Living in the D

Category: Architecture

Don't rip down the Michigan Central Depot -- light it up at night!

Here's a modest proposal: We shouldn't tear Detroit's old train station down, as our perpetually misguided City Council (and -- ahem! -- another Detroit newspaper) wants. Instead, somebody should illuminate the great tower at night.

Yes, yes. ArchBlogger knows.

It's a wreck. We should be ashamed. Outsiders will just snicker at our dilapidation.

Rubbish. The train station is a towering icon, our very own Coliseum which, it's worth noting, Rome has been lighting up like a torch for decades.

Tearing the train station down would accomplish nothing apart from robbing the Detroit skyline of drama. Anyone who thinks some big development is going to move in there is just whistling "Dixie." Rather, we ought to softly light the upper stories to add a romantic beacon to the cityscape after dark.

ArchBlogger isn't talking glaring lights, here. Nobody wants to highlight the shattered windows. Instead, any illumination should be soft and silvery -- a shimmering landmark, not a torch.

Not only would it be breathtaking at night, if properly illuminated, A.B. is certain it would goose the sputtering comeback of Michigan Avenue at 14th Street, right across Roosevelt Park from the depot. A lit-up train station would draw kids -- the sorts who support Slows Bar-BQ, L.J.'s Lounge and P.J.'s Lager House, all nearby -- like moths.

And frankly? It's sick-of-the-suburbs children who renovated New York's East Village and Chicago's Wicker Park. Why not give Macomb and Oakland County kids with a taste for urban grit a beacon to aim for?

The nascent commercial strip at Michigan and 14th Street, directly across Roosevelt Park from the train station. That's Slows Bar BQ to the left in the dark-red building.

This also gets to the larger question of Detroit's decay, and our collective embarrassment over it.

It's high time we Detroiters developed a little backbone. New York City in the early 1980s was spectacularly shabby in many places, but that never stopped them from hyping their fabulousness -- in fact, it positively drew visitors, particularly the adventurous young: "Wow, man -- New York is such a bad-ass town. It was totally cool!"

Detroit's reality has a haunting beauty that outsiders, in particular, often recognize and admire. Why not harness that to help some local businesses?

There are practical considerations, of course. The train station -- like the Ambassador Bridge -- is owned by Grosse Pte. businessman Manuel Maroun, and it's unclear whether he'd be interested in lighting a building he may hope to tear down someday.

But there are other scraps of land within a couple hundred feet that aren't his property. Why couldn't some group -- any nonprofits interested? -- get together some money and set up lights?

Sure it's quixotic. But it would make the nearby Corktown commercial neighborhood pop.

More to the point, it would generate a little offbeat urban romance -- precisely what Detroit needs, if it's going to attract more urban pioneers to fill up those empty storefronts along Michigan Avenue, or the abandoned houses across the freeway in North Corktown.

Category: Architecture

Downtown under dramatic clouds

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Gusty, tempestuous clouds drew ArchBlogger, camera clutched in hand, toward the New Center and downtown on Saturday. He spent a good long time with the Fisher Building, and then camped in his car at Cass and Charlotte, where there's a particularly good vista on the towers along the river.

The fruits of that labor follow below -- at least for now, mostly without comment.

The Fisher Building. [All photos by ArchBlogger.]

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The old General Motors Building, now State of Michigan offices since GM's move to Renaissance Center in the late 1990s.

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The recently renovated Westin Book-Cadillac Hotel catches a sliver of pre-sunset light. The Book Building looms left, while the Penobscot Building pokes its head above the hotel.

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Cass Charlotte.

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Downtown seen from a few blocks farther down Cass.

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Downtown from John R just north of the stadiums. The orange towers are, from left, the Guardian Building and the David Stott Building.

Category: Architecture

Inside the Michigan Central Depot

About 12 years ago, ArchBlogger and Donna Terek -- a marvelous photographer at The Detroit News -- spent a couple months following a homeless man around who called the Michigan Central Depot home.

Catfish, as he called himself, was an interesting character, not least because he approached being homeless with a camper's can-do spirit, and because he'd appointed himself the architectural conservator of what little remained of the interior detailing -- exhorting the (mostly suburban, white) kids who'd come down on weekends to, in effect, smash whatever they could get their hands on, or reach with a rock. (In the '90s, the station acted as a sort of destructo-Disneyland for such bored youths.)

