Meditations

You are currently browsing the archive for the Meditations category.

Meditations on a Boat Club

February 7, 2012 in History, Meditations | No comments

There’s something ancestral about boats.

Detroit is a maritime city, even though that eponymous motor and the interstates it compelled us to build have eclipsed this truth somewhat. Cadillac paddled here, Lewis Cass liked to read selections from his scholarly library in his canoe, and when the Erie Canal opened, Yankee settlers arrived in Detroit by — well, the boatload.

And our Boat Club is the oldest in the country.

Source

“When Monsieur de la Mothe Cadillac founded his post on the Detroit River some two hundred years ago he wrote to his superior that he had found the Gateway to the West. Now one can sit on the veranda of the Detroit Boat Club House and watch an endless stream of commerce passing through the channel, and he knows Cadillac was right. That is one of the charms of the place.”

— Leonidas Hubbard Jr, “Paddling your Own Canoe,” Outing (1904)

On February 18, 1839, some society types who enjoyed the sport of boating started a club, a place where they could store some boats and a change of clothes. (Founding members included a smattering of Brushes, Campaus, Farnsworths and Ten Eycks. Also Alpheus Starkey Williams.) The club had a slip at the foot of Randolph Street and one boat — the Georgiana.

“When the house was built more men wanted to join, and then men became canoeists just to get the privileges of the organization.”

— Leonard Hubbard Jr.

Source

It’s not the same building now, obviously; a familiar  fate of its time, the slip on Randolph Street burned in 1848, destroying all boats but the Wolverine. In 1889, the Boat Club moved to Belle Isle — to a building that burned in 1893, then to another building that burned in 1901. The present structure, a crumbling concrete beauty at the foot of the Belle Isle Bridge, dates to 1902. It is fireproof.

“In those early days the club was largely a social organization and barge parties were extremely popular. One of the features at this time was a stunning uniform adopted by the members. It consisted of a chip sailor hat covered with white linen and broad black band; sailor pantaloons of white duck with black belts around the waist; shoes with low sewed heels, and white socks; black silk handkerchief knot; blue shirts with white figure and broad square collar; coat of Kentucky jean. Garbed in this natty uniform the young sailors were wont to take the barges up the river on balmy, moonlight nights, the foremost young ladies of Detroit’s society by their sides, sending the craft steadily and swiftly along under the impulse of their strong, regular stroke.”

— General Friend Palmer, Early Days in Detroit

The fate of the Detroit Boat Club building is uncertain. The Boat Club itself has moved on; the building (owned by the city) is still occupied by crew teams and Friends of Detroit Rowing, but it needs a ton of love and money.

“In the early ’80s the taste for rowing subsided, and indoor gymnastics, baseball, and field sports took its place. The Detroit Athletic Club, which was organized in 1880, was the leader in the new direction. … The Detroit YMCA and Mutual Boat Clubs are now the only rowing clubs in Detroit. Walkerville, Ont., opposite Detroit, and Wyandotte and Ecorse, below Detroit … have also clubs, and these six are the only organized rowing clubs on the Detroit River, where twenty years ago there were about fifteen.”

-  Robert B. Ross, George B. Catlin, Landmarks of Detroit,  1898

“And sometimes you are sick because you cannot leave the canal and, maybe, the parasol, and instead of the cushions throw into your craft a tarpaulin and bag of grub and turn northward over Cadillac’s route. And you dream of islands and camp fires and the smell of hemlock and the ripple of waves at night; but through it all you know that this is a whole lot better than the city gymnasium or the park; you were complaining out of that strange trait of human nature which makes us all want more and more of any good things which Providence sends us.”

— Leonidas Hubbard

 

Source

Tags: , , ,

Christmas and Loneliness

December 21, 2011 in Holidays, Meditations | No comments

The first time I realized that I loved Christmas — as an adult — was in a grocery store in Milwaukee. It had been a tough year, full of loss and heartache, too much drinking, a persistently empty checking account, nagging aimlessness. It wasn’t long after Thanksgiving. I was probably buying noodles, eggs, and cabbage — all I ate. The store had put up a red ribbon-decked tree and there were loose cranberries for sale in big bins. It smacked me in the heart like a cinnamon-scented hammer: I cannot goddamn wait for Christmas. And I guess it had nothing to do with the holiday itself: it just meant that I could go home, turn off my phone, and hunker down at my parents’ house for a few days, safe in a harbor of blankets, dogs, movies I’d watched a thousand times, and the soft smell of sauteed onions.

