james scott fountain

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Links for Friday, 5-20-11

May 20, 2011 in Uncategorized | No comments

Wow, it’s nice outside, huh? That’s about all we can think about today. Bike rides this weekend? We think so.

[Via Virtual Motor City]

Kickstarter of the week: Did you know that Eleanor Roosevelt broke ground on the Brewster-Douglass housing projects in 1935? We did not. But news of this project encouraged us to learn more. So we donated! Also, there are kittens in the trailer.

High nerd season: Preservation Wayne walking tours (Saturday mornings/Tuesday afternoons) are afoot (HAR HAR). Also: sesquicentennial fever! The Henry Ford’s summer blockbuster Civil War exhibit opens tomorrow. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look. I’m sure you’ve heard that the Emancipation Proclamation is coming to town, but did you realize that it will only be here for 24 hours — and the Museum will be open the entire time? I can’t be the only person that thought, “OH MY GOD HUGE PARTY FOLLOWED BY 3 A.M. EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION VIEWING” when I learned that.

emancipation proclamation

No bad prank goes unpunished: Does the rascally spirit of Jim Scott seek to destroy its very creation? Or is it just bad luck? During his Fountain’s restoration, most of the Pewabic tiles in its basin were trashed. Friends of Belle Isle is hosting a fundraiser on June 3 to help cover the costs of recreating the tiles to original specifications. We should all attend. Dressed as Jim Scott, in top hats, bow ties and carrying canes. (More on Jim Scott here and here.)

Epic: Sweet Juniper does it again. A witty post in epic poem form would have been enough. Throw in cute pictures of a kid in a Greek warrior costume AND delightfully fanciful cemetery photography and you have something pretty damn special.

Three cheers: Thanks to The Detroit News for helping the Detroit Public Library correct an accounting error that would have forced the closure of up to 10 branch libraries and hundreds of lay-offs. Journalism is still alive, well and relevant in Detroit! SO ARE BOOKS! It’s a feel-good story for the ages, as long as you don’t think about it too hard.

What else? I’m still catching up from all that time off AND I’m on a book deadline now, so I feel really out of the loop.

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Detroit’s other micro-funded public art project

February 14, 2011 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History | 4 comments

In 1901, 60-year-old Hazen Pingree — Detroit mayor, Michigan governor, potato-patcher, Idol of the People —  died in London on his return trip from an African safari. As soon as the report hit the streets in Detroit (“within minutes,” reports Dan at BuildingsofDetroit.com), readers started calling the paper offering donations for a monument.

The iconic seated Ping that has presided over Grand Circus Park since 1904 was funded by over 5,000 people. The average donation to the project: between 25 cents and a dollar.

I know I said I didn’t really want to talk about Robocop (also, are we still talking about Robocop?), but the project’s much-ballyhoo’d Kickstarter campaign has made me that much more awed by and appreciative of how much people adored Hazen Pingree.

It also occurred to me that we’d be remiss if we neglected to mention, in our heated public debates about the Robocop statue, the heated public debate that raged for five years over the Scott Fountain on Belle Isle (and accompanying life-size statue of Jim Scott). When I’m really feeling bummed about Robocop, it’s nice to remember how many people really loathed Jim Scott (and if indeed he was a scumbag, he was a REAL LIFE scumbag, and not just an imaginary robot). And that turned out a-okay. Except the fountain keeps getting scrapped. But other than that. It’s a joy to behold. Perhaps Robocop will be as well.

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More on James Scott, “Detroit’s Boss Romancer.”

April 21, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History | No comments

So. I have become a little single-minded about Jim Scott, whose magnificent fountain on Belle Isle was cause for tremendous contention when it was built.

On an excursion to the Burton last week, I dug up a charming profile of “Detroit’s Boss Romancer” from the March 14, 1885 edition of the Detroit Tribune. Like many newspaper stories of the day, it doesn’t seem to have much of a point besides to give the reader some amusing information about somebody they may or may not know, but Scott’s joke about the dead man in the saloon made me laugh out loud at the microfiche machine, causing alarm amongst the librarians. Maybe you’ve heard it?

One of [Scott's] stories is about a two men who sat up with the body of a dead man who had died near a saloon. Every few minutes during the night the watchers had adjourned to the gin mill for something to drink. At last their money gave out and they were refused credit. They then carried the late respected into the bar and stood him up against it.

