remember that the proposed Woodward Avenue Light Rail would not be the first train to travel up and down the center of Woodward. If you need to see it with your own eyes, I will direct you to these two photographs, taken by Arthur Siegel in July, 1942:

Woodward looking south towards downtown from the Maccabees Building at Warren Ave. (Image from the Library of Congress)

Woodward looking north from the Maccabees Building. (Image from the Library of Congress)

On April 8, 1956, the Woodward line was the last piece of the system to be dismantled. The city's rail system was taken down in the 1950s as a result of the introduction of buses, which were considered more flexible and safer for riders, as they could be boarded from the curb as opposed to the middle of the street. Citizens of Detroit, however, mostly opposed the removal of the streetcars (Detroit Transit History).

We often hear that public transportation in Detroit was doomed by the city's obsession with automobiles. While this is true to some degree, keep in mind that Detroit's transit system was not always as embarrassing as you might think. The idea of a train traveling down Woodward or any of Detroit's avenues is not totally outrageous. Think of it this way: Detroit is not really building a train system, it's beginning to re-build it. And if you simply don't think cities need efficient mass transit or that it's a waste of money, I can only suggest that you join the rest of us in the twenty-first century.

Note: Arthur Siegel also took this photograph, which I posted earlier. These two are from the same collection of photos taken for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information.

Poletown's "Desolation Angel"

The cover story of this week's issue of the Metro Times, "Desolation Angel" by Detroitblogger John, is about a small church on Chene called Peacemakers International which has become a refuge for the poor, drug-addicted, and destitute in one of Detroit's roughest areas. It's a really great article and I would recommend reading it, but one specific reason I wanted to mention it is that Peacemakers International is located in Poletown, a few blocks south of I-94. I've written about Poletown a couple times recently, specifically about how the neighborhood slowly declined over several decades as a result of the same things that affected many neighborhoods: freeway construction, a general movement of population out of the city, and urban renewal (a highly publicized and controversial example of it, in Poletown's case).

Here's how the article describes the area's recent history:

"Chene Street is a disaster. The rows of burned-out storefronts between the empty blocks are reminders of how bustling it once was. But after the riot, after the freeway and an auto plant split the neighborhood in half, after everyone packed up and moved away, almost everything just died off.

Pouring into the void left behind were outcasts and cast-asides — junkies and drunks, hookers and drug dealers, the mentally ill and the physically disabled. Like a few other areas of the city, it became a refuge of the underclass, a home for everyone with nowhere else to go, where they can wander freely without being chased away by store owners, or told to move along by the cops."

Peacemakers International, at the corner of Chene and Frederick. (Image from Google Maps)

Detroit Does Not Need a Walmart

Jim Griffioen, the author of Sweet Juniper, wrote an amazing article for the Urbanophile called Yes There Are Grocery Stores in Detroit in which he attempts to refute the widespread myth that Detroiters have no place to shop for food. We've all heard this idea repeated over and over in the national media - a reporter says, "There is not a single grocery store within the city limits of Detroit," accompanied by a series of images of boarded-up liquor stores. Griffioen argues that while there are no national chain supermarkets in Detroit, America must try to get past the idea that a city without a Wal-Mart or Kroger is somehow at a disadvantage.

There are plenty of independently owned grocery stores in Detroit. Of course, some of them are not so great, but others, like the Honey Bee Market on Bagley, are much better places to shop than a big box supermarket. And the Honey Bee is just one of many small grocery stores in Mexicantown. In fact, in a recent discussion on WDET, the produce purchaser for the Honey Bee suggested that if there's any food issue in Southwest Detroit, it's that there is too much competition among independent food stores. Some of these independent grocers offer a more diverse, high-quality selection than chain supermarkets, and their profits go right back into the community, as opposed to being sent back to Arkansas or wherever corporate headquarters might be. I'm going to guarantee that residents of Southwest Detroit (and many other areas) are not driving to the suburbs to do their grocery shopping, as some in the media have suggested. Unique, high-quality markets like Honey Bee are actually attracting shoppers from outside the city.

The main thesis of the article (at least what I took from it) seems to be summed up in this quote:

"Ultimately, that myth perseveres because the mainstream media and its audience is steeped in a suburban mentality where the only grocery stores that really seem to count are those large, big-box chain stores that are the only option in so many communities these days, largely because they have put locally-owned and independent stores like the ones you find in Detroit out of business."