Since then, I have loved Christmas mightily, in all of its sentimental glory, and it has only been better since I started spending it with Scott: more family, more love, more wine, more crab legs, more card games, and the extra thrill of midnight mass, the only time during the regular calendar year that I set aside for my secret spiritual feelings, and during which I inevitably sob my face off for ineffable reasons.

This year, though — despite the fact that it has been a very big year, and I am more than ready for a long break — I can’t muster the same wonder. Midnight mass is cancelled. My parents just moved to Florida. We will still play cards and eat crab legs, and I am sure by night’s end I will be passed out on the couch at Ciocia’s house, drunk with awe and love and Jezy. But now, just a few day’s out, I am feeling unmoved. Maybe I’m just tired? Maybe it’s just too balmy?

So it was beautiful to find this letter from William Woodbridge to his daughter Juliana. Woodbridge was living in Washington, serving his first term as U.S. Senator from Michigan, and spending his first Christmas away from his family. His daughter was my age, living with her husband, Henry Backus, in Detroit.  His melancholy – resigned to Providence – reminds us that Christmas is sometimes best defined in our hearts by what it is not.

Washington, January 5, 1842

My dear Daughter,

Your welcome letter of the 10th ult. reached me in due time. I read with much interest your remarks on the altered state of things you anticipated when you thought of the then approaching Christmas. Contrasted with such as are past, rarely, indeed if ever, has it happened that a Christmas has gone by without seeing us all together; and there is something grave in the thought that at length, and for the first time, that day of customary hilarity should be decreed to pass by in the absence of one who loves you, and loves you all I do. But it is perhaps better as it is; better that we all should learn by degrees and with contented, though subdued feelings to submit ourselves to the decrees of Providence. Though the day was not untinged by melancholy to me, yet it passed, amidst the bustle of ”carding and being carded” and all that with sober and unruffled quiet. With you at home, it fared I trust a little better.  My last letter was from L., and on ”Christmas Eve.” The stockings had with all due formality been hung up, and you and W. and B. were to have added to the cheerfulness of the occasion by joining in the Christmas dinner. This is as it should be, and many times and often may ”Merry Christmas” occur to all who at that table met.

I hope your holidays are full of joy, whatever they are, wherever you are, and whomever you are with. I will be taking a break from the blog, but hope to check in at least once before the end of 2011 and will return to regular posts by early January, having had some time to rest, clear my head, and read lots of dorky old books.

Cheers,

The Night Train

Other posts about Christmas from last year and the previous year and here is Santa wishing all of Detroit a good night.

Tags: ,

An injection of the past into the present to inform the future

November 4, 2011 in History, Meditations | 3 comments

You may be interested in this event at the MOCAD this weekend (Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m., plus a Saturday matinee at 4 p.m.). Lost Landscapes of Detroit has been here before; this year’s show is new, with even more home movies, newsreels, industrial films, and other film ephemera.

But I want to share something Rick Prelinger says in this article, because it is really important:

“This isn’t about nostalgia, another chance to mourn the loss of the old Hudson’s building,” he says. “Everyone has their eye on Detroit; they see the possibilities. This is an injection of the past into Detroit’s present to help inform its future.”

He means it about these films, of course, where the experience of a lost icon like Hudson’s is poignant, personal and very direct. But I think it applies to the pursuit of local history writ large, from the first frontier fires to the steam ships, the street cars, and the influential people we cast in bronze and plunked down in the middle of city parks.

Sometimes I worry that early Detroit history isn’t relevant to anyone’s real life anymore, especially in a city with so many hip goings-on going on. But while tales of pony carts, public art pranks and wild pear trees may not resonate with as much consequence as stories from, say, the labor movement in the twentieth century, it is still pretty magical, and powerful, to feel connected to the dramatic sweep of this old city.

I try to be cautious about drawing lessons for today from fables of yore, but you can find plenty of useful parallels if that’s what you’re in it for. Like the microfunding of the Hazen Pingree memorial in Grand Circus Park, the fake-eviction tactics staged by the Whig party during the campaign of 1837, and the flourishing of bicycle culture of the 1880s that paved the way (no pun intended) for better roads — and, ultimately, cars to drive on them.

But I find something simpler than that in the study of old Detroit. The thrill of a small, achievable mystery, like the whereabouts of a painting. The joy, and the warmth of affection, of revealing a real person beneath an exalted hero, like the story of Stevens T. Mason drinking 14 toasts at a dinner in his honor and leaping up on the table. Laughing at a still-funny joke Jim Scott told to a newspaper reporter in 1885.

Listen to Rick Prelinger explain this better than I can on yesterday’s episode of the Craig Fahle Show, available here.

And come watch some old movies and think about your place in this city. You are part of its history. Its history is part of you.

