DETROIT — A crowd in suits and gowns mingled below arched windows, 27,000-pound cast-iron chandeliers, and a 54-foot-high Guastavino tile-vaulted ceiling, atop “original Tennessee rose-colored marble” floors, to celebrate the rescue of an architectural marvel — and a new day for their city.
The scene earlier this week was a party in the grand hall of Detroit’s restored Beaux Arts Michigan Central Station. Detroit decided in 2009 to tear down the crumbling, vandalized former main train station, which since its 1988 closure had become a symbol of the city’s decline. Ironically, it then couldn’t find the money to demolish. Preservationists stepped in, then the Ford Motor Company. Ford enlisted more than 3,000 skilled tradespeople to spend six years rebuilding the complex. They started by draining 3.5 million gallons of water from the basement, patching over 1,000 holes found below debris, then restoring and recreating the original fixtures. The building reopened amid fanfare this June as part of a 30-acre campus including Ford’s electric vehicle division, a hotel, eateries, event spaces, shops, and a tech start-up hub focused on “mobility solutions.”
The official purpose of the party was the launch of a coffee-table book documenting the transformation called The Station: The Fall and Rise of Michigan Central.
The broader purpose of the evening was for movers and shakers to toast a revival of a city that has started growing and innovating again after the disappearance of factory jobs led to the disappearance of two-thirds of the population and the pride of a community once known for putting America’s cars on the road and Aretha Franklin and Motown hits on the car radio.
I was in Detroit on a scouting trip to launch a new hub of the Independent Review Crew. The New Haven Independent’s nonprofit parent organization (the Online Journalism Project) launched that project a year ago, seeding a network of arts reviewers in cities across the country publishing in local outlets as well as a curated site called Midbrow. Our mission is to figure out how to recreate the disappearing practice of publishing local in-person reviews (as opposed to previews or features) of the local concerts, plays, and visual art exhibits that strengthen and connect people living in cities. The way we and other nonprofit newsrooms set out two decades ago to figure out a way to revive the vanishing practice of in-person reporting of local school and zoning boards and community news. (Read more about the Review Crew here.)
A visit to Detroit reminded me of most of the other cities in our network, including Tulsa, Oakland, Philadelphia, and New Haven. Arts scenes are key drivers of how these once-dynamic cities are “rebounding” after decades of post-industrial, post-white flight, post-urban renewal devastation. The people invested in these scrappy, soulful underdog cities are wrestling with how to preserve their grit and build on their distinctive identities amid the generic power-wash of speculation and gentrification.
Journalist and public-radio host Ryan Patrick Hooper got me into the Monday night Central Station bash. (Like any seasoned reporter, he inevitably ends up at newsworthy gatherings with free food and cocktails.)
Ryan (pictured above at his Royko-esque “office,” the cozy Bronx Bar), has watched the “comeback” of his beloved native city with that mix of enthusiasm and skepticism. Hooper used to review several concerts or gallery shows or plays a week for local media outlets. As in other cities in our network, the shrinking traditional (even alternative) media no longer has space for any of that reviewing. Ryan will help head up our Detroit bureau. (In fact he popped in on a less formal event later Monday and filed his first review.)
For all his questions about who will benefit from the city’s growing tech and arts efforts and bike lanes, Ryan seemed excited about the gleaming new Central Station. Its towering nighttime lighting offered a beacon of evidence-based hope that serious money and jobs and energy are indeed returning.
Kiana Wenzell lifted a glass in a communal toast at Monday’s event to the station’s and the city’s revival. She described her own hopes in tandem with the revival. Like many Black auto workers, her dad moved to Detroit decades ago from the Deep South for a job at Ford. He was able to retire from that job. Wenzell has developed a design business poised to participate in the massive rebuilding of vacant properties just getting underway in her native city. She gushed about seeing Diana Ross perform along with other Detroit music royalty (Eminem, Jack White) at an early Grand Station coming-out event. She felt part of this latest communal celebration.
Sean Blackman found his way to Monday’s night’s celebration too. I didn’t learn that fact until I met him on Tuesday night at the cozy Northern Lights Lounge (think a mix of New Haven’s ‘80s-vintage Clarence’s Court Jester and Emerson’s), where he was leading his trio’s weekly Cuban, Lebanese, Puerto Rican-flavored jazz gig. Blackman, who’s 54, grew up on Detroit’s Eight Mile Road. He remembered breaking into the ravaged former Michigan Central station as a teen; he said it was a rite of passage. He welcomed its rebirth. The proliferation of new venues is keeping him gigging more than 250 nights a year. He lamented that the new venues add their performance spaces as cramped corners unlike the musician-centered stages at places like Northern Lights.
Blackman told me that between sets while fueling up on garlic pita chips and hummus (which he shared). Back onstage with his amped classical guitar, he played an original song he wrote in 5/4 time inspired by oud playing he remembered dancing to at church events while growing up in Detroit’s Armenian community. Click on the video above to hear why I was moved to record it.
Detroit’s history cropped up in spots grand and hidden, like the Two James Spirits distillery tasting room inside a nondescript block-long brick building a block from Michigan Central in the bustling Corktown neighborhood (named after the county in Ireland from where families emigrated during the Potato Famine). A half-dozen people were inside there Monday night sampling spirits the distillery makes across the street, including a novel (and sublime) bourbon-scotch mixed called J. Riddle. Click on the above video to watch the distillery manager explain how it’s made — and how its inspiration comes from one of Detroit’s best-known legendary figures, the late Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa.
The optimistic arts-and-culture can be found at established Detroit institutions like the Motown Museum (tour recommended), which is looking to complete an expansion by 2026 …
… and in the aspirations of newly arrived creatives like indie filmmaker Tom E. Brown (pictured). Brown (who started his career in New Haven three decades ago) moved to the Motor City on Halloween from the Bay Area. He’s already hosted a screening and is talking up industry incentives. He’s looking to organize a Detroit film festival as a spur to reviving a cinema scene in some of the grand former theater spaces.
For all the evidence of Detroit’s revival, the extent of remaining blight awaiting rebuilding cannot be understated. Even in “The 7.2” acres encompassing the six or so core neighborhoods where most of the creative action is taking place, I still encountered vacant lots and abandoned houses and commercial edifices pretty much every other block as I walked for miles across the city during my four-day stay.
I also encountered murals. Murals upon murals. Official civic-sanctioned public art …
… semi-official murals …
… determined …
… human …
… ecclesiastical …
… and unofficial murals. It was in those reimagined canvasses that I most of all sensed the spiritual yet clear-eyed aspirations of a city that refused to lay down and die. I’m looking forward to following the next steps of its rugged and raw cultural journey.