Rush Hour on Second Avenue, July 1942

Photograph taken by Arthur S. Siegel, a member of a team of photographers who documented American life from 1935 to 1944 for various government agencies, including the U.S. Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information. This photograph, like others in the FSA-OWI collection, is held by the Library of Congress. According to a biography written by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photograph, Arthur Siegel was born in Detroit and attended the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. He was a professor or photography at Wayne State and eventually at the Illinois Institute of Design in Chicago.

This photograph, taken from the Fisher Building facing south towards downtown, shows 5:30pm traffic on Second Avenue. The General Motors Building, now called Cadillac Place, can be seen on the left.

You should probably move to Midtown

As a follow-up to my previous post on the Live Midtown program, I wanted to mention an article in the Free Press last weekend which discusses the program. One Wayne State employee and student who was among the first people to apply for the incentives will be getting a total of $3,500 over two years towards the rent on his $400/month studio apartment. This is a pretty amazing deal for someone working for any of the three organizations involved in the program who is in a position to move.

The program is expecting about 500 applicants in its first year, and it's already attracting at least some outside investment - the article mentions one Oakland County developer who just finished his first project in Detroit, Centurion Place on Ferry, and plans on continuing to build in the area. And on top of that, six of the eight units at Centurion Place have already sold.

Last Days in Poletown

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Poletown, a Polish community just east of downtown that was demolished in order to build the General Motors Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant. I recently found that several sets of photographs were taken of Poletown as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey, a federal program intended to document America's architectural heritage. These two pictures show the Chene Street Commercial District, a section of Chene between I-94 and East Grand Boulevard which was completely erased from the grid for the sake of the plant's construction.

Corner of Chene and Milwaukee. (Image from the Library of Congress)

Chene between Trombley and Piquette. (Image from the Library of Congress)

These photographs were taken in 1981, right at the height of the controversy over the city's decision to displace the neighborhood's residents. The neighborhood appears to be on its last legs. Cars can still be seen in the street and parked along the curbs, but the buildings look dilapidated and the pictures give off a generally desolate feeling. Residents had begun taking relocation payments from the city and moving out of the neighborhood by this time, but the photographs may suggest that Poletown had emerged from the last couple decades in fairly rough shape, anyways. Documentation included in the Historic American Buildings Survey report hints at this, claiming that "the 1950s generally were very hard on the area" due to the steady movement of jobs and residents to the suburbs. The report goes on to say that "to the people of the area, the event which triggered the economic and social decline of the [Chene] Street Commercial District was the construction of the Ford Expressway (Interstate 94)." The report, from the Historic American Buildings Survey, can be found here.

Apparently, the construction of I-94 had cut Poletown into a north and a south section, which had done irreversible damage to the neighborhood by displacing some residents and breaking links between the remaining ones. This very closely resembles the way Corktown was split into two sections by the construction of I-75. It seems that by the time the neighborhood was scheduled for demolition in the 1980s, it was already on the decline.

On March 30, 1981, Time Magazine ran an article called "The Last Days of Poletown," which stated that 90% of Poletown residents had accepted relocation. The author writes that while a small group of protestors fight against the city, "other residents contend that the plant is actually a godsend, for it gives them the chance to leave the aging community and still get a decent price for their homes. Says John Kelmendi, 27, an area resident: 'Ninety percent of the socalled silent majority here want to go'" (Time Magazine, March 30, 1981).

So, these pictures may depict a neighborhood that has reluctantly accepted its fate after years of decline.

The Consequences of Progress: Corktown

I'm really interested in how urban planning decisions that are intended to improve neighborhoods can have terrible long-term consequences. Urban renewal was a concept based on the idea that city governments could take an active role in redeveloping land and revitalizing cities. It became popular in America in the middle of the twentieth century. Corktown, an originally Irish neighborhood located immediately southwest of downtown, was threatened by several development projects over the course of its life, but it has emerged in relatively good shape.

A few of these projects involved transportation. Ironically, the automobile both built Detroit and contributed to its demise as the freeway system cut the city into sections, many of which withered away as neighbors were separated from each other and from commercial districts. In the 1950s, the construction of the John C. Lodge freeway, which ran north from Jefferson, separated Corktown from downtown. Some of the eastern edge of the neighborhood was demolished for the construction.