Tags: ,

Walter Owen Briggs: The opera

October 24, 2011 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History, Meditations | 1 comment

The good people at Single Barrel Detroit have released the results of their new project, “Four Films for Attention,”  in which a terrific local band called Prussia dolls up in fancy dinner clothes and prances around the historic Briggs Mansion in Boston Edison. For attention! The videos are remarkable (especially the official video — mildly NSFW if your W is suspicious of cross-dressing, gun play and close-ups of pig roasts), and obviously they’re working; Prussia was just deemed one of the top 15 bands to see at CMJ 2011, which draws something like 900 acts.

SBD asked me if I wanted to write a little about Walter Owen Briggs, who built his English Manor-style mansion, nicknamed “Stone Fences,” in 1915. So I read up.

Someone should write an opera about Walter Owen Briggs.

(Via Virtual Motor City)

Opening scene: the streets of Detroit, 1907. Thirty-year-old Walter Owen Briggs, a life-long Tigers fan, always buys his tickets from the same cigar stand vendor. But it’s the World Series with the Chicago Cubs, and the game sells out. There’s a comic duet between Briggs and the cigar dude, but there’s just no way Briggs can get tickets; Bennett Park seats just 5,000. Defeated, Briggs shakes his fist to the sky and vows to one day build a stadium that will seat every soul who ever wanted to see a baseball game.

Twenty years later: Walter Owen Briggs, 50, is president of the largest auto body manufacturing company in the country. Briggs employs thousands of workers, who have come to Detroit from all corners of the earth. A kingly capitalist success story, Briggs buys a 50% share of the Detroit Tigers and, in a big choral production number, promises he will not make a cent on the endeavor: the Tigers are for all Detroit’s children. And they’re for winning. That’s all that matters to Walter Owen Briggs.

That year, a conflagration at one of his plants — sparked by unsafe conditions and poor ventilation — kills 21 workers. ”Bodies by Briggs,” the labor press leads.

Scene: 1940. Briggs is sole owner of the Tigers — his former partner, Frank Navin, has been dead for five years, having suffered a heart attack whilst horseback riding just 6 weeks after the Tigers won the 1935 World Series. Briggs Stadium, as it’s been re-named, seats 58,000, a proud testament to Detroit’s cosmopolitan, victorious baseball society.

The Tigers are racing for another pennant. Polio-stricken Briggs is in a wheelchair. His field is full of old-timers (“The G.A.R. of baseball,” wrote Malcolm Bingay), because Briggs wants to win one World Series on his own before his death, which he believes is imminent. The Tigers deliver an American League pennant for their ailing owner, who is famed for his name-your-price offers and personal gifts of bespoke suits for players who perform like stars.

(Virtual Motor City)

Walter Owen Briggs does not die that year, and the Tigers do not win the World Series. But the world — in Detroit, at least — is changing radically. Briggs Manufacturing has been unionized since 1937, although Mr. Briggs had stridently resisted those efforts. His ball players are trying to organize, too; Briggs pretends not to notice. His company is one of the largest employers of black workers in the city. His team will see no such integration in Briggs’s lifetime.

In June 1943, racial tensions boil over into a bloody riot, killing at least 34 people, wounding hundreds, and leaving a city dazed and horrified.

Scene: the Arsenal of Democracy. Walter Owen Briggs, his body nearly useless but his mind just as keen as ever, has no time for baseball. His 40,000 employees are powering the most heroic war production effort the world has ever seen.

(A worker priming an airplane wing at Briggs Manufacturing Co., 1942. Library of Congress)

(A Briggs Co. ad from Flying Magazine, September 1944.)

The Tigers, with many of their players drafted into service, are rough around the edges. But with Hank Greenberg slugging and Hal Newhouser on the mound, the boys take the team to the World Series and, in seven games against the Chicago Cubs, win the championship.

Against doctor’s orders, an exhausted and frail Walter Owen Briggs attends the victory banquet.

Curtain.

Is Briggs a tragic hero? A compellingly human villain? Unshakable, outrageously rich, Briggs busted unions and broke strikes throughout the turbulent 1930s, called armed federal soldiers to his stadium during the 1943 riot, had a motorcade escort him to the stadium from his estate in Bloomfield Hills, and refused to sell box seats to black Detroiters.

But the same workers who cursed his name in Detroit’s factories brought their kids to his splendid stadium and watched his well-paid Tigers play ball. From the sweat and fire of an imperfect city, Briggs forged something wholly and timelessly loved: a champ team, a stadium for the ages, and a refined culture of baseball that, under his direction, had come into its own. It was Briggs’s vision of something like paradise. He held on to players he loved, regardless of how they performed, and lavished them with gifts, cash, and affection. All summer long, he let city kids see games for free. The world he created there was nostalgic, unchanging and certain. In his heart was a child climbing on a box to watch baseball through a knothole in a wooden fence.

