The Detroit Boat Club, founded in 1839, is the oldest in the country. Its home on Belle Isle is crumbling, compelling, and calls home centuries of water sport.
Read more →Walter Owen Briggs: unshakable, lavishly wealthy, sentimental, racist, beloved, reviled. Someone should write an opera about him.
Read more →Old, beautiful, mysterious and open to the public twice a year.
Read more →The old Log Cabin at Palmer Park. Why a log cabin? What did it look like inside? Did people really live in it?
Read more →A Hungarian chocolate mousse torte recipe with a tantalizing connection to Detroit history.
Read more →Dear Detroit: Happy birthday. And chin up.
Read more →The heartbroken wolverine at the Belle Isle Zoo.
Read more →Fake eviction notices in Detroit. From 1837.
Read more →An astronomical clock built in Detroit was a marvel of the modern world.
Read more →A brief scrapbook of Detroiters, Veterans and countrymen (and women) from the Revolution to the Civil War.
Read more →A brief biography of Ebenezer Rogers, a.k.a. "Squirrel-Tooth," a.k.a. "Old Famine," who ate everything, leered at women and got in a lot of fights.
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The cities share a lot, including the Commandant himself: Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac.
Read more →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...
Read more →It’s not the likeliest place for a hallowed memorial to a decorated officer of the Revolutionary War. But here he lies, along growly old Jos. Campau, across the street from an L.A. Insurance. There’s a certain satisfaction to swinging open one of the iron gates that picket the tomb of Colonel Jean-Francois Hamtramck. You...
Read more →On the Belle Isle Casino, where the author will be wed.
Read more →Something to think about when we think about the Robocop statue.
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