How a Billionaire Can Make a Billion Dollars

Toby's latest - printed in the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/toby-barlow/how-a-billionaire-can-mak_b_404253.html

Talent Show Venue Scouting

A message from the Polish Veteran Hall's board of directors:

Dave Bing Holiday Party Poster

Hanging Meats in Detroit

This photograph shows a recent pancetta & chorizo hanging in the basement of O'Connor Development on Michigan Avenue in Detroit, the early stages of our "Charcuterie Club," known also as "Meat Club." Pictured, from left: Mr. Dave Mancini, Mr. Chalres Sorel, Mr. Phillip Cooley and Mr. Putnam Weekley.

The gentlemen:
Mr. Mancini - Supino Pizzeria (www.supinopizza.com)
Mr. Sorel - Le Petit Zinc (www.lepetitzincdetroit.com), Lafayette Cafe (www.99cafelafayette.com), Chez Oskar (www.chezoskar.com)
Mr. Cooley - Slows Bar-B-Q (www.slowsbarbq.com)
Mr. Weekley- Detroit Drinks (www.detroitdrinks.com)

Mr. Weekley's advice on wine and beverage selection is quite possibly the perfect weapon in a young suitor's arsenal. The man cannot much get a sandwich when he visits the city of New York without some young lad accosting him for a good wine tip. On the evening pictured here, Mr. Weekely shared the acute insight that perhaps seventy years had lapsed since the practice of hanging meats in ones' basement was observed in the Corktown community of Detroit.

Detroit Talent Show

This Thurs 12/17 - scouting/brainstorming trip for the Detroit Talent Show!!! @ the VFW hall in SW Detroit. Phil originally thought this thing up last year as a possible holiday party for Slows, but somehow it fell off its tracks...

Well, last Friday while running on the treadmill & trying not to watch some terrible infomercial about a lousy broom swifter I pulled this one back out of the bag. Quickly started scheming with Dorota Bilica- one of the artists responsible for the Hygenic Dress League and day-jobber at the downtown YMCA. It's gonna be a fundraiser for Dai Hughes' Astro Coffee project, coming Summer, 2010.

So who's coming to help scout?
Daisuke Hughes (Astro Coffee)
Kristen Dean (architectural/graphic designer from M1)
Phillip Cooley (Slows Bar-B-Q, all things Detroit)
Steve Coy/Dorota Bilica (Hygenic Dress League, U of M Art Faculty)

Can't wait. I haven't been to this gem of a dive bar in quite a while. We'll keep ya posted...

A Free-Market Pub Crawl

I've had about five people in the last two weeks ask me whether my boss is Santa Clause. And it's not because of some kind of strange resemblance. He certainly didn't go ahead and legally change his name to Santa Clause like my dad's cousin did. I'm guessing it must have been because we passed out 5,000 of these around town:

Now Santa's got a pretty good thing going- fame, a pretty good track record for showing up and getting the job done, and he's always got those hot momma's kissing him under the mistletoe. And I know, I know- he gets to fly and stuff- and I don't want to belittle that- but how about a full-on pub crawl that ends in divebar karaoke and a rock show for a day at work. Santa's kinda got nothing on that. Especially not when it was my first day working at a so-called "real job" in a year and a half.

Let me explain. The three of us met up on a Saturday afternoon back in November to take these things to the streets. We had some great success right off the bat- Slows Bar-b-q agreed to take about a thousand and put one in with each bill going out. Maybe that was a bit of a shoe-in since Phil is one of the owners, but its always smart to start out on a good note. 'Hit all the balls in front of you' is what my professor, Perry Kulper once said. But that streak continued pretty well for the rest of the day. When all was said and done- we got six places that see a steady stream of city and suburban folks to actively shlep these guides on behalf of Detroit small businesses - either by having waitstaff slide them in with bill presenters or put them into those metal-loopy things that sit on the tables.

Now, not every place we visited was quite so happy to help their fellow Detroit businesses. But not for our trying. We'd sit at their bar anyway, and happily drink one to them in any case.

