Old Detroit

Last month I had the pleasure of introducing my new German girlfriend to the old Detroit I grew up in (1930-49). She's an Ossie, so she's used to visual disasters. But we both found parts of our journey down Woodward Avenue from 14 Mile to Jefferson scary.

We traveled SMARTly by bus from our Days Inn in Madison Heights--to be near my college chum in Troy who was to chauffeur us around on the three other days of our stay, exploring my old Denby neighborhood and our University of Detroit venues. But we began on Woodward. I should begin by saying how efficient and cheap the SMART bus service was--$l.50 for her, 50 cents for me, with schedules that kept us from standing long on street corners.

At 14 Mile Road, I told her about Cranbrook up the road (which we visited the next day by car to find their exhibition on the Saarinens' plans for Detroit) and how I discovered Architecture with a capital "A" there with Eliel's designs and Carl Milles' sculptures giving my sensibility a permanent Scandinavian bent. I explained the smart suburbs of Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills and how many of my most successful friends moved out there, abandoning the center city to its troubled fate.

At Eleven Mile, there was a short lecture on Father Coughlin and his Shrine of the Little Flower and how my U of D sociology prof, Father John Coogan, S.J., fought to contain the radio priest's anti-Semitism. And how the German nuns at Holy Rosary Academy in Bay City (where I boarded for 10 years while my single mom taught middle school in Hamtramck to support me and my brother)listened to him religiously every Sunday. (I still love the world class Art Deco of the buildings--bad radio can finance great architecture!)

At Eight Mile I showed her where my mother spent her last years in Southfield. And where a few years ago I had interviewed Dick Clark at the Michigan State Fair. (We had shared a TV crew at WFIL-TV when I was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.) The crew used to kid me for the miniscule audiences for my telecourse on architecture.

Heh, I countered: Give me a gaggle of South Philly fillies and watch my ratings soar. (It was not to be--they couldn't spell "architecture".)I also pointed to Eastwood Gardens right off at Gratiot where I loved dancing under the stars to the likes of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and Gene Krupa.

At Seven Mile, I told her about my dismal golf game at Palmers Park as I tried to impress the father of my first serious girl friend, a Denby buddy. (It was so disenchanting an experience that I swore off golf played or observed until Tiger Woods brought me back.)

At Six Mile, I pointed left to where we lived and right where I went to college and what a long tedious bus ride it was. Missing was the Varsity Theatre where I had seen Bob Chester's orchestra when they tried to start a big band policy.

Then things began to get dismal. I hyped the Ford Plant in Highland Park (where Fordismus, which still influences the Germans heavily) got started in 1913. But the apartment we lived in across from Highland Park High School had simply disappeared. As had another one we lived in later across from Blessed Sacrament Cathedral. As we passed Chicago Boulevard, I told her we'd visit Sacred Heart Seminary tomorrow, where I spent almost three years until Monsignor Donnelly caught me and Jim Van Slambrouck trying to learn how to smoke at midnight in the Gothic Tower. Cough, cough. He booted me into Denby during Easter Vacation. The only things that seemed changed there were a statue with a black face (welcome) and a fortified fence (which said WATCH OUT.)

Then things began to get really run down. With a brief oasis, but not as green as they had hoped for twenty years before, at the New Center. I told her about Albert Kahn, the great industrial architect who designed the GM World HQ (and whom Uof M's Art Museum is honoring as part of the Detroit Tricentennial). I also pointed out his Fisher Building because its illuminated tower had a crucial place in my family history.

My Uncle Dan Fitzpatrick who dispatched the delivery trucks at the old Crowley-Milners informed me as a goggle-eyed four year old that that was the GilleyHoo Bird's Nest. And every night he came back to our house on Mendota, he'd say, shortly after settling down to read The Detroit Times. "Did you hear that swooshing sound, Patrick? Check and see if it was the GilleyHoo Bird.) So I would eagerly search the outside window ledge which Our Bird favored and sure enough there'd be a Baby Ruth, or a Mounds, or a Twix--The GilleyHoo was amazingly catholic in his benefactions.

But the high point was our passing Orchestra Hall. I told her how I used to play hooky in high school to see what we then called the big "colored" name bands--the Duke, the Count, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Erskine Hawkins, you name it, we heard it. And that my humanistic education began at the Paradise. In 1980, burying my brother, I was in a sentimental mood. So I went by the Paradise, which had been shuttered by rock music to find a most interesting Bicentennial Year plaque.