“Our friend wants drinks here,” said one of the men. Three drinks were handed out. Two were drank, and when the barkeeper wasn’t looking, the drink for the unconscious man was swallowed by one of the friends. Then the watchers went out and pepped through a window awaiting results. Pretty soon the bartender asked the remaining man for pay for the drinks. as he received no answer, he asked again, and then again. Suddenly he grabbed a bung-starter and struck the quiet man to the floor.

“Ah ha!” shouted the watchers rushing in and picked up their dead friend. “You’ve killed him.”

“Well, supposin’ I did? He drawed a knife on me first.”

More amusing facts from the Trib story that made me smile include his fondness for a particular style of neckwear:

… He never wants to wear any other necktie but a white bow. He probably does this because he has a sort of solid, professional look, and likes to appear like a member of the bar.

As well as his great love for bagpipes:

Jim is passionately fond of music on an Irish bagpipe and says the only time he feels romantic is when he can sit down in a small room and have some fellow with a pair of lungs like an emigrant’s valise play “The Devil’s Dream” on the bagpipes.

The article, however, is quick to temper Scott’s cleverness with a brief coda that he may, in fact, be insufferable:

He never tells the same story twice, and does not depend on traveling men for his stock of stories, but invents them himself. He tells lots of funny things in different dialects … There is one friend of Jim’s, however, who insists that he dishes up old chestnuts, and when this friend sees the joker coming, he runs and hides in the hay-mow.

One person who was NOT running for the hay-mow, who in fact confirmed Scott’s skill at funny voices was — YOU GUESSED IT! — General Friend Palmer, who wrote of his good friend Jim in Early Days that “on the order of dialect story telling … he is unapproachable.”

I don’t think a statue of this guy was such a bad idea. In fact, I really love it. There. I said it.

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Practically Blameless: James Scott and his Memorial Fountain

April 13, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History | 2 comments

james scott

Poor James Scott. Was he really so repugnant a creature as Detroit society painted him in the years after his death and before the construction of his grand fountain on Belle Isle?

The heir to a real estate fortune didn’t do much to earn himself a monument quite this enduring, and the condition he placed on building one of the country’s greatest marble fountains with almost the entirety of his estate — that it come with a life-sized commemorative  statue of himself — reeks of either pathological self-importance or a deliriously smug joke.

I just found this article from the January 29, 1911 issue of The New York Times on the end of the fight over Scott’s contentious fountain. Wait, it made national news? Oh, it did. The article begins:

This is the story of a man who led a practically blameless life for eighty years, according to the preponderance of testimony, as blameless as that of the average man at least, who loved his home, his family, his friends, and his city, the latter so much that when he died he left five-sixths of a fortune of $600,000 to the municipality of Detroit with which to build a fountain on Belle Isle, and who has been since his death, a year ago, unmercifully reviled for his generosity. James Scott was his name — ”Jim” he was universally called.

Sure, the article goes on to admit. There was that “hog block” incident, where Scott hung a giant gilded pig statue near some grocers that made him mad. And “Scott’s Folly,” of course, in which the millionaire built a mansion he never meant to occupy, gorgeous from the front, nothing but a high brick wall in the back to block the neighbor’s light and devalue the lot.

But remember, reminded the Times in 1911. James Scott, branded a gambler and a lowlife, just had a “cynical view of human nature” after his generosity with his own money, loaned to dozens of needy friends, was betrayed. Oh, and because that one time, he lost $86,000 in a faro game in St. Louis. The house wasn’t playing fair, though. So you can understand why he might be bitter. Plus, he had friends in high places (Senator Thomas Palmer; US Postmaster General Don M. Dickinson, Lord Sideburns)  to defend his honor.

I don’t know a lot about Mr. Scott and his fountain besides the second- and third-hand accounts I’ve read, and it does make me suspicious that the biggest objection to this gift would be the fact that he liked poker and ribaldry at the Russell House. He probably wasn’t alone.

So far be it from me to believe the rumors that he was a mean-hearted playboy who never amounted to anything. Even if he was, his fountain — designed by architect Cass Gilbert, made of white marble and completed in 1925 — is pretty great, so I’ll forgive him. Any reason why I shouldn’t? Let me know.

scott fountain no fence

(Not in its full glory for the season quite yet — when I visited last week, it looked like the Fountain was undergoing some brick work.)

(Oh, AND! In that pile of Kodachrome slides from my dad’s closet we found a ton of night shots of the Scott Fountain. As I’m digitizing them, by the way, I’ll be sharing them on one of those new-fangled “Tumble blogs” the kids seem to like. Not much to look at yet, but stick with us. We’re going places.)

(detroitfamilyalbum.tumblr.com)

scott fountain at night

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