Metro Detroit, A Former Las Vegan’s View From Outside to Inside
There is something about Detroit that caught my imagination when I came here from Las Vegas. No doubt, Las Vegas is a pretty extreme contrast to any other city, but the contrast to Detroit was beyond stark. When I left Vegas in 2003 it was still a city where property value was king, prices were accelerating upwards, and history was moot due to everything old being torn down to build something new; history was a casualty of the property values. History was a postcard, now was a dollar bill. They even tore down the Stardust. The only things left of the old casinos were, occasionally, their signs sitting on the ground at odd angles in the Neon Graveyard. There was apparently only one value that mattered and it wasn’t having a tie to the past, unless the tie was made out of currency decorated with poker chips and credit cards. I make it sound grim, but living there was actually, mostly, fun. I guess it became quite a bit more grim a couple years after I left and, like Detroit, coyotes and other carnivores began moving into the outskirts to replace the two-legged variety.
When I finally got to Detroit, it had big history, plenty of it, 200 plus years of it. So much in fact that the city and its businesses couldn’t afford it and at least half of it was flooded or burned or crumbling into dust or some combination of these. Mansions built during the days of Henry Ford, the Fisher brothers, and their ilk crumbling like the rusted fenders on a 76 Chevy. Early skyscrapers designed by some of the most creative architects of that same period crumbling inside and out, with nothing left inside to crumble that wasn’t encased in concrete, because it had long ago been looted. Sort of like the tombs of the pharaohs but without the actually mummy, although sometimes these post-industrial tombs did, sadly, hold a body.
The most spectacular and beloved department store the city ever had was gone, imploded, a wound that will take decades to heal even though sutured by the building of the Compuware headquarters. I remember seeing Hudsons on TV in Oklahoma as a child, when I was watching the Thanksgiving Day parades. How could a major city, with a grand past and rich history, let such a treasured business get away, much less allow its building to flood, freeze, and then have to come down in a mushroom cloud of dusty goodbyes? I admit I was puzzled.
I was puzzled that there were actually old buildings from the early 20th century, modern and post-modern, with trees growing in them, not in some spectacular arboretum, but in the lobbies, through and on the roofs, and out the windows. The one I always saw, driving into downtown or back home down Woodward, was the Hotel Granwood. It had become something of an indoor forest and the roof had fairly large limbs and branches growing out from its resident trees. I always waxed a bit nostalgic when we drove by, wondering about the stories of the human residents who had once stayed there, not so far from the old Model T factory, possibly having worked there. At least the city or someone finally, very recently, got around to tearing the old Granwood down, although at what cost to the wildlife I don’t know.
But amidst all this decay, which lacked even the decorum of a naturally rotting tree trunk in the woods, I began to see some hope, the cliché “light at the end of the tunnel,” and the tunnel was primarily south Woodward Avenue. I don’t recall the exact order, perhaps it mattered, perhaps not, probably did to the developers, but Compuware was built to stanch the Hudson’s wound, Ford Field was built (at great expense to Pontiac, but that’s another story), Comerica Park was built, the Superbowl came to town, Slow’s BBQ began to exist along with the Mercury Bar across Michigan Avenue in Corktown, lofts were built in old, and a few new, buildings, the Book Cadillac was renovated, Detroit Beer Company and Small Plates came into my consciousness, Avalon Bakery opened along with several other nearby shops, the Riverwalk was developed, Wayne State kept growing, Ye Olde Butcher Shoppe and Whole Foods moved in along with a crop of young, imaginative, creatives, the Russell Industrial Center is now occupied by artists and craftspersons, the Argonaut Building was renovated and occupied by the Center for Creative Studies, Shinola became a tenant…my fingers are out of breath. Most importantly I began to see a new twinkle in the eyes of Detroit residents, some long-time and some new, young and old, eyes that were looking towards a new future rather than mourning the loss of past glory.
Regrowing a city is somewhat like growing crystals in a solution. You keep adding to it and adding to it until finally something spectacular happens. You add a few particles to a solution that is already saturated, and Detroit is a metaphorical solution already saturated with creative, driven, entrepreneurial people and cheap property prices, and the crystals begin to form, assembling into dendrites that grow in some direction and then branch off into others. If the particles are businesses and you keep dropping them along Woodward and other streets, eventually entire business areas begin to form, seemingly spontaneously, always requiring work just as a crystallizing solution lowers free energy (Too technical? Sorry hard to squelch the chemist in me), but allowing other peripheral businesses that were either already there, or themselves new, to prosper as more people now find the area attractive and accessible.
We at Detroit Metro Mashup see the same things happening in Pontiac, on a somewhat smaller scale, that are happening in Detroit. Excitement, forward-looking people, new businesses such as the Lafayette Market, lofts and the Anytime Fitness gym, the rebirth of Bo’s Barbecue as the Downtown 51 Grille, more lofts coming soon across from 51, renovations to the Thrifty Drug Store, DIA art shows downtown, restoration of the historic Strand Theater, and something more than 100 new businesses downtown in the past couple of years.
Rebirth is everywhere in SE Michigan’s urban cores and Detroit Metro Mashup wants to be part of this rebirth going forward. We want to publicize the events, people, places and things that are driving this engine of Michigan into the 21st century. We will cover the suburbs, but we hope to make suburbanites aware that there is new life in the cities that many of them gave up on long ago. We want everyone to go everywhere in SE Michigan and realize that we are all in this together, that we will be stronger, grow faster, and go farther if we are all rooting for everyone else in addition to ourselves. We want everyone to understand that all our communities need to function like a well-lubricated, highly-machined drive train for the engines that are being built to move us forward at the speeds we need to achieve.