Well, that was the first time I'd been drinking with Phil and Toby. And if there's one thing the three of us have in common-it's that we're all top-notch dreamers. I mean, I for one as a child set a new school record in third grade by getting 28 check-marks on my report card. I had my two best friends in class with me and we were always talking, scheming, working on the next big thing. The teacher would always be yelling, "Sit on the Seat and Stay There!" And we'd mimic her, adding an H somewhere within that first word, but anyway- I digress. Well, Toby and Phil are actually more than just dreamers- they've actually done some real things in this city, some real great things, I might add. And they've managed to pick up some pretty good connections along the way. So when you throw them together for an afternoon/evening of drinking- you're bound to get some really good seeds planted. I for one have a solid four projects at work now because of that day. All dreamed up over rounds of various whiskey drinks. This blog is one of them.

#2 started when Toby saw my friend Ko's car parked on Michigan Ave out front of Slows. She's got this old Explorer. Hasn't driven it for like six months. Tires have been flat, battery dead, muffler shot, stereo gone. And Toby starts talking about how we should fix it up for her. Phil's like- I can get her keys. And I'm thinking that'd be sweet. Now about five seconds later I've officially filed that thought in the Never-Gonna-Happen-In-A-Million-Years folder. Which has seen a lot of use in the past year and a half I've lived here. But I guess Phil didn't. Cause he wound up calling me the next morning saying - hey homeboy, how we gonna do this for Ko? And I'm like ...uh ....yeah ...we should ... ...do it. Well, we did. And it was pretty amazing. I'll get to that whole thing in another post. Her car looks snazzy, btw.

Well, after Slows we went to a place that didn't much like our shtick. But we still stuck around and had a drink. We've got wills of steel. The bartender was a young, nervous little guy who broke a bottle while trying to introduce himself to us. But I guess I'd be nervous too if I was trying to pull off the kinda stuff he's up to at the tender age of like, 19 (can't be more than 23, honest). He moved to a loft in Brush Park- a place that's sort of a graveyard of old 19th Century mansions. Out of his home he runs a speakeasy called the Breakfast Club with his girlfriend, a chef. It runs the 1st Friday of every month, starting after 2am with three inspired breakfast dishes and a full bar. Candle-lit, raw, exposed brick walls, a dj upstairs in the loft, tables scattered all around. Beautiful scene. I went this past Friday and it blew my mind. Felt like I was walking into the party for which they invented cocaine. Well anyway, the guy took our names and emails and said he'd add us to the guest list. When you go there, they give you this card, which you'll need to get in every time after:



We also planned a trip to Cuba for Phil and Toby's birthdays in February at that bar. I can't wait. (I guess that's #5, forgot about that one till now. Gotta remind Phil and Toby).

Oh, and I also forgot to mention the stop we took in North Corktown at the new pump-track that Phil helped build the day before we all met up. We went there right after Slows. We pulled up and there were a handful of folks hanging around geeked about their shiny new park. Phil had brought over a bunch of dirt left over from the landscape project we built in front of Michigan Central Station this summer and these guys helped guide him & his bobcat to make a figure-8 track for the bikers to ride. The corner of Cochrane & Sycamore in North Corktown: 1967- Riot Hell. 2009- Dirtbike Heaven. Victory.

Well anyway, a few other places, a few really great drinks and varying degrees of success with those shopping guides. We sure did have a lot more to say about them as time went on though. I remember at Union Street, where in the end they picked up what we were putting down, that all three of us were talking while the owner tried to listen. He scanned each of our faces right to left, sometimes nodding, like he was reading a really big book.

At Michael Simon's Roast, we got some appetizers and a round of Rye & Sodas. Delicious. I'm pretty sure it was here that Toby dreamed up the Slows cookbook. That's #3. Slows has a pretty amazing story. The block it's on was a cold wench of a place a few years ago (please forgive my french) before Phil's family purchased four buildings and got a group together to open up the Bar-B-Q shop there. The place has since become the miracle child of Detroit. It's like a crackhouse for suburbanites. And a local favorite to boot. Enter the restaurant's info into Business Plan Pro and see what happens... You'd have to pull out some voodoo magic to get it to show you the sales figures they pull in Downtown Detroit. Anyway, we were talking something about Slows and the community around the old Michigan Central Station. And about how it seems like the successful business owners in Detroit 'get it' that you have to support the whole community to succeed and not just fend for yourself. Something like that. Phil was noticing that our track record with the guides was hitting this point home,


And that's when Toby started talking about doing a cookbook/business community/Detroit story. How to build a business in Detroit and how to make a mean 'slaw all rolled into one. He's already mentioned it to his publisher at Harper-Collins, the one that put out his book 'Sharp Teeth' and it seems like there's a good chance we can get it rolling.