(Kids at Briggs Stadium, 1942. Library of Congress.)

After the win in ’45, Briggs was rarely as enthusiastic or engaged as he had once been; though he held on to his 100% share of the team, he slowly retired from its affairs. He died in Florida in 1952.

Does anyone know a good librettist?

Tags: , , , , ,

Detroit turns 310

July 22, 2011 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History, Meditations | 2 comments

champagne tower

[Source]

Dear Detroit,

It seems like just yesterday that our rascal voyageur, Antoine Laumet, the self-styled Sieur de Cadillac, shored his canoes on a verdant bluff above the straits and struck a flag in the ground for the glory of God and King Louis XIV.

Where have these 310 years gone? They’ve been a whirl of impossible circumstances, impossible people, impossible luck. Dapper steamboat captains. Damsels in French pony carts. All-night parties on the frozen river. Boy governors, shoemaker mayors, and speedboat-racing daughters of industry. (Also, Bavarian princess daughters of industry.)

Remember when you were surrendered to the British in 1812? What was THAT all about?

People from all over the world have come to your shores to make their lives better. Political unrest, geographical upheaval, potato blights, crooked land speculation, the hunger for freedom and the plain-old desire to try something different have all brought settlers here. And they made you a pretty cosmopolitan place, right from the get-go. Cadillac’s  first settlers mingled and married local Huron girls. Gabriel Richard came to escape the Jacobins. German lager-makers, Irish brawlers, Polish girls who went to work in cigar factories. New England Yankees who came to make a buck. Some of them did. Russian Jews, like my grandfather, who built flophouses and ran sugar for the Purple Gang. Kentucky peasants like my grandmother, who met my grandfather at a deli. Mid-Michigan farm girls, like my maternal grandma, who came to Detroit with her husband and worked in a munitions plant during World War II.

Ulysses S. Grant was here, smoking and drinking at musty old dive bars. Frederick Douglass and John Brown met here for the last time. Martin Luther King, Jr. was here. The Prince de Joinville was here, looking for the lost Dauphin. Tecumseh was here.

Keep at it, Detroit. I know it sometimes seems like you are not what you used to be. And that is true. But what city is? And why would we want it that way? Don’t let anyone tell you it’s over. Taken as a whole, these 310 years have been pretty remarkable. With a lot of grit and a little of that strange and ancient charm, you’ll enjoy 310 more.

With so much love,

The Night Train

P.S. – The Detroit Historical Society is celebrating with birthday cake, a special program called Seven Days: Seven Stories and free admission Sunday, July 24 – Sunday, July 31. The line-up looks wonderful.

P.P.S. – We are kicking off a special program of our own next week. A little celebratory summer cocktail party, of sorts. With LOTS of special guests. But no actual cocktails. Unless you want to come over and have a cocktail! Which can be arranged.

Last year’s post: Detroit turns 309

Tags: , , , , ,

The Spirit of Detroit

April 13, 2011 in Art, Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, Meditations | 12 comments

Five years ago today, on the first take-off-your-sweater-nice day in spring, in a college town on the stateline between Wisconsin and Illinois, I walked to a tattoo parlor, had this done, and then went out for a beer.

Because it was sunny and warm. Because spring fever does funny things to people.

What compelled me? I was a kid. The bad-ass mystique of Detroit still impressed my friends. And I suspected that I loved the city. Because of the train station. Because occasionally my cool friends from home would take me to someone’s “artist loft” for a scene-y CCS party, or smuggle me into some blues bar to see a cover band.

And because Detroit was where I’d come from, and where generations of both sides of my family had come to, and from, in their quests to improve their lives.

That said, I really didn’t know anything about the Spirit of Detroit. (Also: I didn’t really know anything about Detroit.) Brutal honesty: I thought it was a sculpture of a man letting some birds eat out of his hand. I REALLY DID.

A mere hour before I had this heroic little man inked into my leg for the ages, I went to the library and did some research.

The sculptures of Marshall Fredericks, I learned, are some of Michigan’s most beloved works of public art. As a young teacher at Cranbrook, he won a national competition in 1936 to create the Levi L. Barbour Memorial Fountain on Belle Isle — the wheeling gazelle, his first public monument.

Fredericks worked in bronze on a gargantuan scale. Look at this room full of humongous treasures. His crucifix at Indian River was at the time, and may still be, the largest crucifix in the world.