In this c. 1950s photograph, the Lodge freeway (seen from left to right near the middle of the frame) can be seen running under Michigan Avenue towards the Detroit River. Beyond the concrete river is Corktown and the rest of Southwest Detroit. (Image from the Wayne State University Virtual Motor City Collection)

In the 1960s, the Fisher Freeway was built right through the middle of Corktown, just north of Michigan Avenue. The freeway intersected with the Lodge at the edge of the neighborhood and basically split it into two sections, north and south. North Corktown, as it is now called, did not fare as well as its southern neighbor, probably because it was cut off from Michigan Avenue, the main commercial anchor of the neighborhood. North Corktown is now an almost rural landscape, with many abandoned lots and some scattered homes. Driving north on Rosa Parks Blvd over the Fisher Freeway, the contrast between the southern portion of the neighborhood and the bizarre peacefulness of North Corktown is striking. The comparison to the rural country may be somewhat accurate, as some farms have emerged in between the grassy lots. A few Corktown establishments, like Nancy Whiskey, have been able to hold on over the years in the area north of the freeway.

Harrison Street in North Corktown. (Image from Google Maps)

The two freeway projects were not the first transportation-related plans to affect Corktown. In the early twentieth century, Michigan Avenue was widened to make room for increased automobile traffic. This required the demolition of the southern portion of the street to accommodate the extra lanes. Today, with the population of the neighborhood and city far below what they were at the time, Michigan Avenue seems desolate and incredibly spacious. I should note that the surplus of lanes would make plenty of room for a light rail line extending from the southern end of the Woodward line and traveling through Corktown and Mexicantown, but I won't count on it. Still, this could make positive use of a situation that originally caused the destruction of much of the neighborhood's major street.

Probably the most significant threat to Corktown came in the form of an urban renewal project. The city sought to demolish much of the neighborhood in order to re-zone the land for industry. Fortunately, resistance from the neighborhood was strong enough to prevent much of the potential damage from being done. The core strength of the neighborhood may also be one of the primary reasons that Corktown has been experiencing a small renaissance in the past few years. Armando Delicato and Julie Demery write that "today many of the buildings that were to save Corktown are abandoned while the remnant of the old neighborhood is resurging" (Detroit's Corktown, 40). Hopefully, the neighborhood can see a steady, organic renewal that forms it into something new and exciting but still connected to its beginnings.

Move to Midtown?

Wayne State University, the Detroit Medical Center, and the Henry Ford Health System are collaborating on a new program called Live Midtown which provides incentives for employees of these companies to buy or rent a home in Midtown. As the three largest employers in the neighborhood, these organizations are attempting to become actively involved in its redevelopment. Although the specific guidelines vary between each organization, the general idea is that new renters can receive a total of $3,500 towards their first two years of rent, and new homeowners will benefit from a forgivable loan of either $20,000 or $25,000. Employees who already live in Midtown can also receive assistance through the program - renters receive $1,000 for renewing their current lease, and homeowners can get up to $5,000 to be used towards exterior renovations.

Craig Fahle discussed the program on his radio show yesterday morning, and he framed the conversation around the question, "What would it take for you to move to Midtown?" These financial incentives are obviously very significant, and there has apparently already been a positive response to the incentives. Of course, a move to Midtown will not interest every employee of these three organizations. Many with children are concerned about the quality of area schools, for example. Many of the commonly referenced concerns, such as school and crime, will only improve as more people move into places like Midtown and become invested in the neighborhood. Just by visiting, it's clear that the neighborhood is seeing a resurgence, and these financial incentives might be enough to give one final push to someone who has been considering a move to Detroit. More information on area boundaries and program guidelines are available at livemidtown.org

Detroit Lives

A while ago, I had heard that Johnny Knoxville was making a short film about Detroit with Palladium Boots as part of the company's series on urban exploration. I just got around to watching it a few days ago, and I ended up really enjoying it. The film, called "Detroit Lives," follows Knoxville as he attempts to look beyond the tired imagery of Detroit's epic collapse, and while he does spend some time exploring the city's ruins, he makes an effort to look beneath the surface. He highlights several of the creative projects emerging from the city, and he visits some of the classics, like the Heidelberg Project. The film portrays Detroit as a unique environment that is offering people the freedom and space to realize their vision and make a real impact on their surroundings. And of course, like any city with cheap rent, it's attracting some hipsters, as well.

The movie is about thirty minutes long and you can watch it in three parts on the Palladium Boots website.

Evidence of Poletown

Last winter, I spent some time at the Detroit Historical Society helping to catalog photographs taken by former students at the College for Creative Studies. One day, I was going through some miscellaneous photographs of residential neighborhoods, and I began looking up the addresses of some of the homes. One photographer had taken a series of shots of some small single family homes on St. Aubin, and I didn't recognize the cross streets he listed under the photographs, so I was doing some Google Maps investigation. I couldn't seem to locate the intersections where these photos were supposedly taken. Google Maps told me they didn't exist, and I searched up and down St. Aubin a few times. I was starting to wonder if the photographer had made a mistake and completely mislabeled the photos. After searching the map several times, I realized that the huge space directly adjacent to the area in which I thought these homes would be located was the General Motors Hamtramck Cadillac Assembly Plant.