Well, we crossed the finish line with two places for a drink without the shopping guides. Jumbo's Bar on 3rd Street and The Lager House in Corktown. Jumbo's is a first-class cinder-block dive. No windows. Right in the heart of the sketchy Cass Corridor- well, maybe not as rough as those days when you could catch a show at the Gold Dollar, but still not the place you'd want to go start up a game of midnight tag. We each took the karaoke mic for a spin to celebrate.

And finally, things ended at the Lager House. If I ever was a sharp guy, I sure wasn't by the time I got there. I almost blew the surprise we had in store for Ko- but managed to cover it up somehow. Then we watched the band (usually I'd at least know the name of the band I go see, but I guess I just had a lot on my mind after my first day of work...)

Oh, and there's also a top secret project I'll be working on involving that Lucky Old Train Station. See that's #4. But I can't say a peep about that. And there's also a #6 and that's a bar, but I can't let that one outta the bag either. Highly confidential stuff. Well, for Santa Clause, and all the Fans of the Underdog City, goodnight. We'll see you in Cuba.

The First Assignment

Last fall, as the nation's economy took a swan dive toward an empty pool, Time Magazine rushed out to the homeland of the Big 3 to capture some high/res portraits of the Motor City. Published as the "Remains of Detroit"- the images would become part of a cover story for the magazine, and the digital slideshow circulated about like some Youtube fetish. Even my mom forwarded it to me. In case you missed it: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1864272,00.html

Well, I've got a bit of a bone to pick with Time Magazine. Not for their overall effort toward my new hometown (sending writers out to live here seems like a pretty good way to get a pulse on the situation: see their Detroit Blog). But for their choice of a title. The Remains of Detroit? As though the shrink from 2 million people in the 1950s to under a million today gives you license to completely disregard the remaining 900,000+ people living here now. Picture it: [the voice of Charleton Heston] 'And this... Today... What's left of our nation's Greatest... Industrial... Empire...' (cue the slideshow with 5 second fade-outs...).

The problem with the whole thing is that on the flip side of the coin, you've got people saying stuff like this about Detroit these days:

"It would be ignorant not to recognize the problems the city is facing, and perhaps as a creative soul I have a rose tinted perspective, but the freedom, the energy and the inspiring individuals I met there are unequalled by anything I’ve felt living in Paris for the last 3 years." -- Susan Connie Marsh, Publisher of Under the Influence Magazine

"You feel the potential, and if you don't grab it and run with it, you'll lose it. ... You can't do these things anywhere else. People with ideas are coming here; there is hope in the people that come here. … There is possibility in Detroit." -- Diederick Kraaijeveld, Dutch artist

"I've lived in a number of terrific places, including Paris and Reykjavik and Kyoto. But I keep setting my books in Michigan. For whatever reason, Detroit has the most powerful hold on my imagination." --Brad Leithauser, writer

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So I got this new job at Team Detroit with a very agreeable boss named Toby Barlow who asked me to start up a blog. He was named 'Best Candidate for Intergalactic Ambassador of Detroit' by Metrotimes (read it here) and you'll pick up on that by seeking out any of his Detroit-focused editorials for the NY times. Google them, they're great. From buying a house for $100 - to the amazing support the community gives new business owners - to the joys of biking in the Motor City. Toby's moved around a bit getting to where he's at in life - from SF to NYC and now to Detroit. And while he set Sharp Teeth out in LA, he's writing another novel that takes place in his new (and favorite) city: you guessed it, Motor Town. (As I write this, he's just sent an email from Paris via India & London, calling himself out on being sappy for how much he misses this place.)

Anyway, this blog's gonna be a forum that tries to shed some light on what else remains here. Down on the ground, between those empty hulking edifices. I have a crazy sense that focusing on what actually remains in the D is gonna be a tough assignment. Not because I'll have to rack my brain to find anything of value going on here. But because I can feel the city changing around me and growing every single day. I can't go out and get a freakin' beer in this city without hearing about something else that's about to start up, something that's just opened, or is starting to blow up. And since more and more the trend seems to be people wanting to work together to achieve larger goals, the Remains of the D will probably grow even quicker. So it won't be very easy to try and capture a fair sense of it. But you definitely won't have to twist my arm to get me to try.

So what the F- are you gonna find on this blog?