He worked with huge ideas and emotions, too. His sculptures are lofty. Like, here’s Man and the Expanding Universe, 1964:

The Cleveland War Memorial Fountain (the “Fountain of Eternal Life”), 1964:

The nudes of “Star Dream” rising over Royal Oak, 1997:

(He had a way with animals, too, that I really appreciate:

LOOK AT THOSE BUDDIES!)

Over and over again, the triumphant theme of the human spirit, in harmony with nature, ascending from forces of violence, evil, war and suffering, to an eternity on high. Ad astra per aspera: to the stars, through adversity.

So. The Spirit.

(Of COURSE, the only picture I have of him in my personal collection includes a marching band.)

He’s a hunk, that one. By one account, the largest hunk of bronze cast since the Renaissance. A dream of perfected humanity, with wavy hair and washboard abs. In one hand, he holds a gilded orb, representing God, casting rays of light on the world.

Like a lot of Marshall Fredericks’ work, there’s a touch of the Disney — a wholly uncynical dream of man’s potential, cartoonishly rendered. But I will always love this sculpture for this tiny, gleaming reason:

This is not a bunch of birds eating out of a man’s hand. It’s a family.

This weekend, my fella and I will start a tiny new family, in front of our much larger family, and our family of friends and loved ones, in the magnificent, magnanimous city of Detroit, where our families have lived for years. That’s why we included a silhouette of the Spirit on our invitations (designed by the amazing husband-wife duo of Perfect Laughter). (I’ll include a picture, but I can’t find anything right now, because, GOOD LORD, WE’RE GETTING MARRIED IN THREE DAYS, and our place is a shambles.)

After the wedding, we’re honeymooning in New Orleans. When we return, I will settle in to write my BOOK (!!!!) of quirky tales from Detroit’s pre-automotive past.

So I guess this is my long-winded way of saying farewell, for a while. Posts will continue in May. See you when I’m MARRIED! Meanwhile, be good to your family, be good to Detroit, and enjoy the spring.

Love,

The Night Train

Solomon Sibley’s pear, & a brave New Year

December 30, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, Meditations | 2 comments

Life for a pioneer lawyer of the Northwest Territory — say, for instance, Solomon Sibley — was no cakewalk.

There were no telephones or telegraph wires. There were no railroads. Communication and transportation were uncertain and often dangerous. Even the brief case, time-hallowed badge of the busy attorney, had not yet been devised …

[On horseback] he traveled, under any condition, from court to court … At night he stopped for shelter in the cabin of some friendly settler. If no such shelter offered, he tethered his horse, built his campfire in a forest clearing, close to the old Indian trail, which was the only path through the wilderness. In that manner, your pioneer lawyer of the West made his uncertain and difficult way.

George Washington Stark, City of Destiny

Solomon Sibley moved to Detroit in 1796 or 1797, not long after the British handed over Fort Detroit to the Americans. A talented and hard-working Counselor, he became one of the frontier city’s most prominent citizens — a member of the first Territorial legislature, Detroit’s first Mayor under the 1806 charter and a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court.

So it sometimes fell to Solomon Sibley to defend the honor of his adopted home.

In later years he made eloquent answer to a contumely issuing from the surveyor-general’s office at Chillicothe to the effect that in the whole of Michigan there was not “one acre in a hundred, if there would be one in a thousand, that would in any case admit of cultivation. It is all swampy and sandy.”

This canard so infuriated Solomon Sibley that in his own orchard he grew a pear that was the astonishment of the agricultural world and the envy of all the natives. It was a pear weighing thirty ounces. This phenomenon was seven and a half inches long and fourteen and a half inches in circumference. The evidence was irrefutable.

(Stark)

On the brink of a brand new year, I have not been able to pluck Solomon Sibley’s magnificent, poetic, 2-pound pear from my imagination.

Perhaps because I suspect that most of us living here have to procure a gigantic pear from time to time. For dubious friends & relatives. For the national media. For people who say, simply, well, what a shame.

Belle Isle, I think, is one of these marvelous fruits. Last week I took a long walk out on the east end, near the lighthouse, so tucked-away and tiny-looking from the road. For a while I sat on some crooked rocks near the Coast Guard station and watched the ice knock around in the river. There were swans, on-guard and honking. A big green freighter from Cleveland crept down the straits.

Then I went to see the art deco all-marble lighthouse, designed by Albert Kahn. It’s the only one like it in the country.

Hiking back across crusty snow hewn to a trail by truck tracks and cross-country skis, I felt like the only person in Detroit. The solitude was profound, but so was this sense of intense affinity. For Solomon Sibley, crossing through a sleeting gale on horseback. For General Friend Palmer, remembering, perhaps in his old age, a sleigh ride on a frozen pond, or a horse cart struggling through snowy downtown streets. For a French woman farmer, trekking out on some winter errand. For families burning wood they’d split themselves to stay warm.

