Back from Detroit
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Just got back from our bus trip and guided tour of Detroit with the YMCA geezer group. You may remember our trip to Pittsburgh a few months back. Same YMCA and many of the same geezers.
When we told people we were visiting Detroit everyone told us we were crazy. Those people could not have been more wrong - Detroit is a beautiful city! In fact, I’d say it’s the cleanest city of any size in any country I’ve ever visited, and this includes Germany and Scandinavia. There was no litter of any kind, no graffiti, no bums, no weed choked lots. A really amazing level of maintenance and a pleasant surprise.
One advantage Detroit has over Cleveland or even LA is it mostly was built in the 1920’s and that means art deco. There was also a tremendous amount of money in town and they laid out wide streets and wider sidewalks with gracious medians throughout downtown. I don’t know when it was actually platted but they got it right. It’s beautiful!
We toured this building - the Guardian. No expense was spared in design or construction and I’d rank it with the cathedrals of Europe.
The clock is Tiffany. Of course it is. The metalwork is all Monel (!) - Dewey and Al will back me up when I say there are few more expensive materials to use for interior metalwork.
The ceilings are tile. Rookwood tile specifically, an art pottery and tile manufacturer based in central Ohio. The floors are marble -of course they are. But not just marble - rare and exquisite marbles brought in from all over the world. The red marble from Africa is particularly fine.
More Tiffany work, beautifully executed, beautifully maintained.
I’m a real sucker for 20’s social justice rhetoric like this, even though I realize that the money used to build it was not generated through any sort of socially responsible financial stewardship.
Building was finished in 1929, just in time for the stock market crash. The company that built it went bankrupt and the building is now owned by Wayne County.
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Remember “Body by Fisher?” I never understood what the Fisher Bros. did for GM but they made a lot of money doing it. Enough to build this temple to excess, including more marble in any single building in the world except the Taj Mahal.
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Hitsville, USA. Barry Gordy cranked out over 100 top 10 hits over the course of 15 years from this little house.
Gordy bought more houses in the street as his business grew. It’s a museum now.
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I’ll point out that this house is in a rather ordinary looking middle class neighborhood somewhat outside of downtown and it’s all immaculately maintained.
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Detroit pizza for lunch then a visit to The Parade Company factory/art studio. An absolutely unexpected treat! I thought the whole idea of visiting a factory was goofy but I was wrong!
Back in the day, Hudson’s department store put on a four block parade every Thanksgiving, the idea being to get people to see their beautiful display windows so they’d come in and buy stuff. Its grown from there, and when Hudson’s went bankrupt the tradition continued. The parade includes dozens of floats and that’s what The Parade Company does - they build floats. Lots of them in a 225,000 square foot factory. It’s an amazing place.
Their head artist has been there for 35 years. Everything is made of styrofoam and they never throw anything away - figures they no longer need are carved in to new figures. The creativity is this place is mind blowing.
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What I found more interesting, though, is that the side trip to the factory took us through a rather gritty industrial area. I expected to see the ruin porn that Detroit is famous for and sure enough I saw a bombed out, graffiti covered multi story factory building on the way in. The surprise was that it was in the process of being demolished.
Looking around, I realized that this is how Detroit is turning around. They’re demolishing the abandoned houses/buildings at a furious pace - and it’s working. Cleveland needs to pay attention and take a lesson. So does LA. There were vacant lots in the beautiful downtown area and my guess they were boarded up eyesores at one time. The vacant lots were being kept clean and mowed.
The Packard factory, long an icon of urban despair has been demolished. The Grand train station, long the poster boy for Detroit’s demise, has been bought by Ford and turned in to a beautiful convention center.
Detroit is gonna be OK and I couldn’t be more pleased.
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Thank you for the photo tour. I think I was last in Detroit in the early 80s. I'm curious if you visited the Art Institute, the Renaissance Center, or Indian Village (I lived there briefly around 1980). Crime was rampant back then, even in the lovelier areas of town. What about Greektown? Hamtramack? (the birthplace of punk rock).
The Detroit I remember was sad and abandoned, but had so much potential. Sounds like it is still like that.
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Great photos, thanks @Steve-Miller !
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We drove past the Renaissance Center and several other points of interest but didn’t have time to see more than we did.
I didn’t see Detroit as sad and abandoned at all. What I saw was a city of 1.8 million people that has adjusted to being a city of 650 thousand people and has done so successfully.
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As always, I enjoy your travelogues, @Steve-Miller !
What other kinds of trips does the YMCA sponsor?
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There are lots of them, as it turns out. The next one is an evening downtown to attend a dueling pianos Christmas show.
Coming up are several cruises, a multi day tour of New England, a week in Greece, a tour of some 10 local covered bridges, a couple of plays and a concert or two.
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Just now seeing this. Wow, a great travelogue, Steve! I love your eye for the beauty of these monumental buildings. Nice to see what's happening in Detroit.
I'm also fond of my hometown of Buffalo. Very prosperous place at the turn of the 20th century, and you can see it in the grand mansions, public buildings and Olmsted's parkway system. Very gracious.
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@Steve-Miller said in Back from Detroit:
There are lots of them, as it turns out. The next one is an evening downtown to attend a dueling pianos Christmas show.
Coming up are several cruises, a multi day tour of New England, a week in Greece, a tour of some 10 local covered bridges, a couple of plays and a concert or two.
Nice assortment of activities. Our senior center isn’t nearly as creative or wide-ranging in its offerings.
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Might check the Y. They have a lot more going on these days than I ever expected.
Great gym, too.
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I’m so glad you loved Detroit, Steve! We do too! You may recall it’s the closest city to us. We can be at the DIA or the Detroit Symphony in under and hour, door to door, including the border. In my adult lifetime it has really turned around. When Rob moved here in 2011, there were still huge areas of the city with abandoned and burned out houses. In the early 2000s, the fire department was literally out of money and they weren’t paying the firefighters. It was really awful. But building Tiger Stadium, Ford Field, and Little Caesars Arena downtown brought people into the core. And then gentrification set in. Now there is a Whole Foods and one of those fancy “fur baby” pet supply stores in an area where I previously wouldn’t have left my car unattended. The old theatres are GORGEOUS (an architecture group does a theatre tour every fall that sells out. It goes to all of the still open theatres but also some abandoned ones. It’s really spectacular!). Now, we drive across for shows, shopping, or just to have dinner. I have no problem walking around in the core after dark. We ride the public transit. There are definitely still areas that are dangerous for tourist folks to hang out in, but no more than any other large city. It is a joy to watch it come back!
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My home town. My grandmother and some aunts and uncles lived right by downtown until the late 60’s. It was at one time a great city and is thankfully heading back to that status.
Steve, Rookwood is a Cincinnati firm that goes way back. They are still producing gorgeous tiles and other things. The original pottery factory in Mt Adams has been a restaurant for many years. Your table may be inside a kiln.
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Thanks for the tour, Steve. You saw some beautiful and interesting things in Detroit.
My last visit to that city was in the mid-1980s on an industrial project. Zug Island was not the garden spot of the world. My best memory was Jim's bar in Dearborn, just down the street from the motel I stayed in. The bar cooked up excellent hamburgers and had a counter at the end of the bar with condiments, onion and tomato slices, pickles, etc. so the customers could dress their burgers exactly to their liking. I ate there almost every night during my stays there.
Big Al