I didn't know too much about the Assembly Plant, besides that it was constructed on the site of a large immigrant community called Poletown. Poletown was one of the few communities still thriving in Detroit by the 1980s, but the city of Detroit seized it through eminent domain, claiming that the potential for job creation brought in by a new GM plant would outweigh the benefits of keeping the community intact.

The pictures I was looking at were taken in 1981, and they showed rows of homes which were in various states of disrepair but still appeared to be in decent shape. Many of them were located on a stretch of St. Aubin which was right on the edge of the Assembly Plant and, as far as I can tell, no longer exists. I had heard some vague rendition of the story of Poletown, but seeing pictures of entire city blocks which stood in 1981 but have completely disappeared made the whole thing seem more like reality and not just a piece of Detroit political history.

Of course, it's tough to know what conditions were like in Poletown in the 1980s without actually having lived there. Even by interviewing former residents of the neighborhood, I'm sure we would get conflicting opinions about the neighborhood's reaction to the deal. For example, David Schultz writes in Property, Power, and American Democracy that the Poletown Neighborhood Council (the organization created to oppose the demolition) was actually fairly unpopular among Detroit's Polish community, which saw the potential economic benefits of the plant's construction for nearby Hamtramck and was offered significant payments for relocating (pg. 101). On the other hand, it's important to remember that this was a community, and there was at least some segment of it that vigorously opposed the deal. Jeanie Wylie's book, Poletown: Community Betrayed, represents the viewpoint that it is an injustice any time a community is sacrificed for the benefit of some external power, and it is widely acknowledged that this expansion of eminent domain gave governments and corporations an unprecedented amount of control over private property. These complicated issues are always important to remember, especially as the city attempts to deal with its current land use issues by attempting to incentivize residents to move out of what it considers to be unsustainable neighborhoods through the Detroit Works project.

***

One of these photographs had a caption which read, "On St. Aubin between Henrie and Palmer," and it showed a row of six or seven houses. I located this block on Google Street View, and found that only one of the houses in this row remains, surrounded by trees but still appearing to be in good condition. The house is only a few blocks from the GM Plant and from I-94, which had done its own damage by splitting the community in half like so many Detroit freeways had done in other neighborhoods. Even though this block sits just outside the area demolished for the plant's construction, surely most of its inhabitants simply gave up and moved on to other places. I wonder if this house is occupied by some Polish family that was too stubborn to leave the neighborhood, like the few residents of Centralia, PA who refused to leave after a mine fire made the town uninhabitable. Maybe they choose to continue living in the house, painting the walls, and trimming the bushes as a symbol of this former immigrant community.

(photos from Google Maps)

***

Still, Poletown refuses to die. A few months ago, an article on detroitblog drew attention to St. Albertus Catholic Church, which is no longer an officially recognized church but is hanging on by a thread as a small group of people work to preserve it. A priest from Hamtramck occasionally bikes into the neighborhood to give masses to a handful of people. And the Ivanhoe Cafe, or "Polish Yacht Club" (not an actual yacht club, for the record), still serves fish and Polish food on a desolate section of Joseph Campau Street which was cut off from Hamtramck by the construction of the Assembly Plant. These people and others like them are evidence of the community's symbolic connection to this one random piece of land, and stories like this are repeated throughout Detroit's many forgotten neighborhoods.

Positive news for several neighborhoods

An article in this morning's Free Press titled Detroit's profile grows as investors, young professionals return to city discusses the steadily increasing interest and development in neighborhoods like Woodbridge and Midtown. The article includes the story of two friends who left their jobs in New York and Washington, D.C., to move to Midtown after vacationing in Detroit on a whim and finding that the city was more than the decaying, feral wasteland portrayed in the media. The founder of a real estate firm called City Living Detroit says that the housing market in these neighborhoods is doing very well in spite of the generally stagnant American real estate market. At least seven major housing developments and renovations are being planned to meet the demand.

And Corktown seems to be headed in the same direction. An article on Model D a few weeks ago talked about several restaurants planned to open in 2011 along Michigan Avenue and in the space where Bailie Corcaigh used to sit at the corner of Trumbull and Bagley. Sadly (for me), Mudgie's is moving downtown, where it will probably be much harder to find parking.