I started this blog more than a year ago. Let’s not go back that far in the archives, OK?  Because in 2010, this project really started in earnest. In fact, in January 2010 alone, I visited Elmwood for the first time, discovered Silas Farmer, learned about Stevens T. Mason and the quest for Michigan statehood and … drumroll? … began to enjoy regular visits with General Friend Palmer. (I still don’t know where “The Burning of the Steamer Great Western” is, though.)

And I’m just so grateful for it. Every minute of it. And all of you reading. Writing about Detroit — a Motor City before the motor that I never knew existed — has given me a pride, a passion and a thrill I never expected.

So here’s my magnificent pear. I’m offering it to you. It’s the log cabin in Palmer Park. It’s the joyously, defiantly beautiful cemeteries, full of boarded-up mausoleums and cryptic Masonic symbols. It’s the boy governor. The boisterous marble fountain built by a gambler bachelor king. The meandering 1000-page memoir of the history-lover General and the unsurpassed, encyclopedic survey of the unwavering Christian mapmaker. It’s the blog. It’s you. It’s the city, and everything about it that takes your breath away.

It’s going to be a big, ridiculous, anxious, wonderful year. I’m getting married in April — on Belle Isle. And — it’s official! — I’m writing a book. About Detroit. I can’t tell you too much more about it because even I don’t know what it’s going to be like.

That’s a lesson I’ve learned, here. You can lay your plans, but history will upturn them, almost as soon as you pick up your trowel.

Happy new year. See you in 2011.

Tags: , , ,

Workmen’s Circle Cemetery

August 19, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History, Meditations | 6 comments

In the early 1920s, my grandfather Isadore came to Detroit from what is now Belarus. My great-grandfather Yehuda was already here, building houses on the east side for the rapidly expanding community of other European immigrants settling at the boundaries the city.

Yehuda died in 1954. He was 86 years old. (If you want to skip the mental math, he was born in 1868. Time marches on.)

He’s buried at Workmen’s Circle.

I never would have known this had a reader not pointed out to me (at a really fun backyard party, after some champagne) that he’d noticed an out-of-place Orthodox Cemetery near Roseville, nestled between Wal-Mart and a Hampton Inn, or something. I forgot about it for a few days. (Thanks a lot, champagne.) Then I asked my dad where his parents were buried. He said they were at Beth El, at 6 Mile and Middlebelt, but that he thought his grandfather was somewhere around Mt. Clemens, at a Jewish Cemetery on Gratiot.

Let the games begin, right?

***

Detroit’s Jewish population in 1920 reached 35,000, a 10-year growth of almost 250%. In the city and all over the country, the climate was right for new congregations, new community organizations, new social clubs and new political movements.

Workmen’s Circle, a progressive Jewish fraternal organization dedicated to social justice and (at least today) a “big tent approach” to Jewish culture and community (see their website), was founded in New York in 1900. Rooted in the labor movement, progressive socialist politics and the Eastern European Jewish tradition, Workmen’s Circle was a big hit in Detroit. By 1917, the Detroit branch of Workmen’s Circle was the largest branch of the fraternity in North America and, by far, Detroit’s most popular Jewish organization. (See the Jewish Virtual Library’s entry on Detroit.)

Workmen’s Circle Cemetery was established in Clinton Township in 1919, with separate sections designated for member organizations, including several local congregations, Jewish lodges and friendship societies.

It’s one of the most distinctive (and well-kept!) cemeteries I have ever seen. Many of the burial sections have their own signs and gateways:

The search for my great-grandfather had barely begun when I found the Irwin I. Cohn Michigan Jewish Cemetery Index, a digitized and searchable database of over 64,000 burial records from the mid-1800s to 1999 for almost all of the Jewish Cemeteries in Southeastern Michigan. My dad cross-referenced, and within a week I knew that Yehuda was at rest at Workmen’s Circle, buried with his congregation in the Beth Schmuel section of the cemetery.

Dad casually mentioned that Yehuda had helped build, literally, Beth Schmuel. Founded in 1926, the congregation operated out of a rented hall for a few years before buying a house at Blaine and Twelfth from a bank for $2500 cash. Yehuda, a charter member of the congregation, helped convert the home into a synagogue, with apartments upstairs for the rabbi and his family. (More on the 40-year history of Beth Schmuel here. The congregation, which had grown wildly to a membership of more than 400 families, built a new synagogue at Dexter and Buena Vista in 1948, where they stayed until the congregation disbanded in 1959.)

