Corrado Parducci designed much more than architectural ornamentation — he also painted intricate designs on the walls of his home, wove tapestries, carved wooden busts of his children, and designed hub caps and bumpers for cars. A guest post about Detroit's most prolific designer from the maker of a new documentary.
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Upcoming events at Palmer Park and the SkyBar in Capitol Park. Bike rides + Underground Railroad history + horses.
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Part 2: From Germany, to Milwaukee, to Atlanta, to Detroit: the cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta.
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Starting around 1850, Detroiters could pop into Old City Hall or the Firemen's Hall and, for 25 cents or so, see the latest "greatest painting ever made" — sweeping views of overland route to California, the funeral of Napoleon, Bible scenes, the life of George Washington.
Read more →I miss history field trips. After spending most of the summer cooped up to write a book (and most of the fall re-assembling my life), I have been eager to start making excursions again — to cemeteries, parks, historic markers, battlefields, the woods. But it seems my time has started to free up just as...
Read more →And it was the best.
Read more →Despite a tremendous weekend that included Lightning Love and The Daredevil Christopher Wright in Ypsilanti, the Hounds Below at the Lager House, a live conjunto band and dancing at the Blue Diamond, a lot of Blatz, Modelo and PBR and a lot of reading, all of which should have been plenty of fodder, I’ve...
Read more →I have always approached weekly themed blog posts, especially those involving alliteration, with trepidation. But then I found Early Days in Detroit, the memoirs of historical Detroit old guy General Friend Palmer (1820 – 1906), and I can’t think of any better way to dig through its 1000+ pages, each of them host to...
Read more →Besides feeling swamped with projects, I’m terrified that I’m coming down with some kind of flu, so here are a few items to keep you busy in the event that I become bedridden or shackled to my (other, metaphorical, paid-gig) desk this week. Katie Barkel makes neat videos The MetroTimes music department was kind...
Read more →This weekend, for the first time since moving back to Farmington, we finally made it to that chapel of childlike astonishment, Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum. My many, many visits to Marvin’s — as an awestruck child, a teenager with nowhere to go on a summer night, an adult with friends in town to impress...
Read more →Greetings, team blog readers: Today I’m taking a reprieve from my usual task of writing about statues and old cemeteries and bringing you something a little different: the story of the music blog that brought me back to Michigan at the end of August. The best part: it’s also a mix CD. You can...
Read more →Well, well. If it isn’t the internet, up to its old tricks! During my usual late-night internet scrounging — browsing lazily for Detroit Christmas artifacts — I found an incredible Flickr haul of old photos, which had themselves been found somewhere between Detroit and Hamtramck. Besides a lot of great mugging in front of...
Read more →The mister and I took a field trip to Ann Arbor last Sunday, desperate to get out of the apartment and into the world after three and a half long days of family visits, plans with out-of-town friends and eating/drinking too much. Our destination: the beautifully renovated University of Michigan Museum of Art. We...
Read more →Please forgive the lag; I have been tied up on a deadline for Metro Times this week, turning my attention from minor local historical curiosities to a scion of Detroit’s early-aughts music scene. Back to normal next Monday, but meanwhile, here are some things you probably already know about. These are The Four Tops....
Read more →I love when people say Detroit is “a shadow of its former self,” or one of America’s “fallen cities.” The benchmark, of course, is Detroit at the height of its industrial success and the peak of its population in the 1950s. But I’ve been reading accounts of the city in the very earliest days...
Read more →Suzy Parker with Robin Tattersall and Gardner McKay, evening dress by Lanvin-Castillo, Café des Beaux-Arts, Paris, August 1956. © 2009 Richard Avedon Foundation. (*Edit: how could I have neglected to mention? Richard Avedon: Fashion Photographs, 1944-2000 runs through January 17, 2010 at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Golly.) Richard Avedon was 21 when he...
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