In any case, A.B. hadn't been inside in years, but Phillip Cooley -- co-owner of the nearby Slows Bar BQ -- had a key to the padlock, and was kind enough to let him in last week.

Alas, sunset light was not streaming through the great, ruined, west-facing windows. That poetic shot will have to wait another day. But A.B. did at least get to reacquaint himself with the space and shoot some images, for which he thanks Phillip.

Phillip Cooley, slightly out of focus, in the depot's grand old waiting room, a vast and satisfying space, even today.

Dig the Doric columns by the windows. The damage at the top, by the way, wasn't there 12 years ago.

The station's interior was an interesting mix of mostly classical-revival with Egyptian-revival overtones, and late-Victorian frou-frou, like the large flowerets that arced across the ceiling. It's almost as if the designers, Warren & Wetmore -- who did NYC's Grand Central Station -- were afraid to go all the way with their classical references.

ArchBlogger can say from personal experience -- when the wind whips through the station, what's left of the roof sets to banging like the soundtrack to a slasher film.

An ominous warning.

Category: Architecture

Hygienic Dress League strikes again!

Those who appreciate a little grassroots anarchy in their cities will be glad to know that the Hygienic Dress League is back at work in Detroit.

"Look, Mabel! Some artist-types are putting up amusing placards on Detroit's crumbling infrastructure!"

Let's face it: Life can be grim. We all need a little ironic poke here and there.

ArchBlogger's devoted readers will recall HDL's panels on the old Grand Army of the Republic "castle" on Cass Avenue.

The new work is on nearby Park Avenue, gracing the old Charlevoix Hotel across from Cliff Bells tavern.

Shocking pink, and splayed all across the decrepit Charlevoix Hotel, is the newest zap by the Hygienic Dress League art-vandals. [Photos by Steve Coy]

The traditional HDL (isn't that a type of cholesterol, too?) elements we've become accustomed to are here, like the silhouetted birds down at the bottom, and the French fleur-de-lis. New, however, are the intriguingly ominous gas masks.

Interestingly, the evil geniuses behind HDL -- Steve Coy and Dorota Bilica -- always get permission before installing a mural. At first, ArchBlogger felt that robbed their work of some of its appealing "guerrilla" quality. On the other hand, it sure guarantees that works stay up longer.

For comparison purposes, the Hygienic Dress League's first Detroit foray into rebel-art, on the Grand Army of the Republic "castle" at Grand River and Cass. This work, by the way, is still up, and has, miraculously, never been defaced.

Category: Architecture

Random Detroit images

ArchBlogger spent the color-saturated hours of the late afternoon a couple Sundays ago tooling around Detroit and Hamtramck, and generated a few images he likes. He throws them up here to see if his loyal readers feel the same, or no.

ArchBlogger likes this busy Detroit roofline. He wishes he could remember where it is, but he can't. [All pictures by ArchBlogger]

Taken from Lawton St. just north of W. Warren, near I-96. Who knew the Ambassador Bridge lined up perfectly with Lawton? And dig the non-functioning traffic signals. (Apologies for the shot's fuzzy telephoto-ness.)

Failed dreams on Oakland Ave., south of Holbrooke near Hamtramck -- all that remains of somebody's ice-cream parlour.

Pallister Street in New Center Commons, north of the Fisher Building. ArchBlogger usually loathes the Detroit habit of sealing off streets or closing access routes (see Virginia Park at Woodward, especially) as a way of enhancing security. But in this case, the bricked-in pedestrian block at Pallister between Third and Bethune Court is quite heavenly, and lined with stolid, four-square brick homes.

Are pictures of water towers a cliche? A.B. could give a rip. He's been in love with them ever since his first visit to New York City, and relishes their contribution to Detroit's industrial skyline every bit as much.

Category: Architecture

Incidental Fisher Building views

No matter where you go around Detroit, Albert Kahn's Fisher Building -- a 1929 art deco masterpiece -- always seems to be poking up somewhere on the horizon. The following random shots have no particular meaning. ArchBlogger just likes them.