Standing at Yehuda’s grave — lightning from a receding thunderstorm flickering in the sky — I felt an unusual chill. Readers of the blog will know that I’ve been visiting relative strangers at cemeteries since this project began. Why would Yehuda be different? He’s a relative. But a stranger. I know more about most of the dead people I’ve written about here than I know about him. If we were to meet, I’m not sure he’d feel much of a connection to me — an agnostic ethnic mutt, decidedly not Jewish (or anything else), a child of the comfortable suburbs.

But I am the daughter of his grandson. Our lives, and our experiences of the world, are completely removed from each other, but that fact remains.

It’s a funny feeling. Maybe that’s all there is to it.

In the Jewish tradition, I left a small stone on his grave marker. Like a hard, ancient, uncorruptable calling card:

Someone was here to see you.

Tags: , , , ,

Ghost hunters

July 14, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, Meditations | 3 comments

Before Sunday, I’m pretty sure I’d never taken a picture of Michigan Central Station.

But let’s backtrack.

Summer is the season for having friends in town. This weekend we entertained a friend of mine from college and his lovely bride-to-be. Eli’s from Northern Michigan, and he’s seen plenty of Detroit before, including once with me, almost six years ago, when all I knew how to do in Detroit was ride the People Mover, drive past the Station (and back then, Tiger Stadium) and eat at New Hellas in Greektown.

Before I had ever set foot in one of Detroit’s mouldering towers of famous decay, Eli used drive out to abandoned houses in the slum-pastoral outskirts of Beloit, Wisconsin and clamor around. Once I went with him. I fished out a down vest in an early-’80s duck-hunt palette, took it home and washed it a couple of times, and wore it faithfully for the next four years. Here I am sporting it in an abandoned barn Eli took us to near his family’s home in Burdickville:

Pretty sharp, right?

Now we’re all grown up. Eli and I are both getting married soon. (Eli’s getting married on a GOAT FARM. GOAT. FARM. Why didn’t I have that idea?) Eli still rustles around in old empty houses. I mostly sit around at home writing about how I feel kind of funny about old empty old houses (or newspaper offices, or blighted barns).

And the empty old thing that makes me feel funniest of all? It’s definitely Michigan Central.

But after we went to Belle Isle (where we saw, by the way, this incredible Black-Crowned Night Heron, who showed up at the koi pond at feeding time:)

And after we went to Grand Trunk for Michigan craft beers on draft, and Sala Thai in Eastern Market, and after I stepped away to pee, I came back to our table and heard Scott explaining the allure of the Station to our visitors. So off we went to see it.

I think maybe I spent so long obsessing over Detroit as an abstract idea, and so long adoring the Station for, you know, that giant, toothless, Rome-recalling Beaux-Arts metaphor of civilization’s decline that it is, that today I want to forget I was ever that person.

The Train Station was it for me, a suburban teenager in love with the idea of Detroit, a kid who was genuinely curious about the city but never managed to get much deeper or more deviant than taking bad black-and-white photos of the houses around my dad’s factory and sneaking into 5th Avenue at Comerica Park to see some lame blues band when I was underage.

Now that I am all grown up and drink legitimately at decent bars and think I might know a thing or two, the Train Station has become this place for people who don’t get it. It’s a secret place that used to be yours and now everyone goes there. Time started publishing photo essays about it and then people started asking questions like “Why don’t you buy one of those $1 houses I heard about?” or “Hey, wanna hear this great idea that might save Detroit?” and you never wanted to see a photograph of Michigan Central ever again.

This, of course, is nonsense, and unfair. There is nothing and nowhere like the Train Station. I have spent a lot of time this year trying to be less unfair about Detroit. To myself and to others. For God’s sake, it’s just a city people live in.

So this weekend I let myself take some pictures of the Train Station.

At first I was concerned. Earlier in the day, Eli’s fiancee told us that in all fairness, and for all our effort to show how people get Detroit wrong, she genuinely felt like Detroit was really, truly falling apart. We tried to leap to the city’s defense, but unfortunately a bum on the corner started shooting up heroin at that exact moment, and our argument was moot.

But the Train Station gave us its best. A gang of kids on bicycles rode up and asked us what the building was and if it was haunted.  Someone on the roof waved down at them and they shouted, “WHO WOULD GO IN THERE? ISN’T IT HAUNTED? IT LOOKS SCARY!” They eventually concluded that the people inside the buildings were probably ghost hunters. With cameras.

We said, “Yes, we’re sure they have cameras.”

And in some ways, they were probably ghost hunters, too.

Just then, we heard a float of brass. A man showed up from inside the Station and played a little trumpet serenade at the central door. (For some reason he was also holding aloft a big sweep broom.)

