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Thank You, Detroit!
8 months ago
Showing posts with label published. Show all posts
Showing posts with label published. Show all posts
August 17, 2010
April 9, 2010
February 21, 2010
Snowbirds Come Home to Roost
RON AND PATTY COOLEY met and fell in love 42 years ago as students at Eastern Michigan University. After a stint at Ford in the early ’70s, they left Detroit behind, taking over her family’s modest real estate business upstate. The company prospered: for 30 years the two worked together, helping to finance, build and sell more than 1,000 homes.
With their two sons grown, Ron and Patty sold the business and semi-retired down to Naples, Fla. Ron took up golf, sometimes seven days a week, occasionally 36 holes in a day. Patty gardened. Their lives in the Sunshine State were relaxed and tranquil, the sort of serene ending that retirement brochures promise to us all. But, unsurprisingly, the collapse of the housing market had a serious impact on a couple with a nest egg tied up in real estate.
Ron and Patty looked around and did the math. Florida’s economy seemed to be declining even more steeply than the Motor City’s. In Detroit, they had roots, their sons had moved into the city and started a barbecue restaurant, grandchildren had arrived. So, weighing their options, they came back. They moved into a downtown loft, just a few blocks from the empty lot where Tiger Stadium once stood.
I first encountered Ron and Patty at an early morning fund-raiser for a neighborhood charity. Talking to them, I found that just like other new arrivals — the artists and recent college graduates coming here from other towns — they spoke of Detroit’s potential with an almost exalted optimism. Instead of depressing or slowing them down, the move has been a thrilling one and they shared examples of how exhilarating their life is downtown.
Being at the center of things means they can walk to the Avalon bakery on Saturday mornings and to the new Comerica Park for baseball games in the spring. Instead of endless golf, they now go to events like the fund-raiser where we met or lectures on design and sustainable development.
Talking about Florida, Ron sounds like someone who made it onto the lifeboat in the nick of time. Yes, they had to sell their home down there at a loss, but a former neighbor in Naples recently sold a similar house for less than half of what the Cooleys got. Ron estimates that with the nation’s battered 401(k) accounts, it could take decades before Florida returns to any sort of substantial growth.
Meanwhile, Patty and Ron are helping their sons expand their restaurant to a new location. Patty is involved in the local school system’s literacy program. Ron enjoys walking down the street to spend time with his grandchildren, the kind of time that, in his ambitious, younger days, he didn’t get to have with his own boys.
In the nation’s shared imagination, Detroit continues to be worse than a punch line — it’s an apocalyptic wasteland teetering right at the edge of the end of the world. When people hear that I live downtown, they ask, “Where do you get your groceries?” and “Where do you get your dry cleaning done?” and when I answer “Well, at the grocery store and the dry cleaners,” they simply look confused. In fact, few can imagine living a life here.
The truth is that my Detroit — and Ron and Patty’s Detroit — might no longer be a city where dreams come true the way they once did. But this story still demonstrates some important things: how lives and businesses can thrive here, how rewarding it can be to have family close and, at the very least, how nice it is that we’re not in Florida.
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Link to the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/opinion/21barlow.html
January 18, 2010
A Staggering Tale of Fabulous Success
It is rumored that in the spring of 1951 a mystical genie appeared in a vision before Albert Como, the last great Republican mayor of Detroit. She was wearing feather boas, leather pants and a slightly transparent loose lace top that the mayor could not help but oogle at as this particular wardrobe style would not become fashionable until the Motor City’s own Suzi Quatro ruled the airwaves almost a quarter century later.
The mayor had just returned to his home after a boozy roast dinner with the Greater Hamtramck Polish League and had settled in for little a nightcap of rye on ice by the fire. The rest of his household was fast asleep. The inebriated and tired mayor, wanting to refresh his drink, reached again for the rye but instead accidentally picked up an old dusty ceramic bottle. Now, nobody is sure where the mysterious bottle came from, but there are records that he had earlier received it as a gift from a visiting Palestinian delegation. Whatever its source, he grappled to get the top off and inadvertently released the genie.