Well, for starters- some projects that myself or my agreeable boss Toby or our good friend Phillip Cooley over at Slows Bar-B-Q are involved in. Things ranging from Phil helping to build a bmx pump track on an empty lot in a neighborhood that 99% of reporters write off as a lost cause; a neighborhood hit hard by the '67 riots, that stands mostly abandoned today, and yet houses some of Detroit's best examples of urban agriculture (I love you North Corktown)... To things like the Detroit Ford Reclamation Project where the three of us cooked up a pool of cash to pimp the ride of our friend Ko, a local rockstar (see - it's not just bad things that happen to cars in Detroit, Mr. Insurance Man)... To things like - oh wait, I can't say that one. But it involves the very photogenic Michigan Central Station- yes the very one in Times famous slideshow (I want you, train station).

Also, you're gonna find some transcripts from the early stages of us setting up these projects. And these'll make for some pretty good reads. I promise. See, like many of the people who claim (for whatever crazy reason) they can spot some light at the end of the dark Detroit night- Phil, Toby and I are obsessed dreamers. Always scheming (& even sometimes succeeding!). We think it only fair to relate some of our crazy roller coaster process to you- so that when people ask us how'd you pull that off, we can say- have a look! Also, I'll let you in on a little hint: the process is like a really good drug. Lots of fun, really fast, sometimes outta control, but making you feel real good all over (especially before the doubts start to kick in). And like I said, sometimes things actually work out! I drove a bobcat this summer in front of the train station while helping build a landscape with Los Pistoleros and Daimler Financial. Did I have any credentials to operate that thing? HELL... NO! In fact- I actually dropped the bucket on Phil's foot as we were packing up the last of the native grass plants to head out and leave for the day. Somehow his foot didn't break. (Shhhh. Don't mention that one to Mr Insurance please.)

What else are you gonna find here? Well, interviews. Kid Rock and Jack White and the scandalous Detroit politicians and Meatloaf and such. Well, maybe not Meatloaf. And I guess maybe not those other folks either, but I won't rule it out just yet. Never say never.

Of course, my agreeable boss will drop in as well to say some smart things that we'll all learn from and say 'oh yeah- that makes sense!'

Oh! and we're gonna get some pictures for you to look at too. Not sure of what yet, but they'll be in there, I promise. I know that a lot of text can be boring. So thank you for sticking it out with me so far.

Well, that's about it for now. Gotta flip thru my shiny new Team Detroit rolodex and check to see if Meatloaf's in there. More to come soon...

For Sale: The $100 House

By TOBY BARLOW

Published: March 7, 2009

New York Times OPINION —

RECENTLY, at a dinner party, a friend mentioned that he’d never seen so many outsiders moving into town. This struck me as a highly suspect statement. After all, we were talking about Detroit, home of corrupt former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, beleaguered General Motors and the 0-16 Lions. Compared with other cities’ buzzing, glittering skylines, ours sits largely abandoned, like some hulking beehive devastated by colony collapse. Who on earth would move here?

Then again, I myself had moved to Detroit, from Brooklyn. For $100,000, I bought a town house that sits downtown in the largest and arguably the most beautiful Mies van der Rohe development ever built, an island of perfect modernism forgotten by the rest of the world.

Two other guests that night, a couple in from Chicago, had also just invested in some Detroit real estate. That weekend Jon and Sara Brumit bought a house for $100.

Ah, the mythical $100 home. We hear about these low-priced “opportunities” in down-on-their-luck cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland, but we never meet anyone who has taken the plunge. Understandable really, for if they were actually worth anything then they would cost real money, right? Who would do such a preposterous thing?

A local couple, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, started the ball rolling. An artist and an architect, they recently became the proud owners of a one-bedroom house in East Detroit for just $1,900. Buying it wasn’t the craziest idea. The neighborhood is almost, sort of, half-decent. Yes, the occasional crack addict still commutes in from the suburbs but a large, stable Bangladeshi community has also been moving in.

So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city’s voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.

Admittedly, the $100 home needed some work, a hole patched, some windows replaced. But Mitch plans to connect their home to his mini-green grid and a neighborhood is slowly coming together.