So this picture doesn’t feel weird to me, although at first glance it still gives me a twinge. (“Oh, hello! We just drove in from out of town to see some devastation! Here, take our picture!”)

It felt like the way photos began. Here. Here we were. We saw this guy playing a trumpet and kids on bikes.

And the next time I see it, it will remind me of Michigan Central as a sunset playground, full of music and ghost hunters, object of awe for careening kids on bicycles, not decrepit symbol of bygone, forgotten city.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Making do

June 16, 2010 in Meditations | 2 comments

Our Sunday started thus: We had just enjoyed some bloodies (well, a Blatz for my sweetheart, who’s never taken to Queen Mary) and a big plate of breakfast at the Bronx.

Then we set out (soberly, I swear) for Delray. Our mission:  Fort Wayne, Detroit’s star-shaped riverbank bulwark against British/Canadian troops that never came.

News came through the wire two weeks ago that proposed cuts in the City Council’s budget could result in the indefinite closure of Fort Wayne to the public. Since the Council overturned the Mayor’s veto, I guess that could be imminent. We wanted to get a visit in before the Fort started popping up in the Flickr feeds of ruin-creepers.

Maybe it’s already too late. When we got to Fort Wayne and drove through the gates on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, perfect for a walk around the old fortress walls, as I dug through my purse for some cash, the parking attendant told us that they weren’t open yet.

“What do you mean, yet?” we asked. “It’s 2:30 in the afternoon.”

“I mean, for the season,” she said. “We were supposed to open Memorial Day weekend. But we didn’t. And now it’s up in the air.”

So we drove back to the city center, my heart in my lap. We tried to think of another outing. He wanted to go to the museum. I wanted to take a walk by the river. We couldn’t find anywhere to park. The museum sounded stuffy. We drove back home.

Here’s the thing: Detroit has real problems. The budget is one of them. An empty 19th-century garrison post, understandably, does not rank high on the list of financial priorities, if it ranks at all. It’s not a space like Belle Isle where people go to grill, bike, fish and relax. Tucked away in Southwest, it doesn’t have the gaping majesty (or danger to pedestrians) of an abandoned tower. Any place that claims flea markets, ghost hunting and Civil War reenactments as its biggest tourist draws is probably a hard sell.

But Detroit’s ongoing failure to tend to its historical legacy is tiring. It makes me so uneasy to imagine Fort Wayne — a place Civil War soldiers returned to and, a century later, drafted Vietnam soldiers decamped — shuttered and crumbling.

Later in the day, some friends called and asked me to join them for a picnic in Palmer Park. Eager for the chance to save the day from my own storminess, I hopped on my bike, stopped at the liquor store for a bottle of champagne and pedaled south on Woodward to 7 Mile.

Palmer Park, the gorgeous, sprawling space granted to the city by Senator Thomas Witherell Palmer — on the condition that its virgin forest be left alone — was a little muddy and unkempt the last time I visited. It was early in March, so I may have been quick to judge. This summer, the park is overrun with geese and there are huge, hungry mosquitoes everywhere (thanks, at least in part, to the lagoon you see in this picture), but it’s crowded and full of activity: people out grilling, jogging, walking dogs, playing tennis and basketball, or just hanging out by their cars and blaring thumpy music through their speakers.

For a while we sat at the fountain and watched a drum circle.

(In its original setting.)

(Today. Photo by Dan Austin/BuildingsofDetroit.com)

Noah rang Senator Palmer’s Spanish bell.

Then we enjoyed some refreshments at a picnic table in the shadow of some lofty pines and an empty swimming pool.

No one actually brought any food, as it turned out, so we left Palmer Park after a few drinks and biked all the way to Mexicantown, a 10-mile trip through a corridor of burned-out buildings in Highland Park, the brick stoops of Clairmount, a long, open stretch on Rosa Parks, into Woodbridge (where I was promised GOATS! but they weren’t out) and Corktown and across the new Bagley pedestrian bridge to margaritas and taco paradise.

A day that started with defeat (OK: delicious brunch, followed by defeat) turned into one of the best, most promising days of the season.

Fort Wayne could close; Lizzie Merrill’s fountain is dry and pillaged; the Senator’s cabin is tagged-up and guarded by clouds of bloodthirsty insects.

But on Sunday evening, the sun was low and the breeze was warm. Kids rode bikes in their driveways and people sat on their porches. At Los Galanes, we watched from the patio while a couple slow-danced in the street.

Detroit’s past matters. A lot. Detroit’s future matters more. But at the risk of sounding trite and kind of drunk, sometimes you need to enjoy where you are and what you’re doing in your own present moment and let that count for something.

Tags: , , , , ,

« Older entries