It seems the Grosse Pointe nabobs, like all nouveaux riches everywhere, decided in 1919 they needed Culture. So they brought a pianist/composer from Warsaw to form the Detroit Symphony Orchestra --and then forced them to play in the acoustical equivalent of a junor high cafeteria. He rebelled. Get me a decent performance space or I'm going back to Poland. They did, in record time, build him Orchestra Hall, which no less an ear than Pablo Casals called the best performance space in North America.

But then the affluent whites moved North, and it became my Paradise. It remained empty for years and years until the benignly obsessed oboist in the Symphony raised millions and millions to refurbish and reopen it in November l989 with the 500,000th Steinway commissioned to the sculpture Wendell Castle. A few years back I went to a rehearsal and chided the oboist for destroying my Youth. A lively fellow, he replied: "Heh, we have a thriving jazz series too." Case closed.(Except for some later reflections.)

What, no Vernor's Building??? Luckily, my college chum had a supply of its uniquely bubbling ginger ale on ice for our later delectation.

Heh, the Fox is alive.

And Comerica Park. (My chum and I had celebrated the 50th anniversary of our graduation from U of D with a final, sad visit to Tiger Stadium, aka, Navin Field where I saw my first game--with the Browns where I embarrassed the neighbor who brought me by shouting my ten year old lungs out at Sunny Jim Bottomly who was singularly unsmiling in the middle of a long batting slump--and Briggs Stadium, which was the cheapest, classiest date during our college years).

My krautlette insisted on taking two rides on the People Mover--one looking out, one looking in. The Joe Louis Arena looked smart under a new paint job. Cobo seemed dingier than I remembered it. The River Front high rises looked terrific--but well beyond the means of my modest pension! And the walkway they were constructing appeared first class. We got off at RenCen and babbled with the authorities about the Winter Garden they expect to open in September.

I loved RenCen on my visits back to Detroit, especially during the 1980 Detroit/Montreux Jazz Festival which I reported for the Christian Science Monitor. Achille Scotti, pianist/arranger for the Jazz Orchestra of RadioSuisseRomande invited me and my date Chris Hamill to palaver from his top floor eyrie, where he and wife promised I could use his apartment whenever I got to Montreux. I later visited them in their Geneva home. I have great confidence this time the RenCen will prevail as a major tourist destination.

Finally, I had to show Hildegard my favorite building in all of Detroit, among my Top Ten in the World, the Guardian, an Art Deco masterpiece. We hung out for a bit at the Aztec Cafe. Assured that they were taking good care of the jewel, we split for Windsor. It seems especially significant that its architects, from the legendary firm of Smith, Hinchman and Grylls, have moved back into the 30th floor their distinguished ancestors so brilliantly birthed the year I was born.)

Windsor is an intrinsic part of my Detroit upbringing because my sense of humor and fondness for radio were nurtured on the early morning nuttiness of Joe Gentile and Ralph Bingay from CKLW. When foreigners ask me if I'm a Canadian (I always say "eh?", I reply. "Only spiritually, I grew up on the CBC." To this day, my college pal Henry B. Maloney and I can sing "Kahn's Clothes, Kahn's Clothes/They're neat and nifty etc) commercials like that from the 1940's.

We savored Detroit's skyline from the park on the Windsor side. We wowed through the new Art Gallery of Windsor with its great gathering of the Group of Seven painters and a frisky thematic show on Portraiture. And the best damn lunch of our entire 15 day Greyhound Ameripass adventure at "Colours". Did you know the Canadians make great wines? In the Niagara region. She had a Chardonnay and I had a Merlot. (Those Canucks are so damn humble!)

And, what we plan to exploit on our next visit, the two national hotels next to the Art Gallery, a Hilton and a Radisson, offer the same prices as their U.S. counterparts--in Canadian dollars. Not bad, when it only costs $5.10 for a round trip bus ticket from RenCen.

Sunday, Henry took us to St. Anne's, for TriCen historical motives and fallen away Catholic theological reasons. I was impressed by the Mexican laity's practically running the Mass!! The ecumenical spirit in the congregation was palpable.

Here's my forecast for the quadracentennial in 2101. If the spiritual vitality of St. Anne's, the unbeatable enthusiasm of the oboist at Orchestra Hall, and the puckish sense of humor of my Uncle Dan prevail, Detroit will then no longer be a basket case. It will once again be the Detroit I remember--of Joe Louis, Hank Greenberg, and Walter Reuther, brave and persistent enough to overcome deficits that sometimes seem insurmountable.