From Pallister Street in New Center Commons, a much-overlooked, gorgeous residential neighborhood renovated by General Motors in the 1980s. [All photos by ArchBlogger]

From the southwest, perhaps 10 blocks away.

Looking south from the Boston-Edison Historic District. That's the old General Motors Building, across Grand Boulevard, to the left of the Fisher tower.

Again, from the west edge of New Center Commons. Delaware Street, unless A.B.'s mistaken.

Category: Architecture

Grand River views

The great thing about Detroit's radial axes that rocket out from downtown -- Grand River, Gratiot, Michigan, etc. -- is that most have significant views at the end, like the following shot several miles out Grand River.

ArchBlogger believes the term is "visual terminus" -- a building, or cluster of buildings in this case, in the middle of the road that anchors one's view. Think Paris, and how many of its grand boulevards have something magnificent smack-dab in the center, way down at the horizon line. Or think Washington, D.C. (New York City, interestingly -- despite the visual drama of its avenues -- has little of this, a reflection, perhaps, of its ruthlessly pragmatic road system.)

Of course, Napoleon III created those breathtaking Parisian sightlines in the mid-1800s by ruthlessly bulldozing (or whatever) thousands of dwelling places, ramming his arrow-straight boulevards at some grand monument or edifice.

We don't do things that way in America, at least not since the completion of the interstate highway system, and A.B. guesses we should all be glad. That said, it would still be fun if a few more great American avenues had something cool to look at, much the way that the Book Building, Renaissance Center and the Comerica Tower act like a collective exclamation point in this shot of Grand River.

Thanks to the magic of telephoto lenses, this shot taken several miles west from downtown on Grand River makes the avenue look a lot denser and more crowded than it actually is. [All photos by ArchBlogger.]

ArchBlogger's always loved Paradise Chop Suey, not least for its old-fashioned name (when A.B. was a mere slip of a lad, Chinese food hereabouts was chop suey, and little else), but also for the little building's triumphant red. Location? Roughly Grand River and Chicago.

Across Grand River and up half a block from Paradise Chop Suey is one of innumerable corner banks from the teens or Twenties -- invariably built in some classical-revival style -- that has since been converted into a storefront church. Call it "From Mammon to Sermon on the Mount." The little honey above is the New Light Baptist Church Annex. (New Light itself is around the corner on Chicago, and a poke-your-eyes-out sandstone pile WELL worth a visit.) It's A.B.'s contention that New Light -- and any congregation that's taken over a onetime bank -- deserves our thanks for preserving a rich little detail in Detroit's built environment.

Note how the triangular pediment over the door penetrates the "circular" window above it -- a nice, unexpected intersection of geometry and materials. (Alright, so it looks like the circular window no longer has glass in it. But it clearly did at one point.)

Category: Architecture

The virtues of an unsteady camera

Sometimes a shaky grip works to the photographer's advantage, lending a certain abstact charm to what otherwise might have been a pffft picture.

In that humble spirit, ArchBlogger offers the following nighttime shot.

Detroit's Penobscot Building at night, seen through the lens of a wobbly camera. ArchBlogger has always admired the lighting scheme -- by Gary Steffy Lighting Design of Ann Arbor -- which this critic thinks is as visually hip as anything he's seen in the show-off cities on the coasts.

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Category: Architecture

Atop the Guardian Building, 486 feet of ecstasy

One of ArchBlogger's longstanding desires was fulfilled on a sunny day a week ago when he finally scored access to the Guardian Building's 40th story roofdeck. Many thanks to the Sterling Group, which manages the building, for the chance, and the really great tour by facilities manager Rick Hohn.

Just getting to the roof was deeply satisfying. You take the main elevator up to a very high floor. Then switch to a smaller, upper-stories-only elevator (it reminded A.B. a bit of the World Trade Center, which had the same idea), with the last several stories accessible only by stairway. Then you open the door, light floods in, and -- bam! -- all Detroit lays itself out at your feet.

Alas, the roof isn't open to the public. As President Carter famously said, life is unfair. A.B. got in because he was working on a story about Detroit's fabulous orange-brick, art deco masterpiece.

The Guardian was designed by architect Wirt Rowland at the celebrated firm Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, now the SmithGroup. (For U-Mich graduates, they also did Rackham Hall on central campus.) The Guardian is located at Congress and Griswold, just west of Woodward.

