On Thanksgiving Day, 1920, at high noon, ground broke on Detroit’s new Masonic Temple. Evidently, thousands and thousands of people were there to celebrate. Two years later, in September — with the trowel that George Washington used to lay the bricks of the Capitol building — the cornerstone of the building was laid in...
Read more →Also: when I was moving some photos from my phone to my computer, I found this picture I’d forgotten about, of a stained glass panel at Old Mariner’s Church. Under the city skyline it reads: “I am a citizen of no mean city.” And it gives me a little chill.
Read more →Our Detroit history tour earlier this month left us with some unanswered questions about the fate of several artifacts from old City Hall, which was razed in 1961. We found some! Including a few we weren’t looking for. Let’s check in, shall we? I. THE CAMPUS MARTIUS a. Find cannon from Perry’s...
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 →EDIT: I spent a lot of time yesterday worrying about Eli Blanchard and his regiment, mostly concerned that I’d been a little lazy with my research, so I went back today to comb through the Orson Blair Curtis book one more time. I still wish I knew what instrument he played in the 24th...
Read more →If you’re a regular web visitor to The Night Train, you may notice a little new trim around the windows, as it were. Hope you like it. If you subscribe in a reader, your feed should automatically switch over from the old domain (thenighttrain.wordpress.com) to the new one (nighttraintodetroit.com), but if it fails for...
Read more →Shorpy — the online archive of vintage photos from the 1850s to the 1950s — ran this photo yesterday of downtown Detroit looking north/west on Woodward across Campus Martius. Take a look at this photo full-size: I love the streetcars and early Model Ts, the incredible clothes, the electric signs and billboards. (Also, apropos...
Read more →Construction continues on the new site, which should be up and running by the end of the week, although your friends aboard the Night Train aren’t making any promises. One of the luxuries of writing about history, though, is that isn’t subject to the hyper-fast timeline that directs our daily lives. Taking a few...
Read more →This weekend — with its unbelievable 60 degree weather, a healthy serving of historical adventuring and a rollicking season finale of Mad Men — was one of the best ever. The Hounds Below got down with their howly selves at the Majestic Cafe, we took in a month’s worth of accumulated recyclables, we witnessed...
Read more →Two summers ago, over watermelon mojitos, I met with Captain Rick Hake of Adventure Charter Boats, who shocked me with stories of violent storms and deadly shipwrecks in the Lakes’ waters. “How many people, on average, do you think survived, per wreck?” he asked me. “Twenty,” I flat-out guessed. He smirked and shook his...
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 →For a few weeks, I’ve been compiling some Mad Men-iana for the blog — notes and sources and photos, with an eye toward exploring the first few years of the ’60s as they played out in Detroit. Because the perfectly constructed, jewel-like ’60s of Mad Men is the ’60s of Manhattan white-collar professionals and...
Read more →It’s been a heady week in Detroit, which is part of what’s kept me from the blog for a few days — it’s hard to find quirky historical perspectives on the tense lead-up Devil’s Night and an FBI raid in Dearborn and Detroit that killed a black imam — allegedly an armed, criminal separatist...
Read more →It’s simple, participatory, and pleasant to look at. Did you buy something in Detroit? Post a picture and submit it to Bought in Detroit dot com. I know it seems banal, but how many times has someone from out of town called you to say, “HEY! I heard there are no grocery stores in...
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...
Read more →There is nothing unusual about a deer, I know. They are so populous we need to issue licenses to kill them every year — for their own good. The drive from the southeast corner of Michigan to the western coast of the lake in Wisconsin is measured in deer corpses on the highway shoulder....
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