Arriving in a flash of smoke and glitter, she immediately asked him for his greatest wish. Awestruck but still in the heady throes of the evening’s Pole Town political theater, the mayor immediately proclaimed, “I want victory for the people!” She asked if he meant all the people everywhere at which he came to his senses, snarled, scoffed and said, “Hell, no. Only the bastards who voted for me!”
With that, she was gone.
Cobo had, in fact, hoped for three wishes, he thought that was how genies generally operated. His second wish was going to be for thirty million dollars and his last wish would have been a night of rough, sweaty and slightly deviant carnal bliss with the feather laden genie herself, but as it turned out that one single wish was all he got.
Whether this slightly fabulous story is true or not, it is certainly true that what followed was the greatest success story of all time. All the people who voted for Mayor Cobo were indeed victorious. The A.F.L. union workers and the middle class whites who had supported him continued to get generous raises from the automobile companies, even the rival C.I.O. union prospered, and so great was their victory that, one by one, they were able to pack up their belongings and head right out of Detroit’s city limits, driving off to resettle in the blossoming suburban neighborhoods of Royal Oak, Ferndale and Sterling Heights.
The vast global corporations that had funneled money into his coffers were victorious as well, and soon they too left their downtown high rises behind, constructing vast business parks for themselves on the outskirts of town in cities like Warren, Southfield, and Troy, and consequently gutting Detroit’s tax base.
In the end the only people who were left behind were the ones Mayor Cobo had shown little interest in, the poor, the minorities, and the unskilled laborers.
There are those who will tell you Detroit’s demise began over a decade later, with the violent race riots of 1967, but that was just an accelerant to an urban unraveling that had, in fact, already begun. In fact, with the G.I. Bill and the UAW labor victories, the great American Dream was born, spawning a prosperous middle class that viewed urban living as less aspirational than the more placid suburban lifestyle being packaged and sold to them by real estate developers, department stores, and television commercials. If you could get out by golly you got out and thanks to — depending which story you believe —the successful struggle of organized labor or the appearance of a voluptuous genie by Albert Como’s fireside, there were now over a million people who could afford to leave Detroit, precipitating the sort of massive civic breakdown not unlike the hive collapse syndrome currently plaguing bee populations everywhere.
We are left with what remains, a city rife with contradiction. It is neither a completely blank slate nor is it truly a functional urban center. It is not a complete ruin nor is there anything resembling a prosperous sustainable economy. The city is rich with opportunity, ripe for the taking, while at the same time short-sighted opportunists continue to create obstacles to progress. The city stands as a beacon of failure while at the same time there are inspirational new stories of success. For instance, while some bemoan the fact that not one chain supermarket operates within the city limits, excellent small independent businesses like the Honeybee Supermarket prosper. Instead of an Outback Steakhouse we have Slows barbecue, which is regularly packed to the rafters. Instead of a Pottery Barn, there’s the Bureau of Urban Living where a holiday shopper can always find unique, idiosyncratic gifts. Finally, in a world of million dollar tear-downs, we have real estate market so devalued, you can easily buy a refurbishable house for less than a hundred dollars.
Adding to the sense of possibility is the fact that these opportunities can be found in a place that is as close to a natural eden as one could reasonably hope to find. In a world threatened by increased coastal flooding and rising sea levels, Detroit is situated a two hundred miles inland. In a world where fresh water is increasingly scarce, we comfortably rest between two of the world’s most enormous freshwater lakes. In a world where heat and drought are on the rise, we enjoy a reasonably temperate climate and healthy precipitation.
It is all here for us.
So in one way or the other, this is the city of the future. Our collective wisdom will either lead to a renewal of civic responsibility or we will squander one of the greatest opportunities for rebirth that the world has ever seen. There has never been a city as successful as Detroit and the absolute proof is that a vast number of people were able to leave because, for good or ill, they could all follow their dreams. Now it is time for a new dream. Now it is time for a new kind of success. Like Mayor Cobo alone in his study, the choice is ours.
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December 30, 2009
December 1, 2009
For Sale: The $100 House
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
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
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
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