The roofdeck is maybe 30 feet beneath the Guardian's haystack peak with the American flag. The building actually has two summits -- the one at the south end is a couple stories lower. [All photos by ArchBlogger]

Two overlapping Wirt Rowland masterpieces -- the Guardian and the Penobscot Building.

Another Wirt Rowland design, the Buhl Building right across Griswold.

Downtown's other orange-brick skyscraper, the David Stott (not "Scott") Building on Capitol Park.

The David Stott Building on the right, the now-abandoned Book Building on the left, and the crapoid Trolley Plaza apartment building in-between.

Capitol Park, at State and Griswold, and only partly shown here, is a triangular space entirely walled in by large buildings. That's the David Stott Building on the right.

City fathers have loused things up in recent years by making it into an outdoor bus station, but that should soon end with the opening of the new central bus station on Cass at Michigan. And not a moment too soon. While it gets little recognition, Capitol Park -- a bit like Harmonie Park across Woodward -- is one of Detroit's coolest urban spaces in large part because of its irregular shape, and the unusual sense of enclosure the building walls provide. In Chicago, it would be prime upper-end real estate.

Back to the Penobscot. And take a look the next time you're downtown after dark. The Penobscot has the coolest nighttime illumination in the city, hands down, which plays on the art deco facade's countless setbacks and ledges. It's best viewed on an angle, rather than straight on. Take a look from Eastern Market, and it can take your breath away. Wayne State English prof and keen Detroit observer Jerry Herron calls the lighting scheme "the best example of urbanism in the city."

Albert Kahn's far-distant Fisher Building. Right in front is another Kahn behemoth, the dark-brown Argonaut Building -- the one with two white refuse tubes hanging from the upper stories.

Remarkably given the economy and everything, the College for Creative Studies is renovating the Argonaut into a vast new design center, a dormitory, and an arts-themed charter school in a $136 million project that opens in September.

But returning to the Fisher Building momentarily ... Sunday, feeling a little obstreperous, ArchBlogger took the gloves off and had at the nighttime illumination of the Fisher Building, contending that it works poorly -- in large part because they're trying to turn a green surface gold. Pure white light, he argued, would make the copper-clad mansard roof glow like an emerald lit from within.

A lively discussion popped up on detroityes.com shortly after A.B. posted these somewhat intemperate remarks on the subject (he employed "dimwit," among other pejoratives he now regrets), prompting IzzyinDetroit and, more energetically, DetroitCity, to make the argument that the Fisher roof was historically gold, hence the illumination scheme. A.B. thanks each of them for that excellent bit of history. But that said, the point still remains that the roof is now copper green, not gold. Were it the latter, particularly if it were gilt or shiny, A.B. would be all over lighting it up to magnify the glow.

It comes down to a question of what works and what doesn't. Pouring as much yellow light on a green roof as possible does not yield a convincingly warm golden glow. As A.B. said above, it yields a muddy shade that looks like sodium-vapor highway lights were somehow involved. In this case, A.B. would argue the attachment to history works against beauty.

The view east, with the variegated blue facade of the Greektown Casino Hotel, at left.

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Category: Architecture

A salute to Detroit's Inn on Ferry Street

Why anyone in search of a downtown Detroit hotel would stay anywhere other than the Inn on Ferry Street, a stone's throw from the Detroit Institute of Arts, mystifies ArchBlogger.

The Inn on Ferry Street was jointly created in 2001 by the University Cultural Center Association (the stellar nonprofit behind most good things that happen around Midtown and the Cultural Center) and the DIA, which owned the houses and had at one point planned to knock them down for a freestanding contemporary-art wing.

They'd be such a lovely hotel to come home to.

The Inn is comprised of four side by side mini-mansions and two carriage houses one block north of the DIA, on the street that for a couple eyeblinks around 1895 was the address for the city's industrial elite, before the monied set roared north to the Boston-Edison neighborhood.

You know where Ferry Street is, even if you can't quite place it: It's the street anchored on the Woodward corner by what generations of Detroiters knew as the "Smiley Organ" castle, the whoop-ti-do chateau-style pile built in 1891 by big-deal Philadelphia architect Louis Kamper (who also built the astonishing chateau-police station on Grand River at Commonwealth, as well as - ahem! - the Book Building and the Book-Cadillac Hotel).