Now, three homes and a garden may not sound like much, but others have been quick to see the potential. A group of architects and city planners in Amsterdam started a project called the “Detroit Unreal Estate Agency” and, with Mitch’s help, found a property around the corner. The director of a Dutch museum, Van Abbemuseum, has called it “a new way of shaping the urban environment.” He’s particularly intrigued by the luxury of artists having little to no housing costs. Like the unemployed Chinese factory workers flowing en masse back to their villages, artists in today’s economy need somewhere to flee.

But the city offers a much greater attraction for artists than $100 houses. Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished. From Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (think of a neighborhood covered in shoes and stuffed animals and you’re close) to Matthew Barney’s “Ancient Evenings” project (think Egyptian gods reincarnated as Ford Mustangs and you’re kind of close), local and international artists are already leveraging Detroit’s complex textures and landscapes to their own surreal ends.

In a way, a strange, new American dream can be found here, amid the crumbling, semi-majestic ruins of a half-century’s industrial decline. The good news is that, almost magically, dreamers are already showing up. Mitch and Gina have already been approached by some Germans who want to build a giant two-story-tall beehive. Mitch thinks he knows just the spot for it.

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the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/opinion/08barlow.html

Bike Among the Ruins

By TOBY BARLOW

Published: July 4, 2009

New York Times OPINION —

ONE night a little over a year ago, crossing Woodward Avenue, I crashed my bicycle. As I flew head over heels across Detroit’s main boulevard, I thought, well, in any other town, I’d be hitting a car right about now. But this being the Motor City, the street was deserted, completely motor-free.

While bike enthusiasts in most urban areas continue to have to fight for their place on the streets, Detroit has the potential to become a new bicycle utopia. It’s a town just waiting to be taken. With well less than half its peak population, and free of anything resembling a hill, the city and its miles and miles of streets lie open and empty, beckoning. And lately, whether it’s because of the economy or the price of gas or just because it’s a nice thing to do, there are a lot more bikers out riding.

This budding culture brings some commerce with it. Down on the waterfront, and just three hundred yards or so from the headquarters of General Motors, my friends Kelli and Karen are in their second year running the Wheelhouse bike shop. One might think, given the economy, that starting a business in the D makes as much sense as stepping on a nail, but Kelli and Karen’s shop is thriving; their profits in May were double what they were a year ago.

Granted, right now neither Kelli nor Karen take a salary from the business. They’ve each kept working their other jobs, Kelli as a bartender and Karen at a local community organization. Neither of them intends for the Wheelhouse to be a volunteer effort forever, but like many entrepreneurs, they believe investing in the business’s growth right now is the prudent thing to do.

Meanwhile, up in the Cass Corridor neighborhood, another bike shop has opened up. Manned by some of the most die-hard, gear-headed gentlemen you’ll ever meet, the Hub comes with a storeroom of piled-up old bikes that they’ll refurbish for you — and a greater social mission. Their Back Alley Bikes training program, which predates the shop, teaches youths about mechanical repairs and customer service. The Hub is technically a nonprofit, but their business is also doing pretty well.

Biking in the D is the transportation equivalent of the Slow Food movement, offering a perspective that’s completely lost to those zooming in on the Lodge Freeway and I-75, those great superhighways that, once upon a time in the name of progress, were sliced deep into the heart of the city only to bleed it dry.

A bike gives you the chance to soak up what’s left, hidden neighborhoods like Indian Village with its dappled lanes and old eclectic mansions. Out near the fabled Eight Mile Road you can cruise past an almost forgotten but now happily restored Frank Lloyd Wright house. Downtown, you can circle the ruins of the old Michigan Central Depot.

Our abandoned landscape suggests an opportunity that alternative-transportation proponents should consider: instead of raging against their cities’ internal combustion machines, they might consider a tactical retreat to the city that cars have pretty much abandoned.

Despite the press, survival here isn’t so hard. Businesses like the Wheelhouse and the Hub have already shown how well Detroit can work as a new business hothouse. With the legendarily affordable real estate and without needing to pay for car payments, gas or insurance, bicyclists could rebuild Detroit into a model of a two-wheeled economy. They could pass laws promoting bikes over cars and designate entire avenues motor-free zones, which, given the state of many of them now, wouldn’t be so much of a stretch.

Maybe it sounds far-fetched, but then again maybe it’s just destiny. Look at a map and you’ll see that Detroit is designed in the shape of a wheel, with streets emanating like spokes from the downtown hub. It looks like a premonition, a city uniquely designed to alter transportation forever.