Happily, in the late 1990s, its owner -- the Charfoos & Christiansen law firm -- did a top-to-bottom restoration that was nothing short of A-plus. If memory serves A.B. (it doesn't always), the motive force was Doug Peters, one of the partners with a passion for historic renovation.

NOT part of the Inn on Ferry Street, but rather a shouting distance neighbor at E. Ferry and Woodward. Built by Col. Frank J. Hecker, railroad magnate, the house was for decades the home to the Smiley organ and piano company. A couple more up-close pictures of the mansion and its carriage house follow, and then we'll get back to the Inn.

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The mansion's roofline is a veritable free-for-all of exuberant detail.

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A pretty-darned enchanting detail on the carriage house's little tower.

But back to the Inn.

Mostly built in the 1890s (at least two are by Detroit architect John Scott), the four mini-mansions that make up Detroit's Inn on Ferry Street had fallen into near collapse before being rescued.

Renovated to within an inch of their lives by Ypsilanti architect extraordinaire Liz Knibbe and a marvelous interiors woman at UCCA (whose name currently escapes ArchBlogger), these are stupendously handsome old Queen Anne houses from the 1890s -- grand, imposing, and full of the kind of detail that's completely vanished from American home-building (unless, of course, you're a devotee of Sarah Susanka and her brilliant "The Not-So-Big House" books).

Built by a German immigrant who got rich in the hardware business, this home originally had a billiard room on the third floor, and is the closest of the four houses to Woodward.

The Inn falls under the rubric "boutique urban hotel," but it's not nearly as stupid as that sounds. The building renovations were A-plus, and the period furniture -- much of it gorgeous art deco stuff -- was sold at cost by the Masco Corporation, which allowed for a huge step-up in quality and overall gorgeousness.

Both bedrooms and public rooms -- the Inn functions as a bed-and-breakfast -- are handsome enough to make you smile.

A.B. has a personal reason for his enthusiasm -- the central house, 84 E. Ferry -- the one where you register and eat breakfast -- was the Hodges family home from 1905 to 1969. As he always likes to say, the Hodges were something in this town before the Depression.

After her death in 1969 (yes, at home), A.B.'s great-Aunt Hazel left the house to the old child-psych research enterprise, the Merrill-Palmer Institute, which eventually got folded into Wayne State.

The Hodges family manse -- ArchBlogger's people -- from 1905 to 1969, where A.B. spent many Sunday afternoons sitting on those steps as a kid. He'd also like to say that the house has never looked better, particularly with its great new paint job. When his people owned it, they favored a disagreeable shade of dark brown, as if the intent was to make the house disappear.

Right across from the Inn houses are the aforementioned Hecker castle and Charles Lang Freer's astonishing Long Island shingle-style mini-mansion.

Yes, it's the house that once contained Whistler's poke-your-eyes-out Peacock Room (its second home after a London townhouse), and the self-same house whose artistic contents, mostly Asian, formed the nucleus of the Freer Collection, a free-standing Asian museum that's part of the Smithsonian Institution. (Freer, who became a millionaire as the accountant to Col. Hecker's railroad enterprise in the post-Civil War era, was one of the earliest, serious American collectors of Asian art, an enterprise he approached with academic rigor.)

A detail of the Freer mansion, across from the Inn on Ferry Street. Alas, this was the only part of the building in sunlight when A.B. happened by.

The Inn's houses are a glorious reminder of a high point in late-19th century residential design in Detroit. Managed by the Marriott Corp. (but not owned), friends who've stayed there -- some rather demanding sorts -- have said that the Inn experience was enjoyable from check-in to check-out. In another plus for out-of-towners, the Inn has a van that will take you at a moment's notice anywhere within several miles of E. Ferry.

In a city once thick with mansions, the Inn on Ferry Street houses are a reminder of how handsome such can look even after they've fallen into near collapse. It's also an object lesson in how much better old, urban neighborhoods look when you stick with the original infrastructure, rather than knocking it down in favor of brand-new, faux-old "townhouses" of the sort that have been built several blocks west of the Inn.