So, who knows, maybe the bike will follow the car. After all, it’s happened before. In 1896, when Charles B. King steered Detroit’s first automobile across its cobbled streets, following King’s progress with a keen and intelligent interest was Henry Ford, riding on a bicycle.

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The link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/opinion/05barlow.html

It Takes a Village to Open a Bistro

By TOBY BARLOW

Published: October 24, 2009

New York Times OPINION —

I WAS recently sitting at the bar of Le Petit Zinc talking to the owner, Charles Sorel, when he said something I found shocking: “I can’t imagine opening a business anywhere but Detroit.”

From a local, I would have just written it off as city pride, but Charles is, as he himself puts it, a citizen of the world. Born in the French Caribbean and reared in Paris, he ran a French joint in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene and lived in Brazil before winding up here. When I pointed out the risks of starting up in a city as troubled as Detroit, he shrugged it off. “When I moved to New York in the late ’80s there was not a day when someone in the city wasn’t robbed or beaten or killed,” he said. “This is so much better than that.”

A year ago, Charles opened Le Petit Zinc with the simple belief that there was a market here for a crêperie and cafe that served fresh organic food at a decent price. But that was certainly no guarantee of success. Not only was the economy cratering, but the building itself, an abandoned day care center tucked between a working-class Irish neighborhood called Corktown and a few abandoned warehouses, was on a street with no foot traffic. The only thing the place had going for it was a rundown playground out back that was good for outdoor seating. For the first five weeks after opening, when he was the cook, waiter, busboy and janitor, he had no idea what to expect.

Now, we are all raised to think of business as a sort of vicious spy-versus-spy, cutthroat activity where every competing establishment is out to stick a shiv into the other. You’d think that this kind of blood thirst would be even worse in Detroit, which — with Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance, Eminem’s lyrics and our old, quaint Devil’s Night tradition of burning down houses — has acquired a certain reputation for toughness. But Charles discovered that the neighboring Detroit restaurants actually had quite a different reaction to a new competitor.

The owner of Slows, a barbecue place nearby, not only helped him get his permits, but also built tabletops for him at no cost. Jordi, the owner of the Cafe con Leche coffee shop, hooked him up with his coffee supplier. Dave, who had recently opened Supino Pizza, even dropped everything one day to get the paper Charles needed for his credit card machine.

Most surprisingly, just as Charles was starting up, Torya Blanchard was opening another downtown crêpe place called Good Girls Go to Paris. Instead of treating Charles like a rival, Torya happily exchanged recipes with him, even coming in one day to help make his batter, an act of crêperie solidarity that would surely have made Detroit’s founder, Antoine de Lamothe Cadillac, extremely proud.

“They want their neighbor to make it,” he says. “It’s different from anywhere I’ve been. Here, your success is their success.” Even his suppliers have shown a generosity he finds surprising: the Avalon bakery charges him wholesale prices even if he orders just one loaf.

In other ways, too, Charles seems to have timed things well, opening just when Detroit residents with an agricultural bent were beginning to take advantage of the 40 square miles of unoccupied open land here, an area almost the size of San Francisco. Greg Willerer, for instance, sells Charles spinach, flowers and zucchini at an affordable price, all grown within the city limits. Charles also planted his own garden out by the patio, putting in tomatoes, basil, peppers, thyme, parsley and beets.

Maybe it’s that adage that nothing brings a community closer than having a common enemy. For the restaurateurs, the residents, the urban farmers and the community activists now working to reshape the city, the enemy is Detroit’s own reputation. They know they will succeed only if they are a part of a larger, collective success, one that makes downtown a thriving destination again, and so they’re working together to make it happen.

Which leads to another entrepreneurial advantage Detroit possesses: instantaneous and automatic publicity. “Open a business anywhere else, and no one will notice,” Charles said. “Open it in Detroit and everyone talks about it.”

Sure enough, people are now driving in regularly from affluent suburbs like Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe to try his smoked-salmon crêpes and ratatouille, a considerable achievement considering many suburbanites come downtown only for Tigers games or a night at the symphony. While I was there, the place was bustling with a diverse crowd that seemed more than satisfied.

“This is the best restaurant ever. I would eat here all the time if I had more money,” beamed a woman dining alone at the bar.

“Somebody send that lady a dessert!” shouted Charles with a smile.

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The link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/opinion/25barlow.html?_r=1