The two men sitting side by side couldn’t be more different.
One is a dignified former college professor who quit his university job so he could teach people how to read. The other is an animated ex-con, fresh out of jail, who visits the teacher every day just to [...]
“Violins up!” says the teacher, and the kids put their instruments against their chins. Some fidgeting ensues, of course, because they’re all barely 10 years old, but after a count-in they begin their song.
They start with a single note, climb higher together, then split off at the [...]
Helen Turner has a mean scowl on her face. Always. It’s the look she gives customers at the diner where she works. “I don’t take no shit off of nobody,” she spits in an Appalachian accent.
She’s behind the counter at White Grove Restaurant, a tiny, genuinely retro diner [...]
West Jefferson starts downtown and takes you to the middle of nowhere, from the city’s skyscrapers into the wilderness of the Delray neighborhood, the closest thing to a ghost town within a city that, in some places, often resembles one.
Kovacs bar is one of a few places [...]
Another downtown skyscraper from Detroit’s golden years is being torn down, the victim of a city unwilling to maintain it and developers unwilling to invest in it.
Demolition prep work recently began at the Lafayette Building, at Michigan Avenue and Shelby, an example of the city’s ornate, pre-Depression architecture. [...]
Their paintings get seen by more people than do the works of most artists in the city. The exhibitions of their art are shown in every part of town, and often last for years. Yet they’re virtually unknown.
“You’ll sometimes see my work in the middle of, say, Puritan [...]
The old, narrow apartment complex is ravaged. Curtains blow out of broken windows and weeds smother its courtyard. All signs point to its abandonment.
But there’s a handful of colorful toys scattered on the porch outside one of the backdoors, which faces a long, empty field. And clothes hang [...]
Murray Grandon has a problem.
He owns a resale shop that sells high-quality things, but on his parking lot next door there’s a ragtag, outdoor flea market that sells cheap, used tools. They share the dingy corner of Van Dyke and the Davison, between the weedy railroad tracks and [...]
A rooster’s crow cracks the silence and sends the chickens around him scattering in the yard. The only other sound is the faint whoosh of faraway traffic. All around are fields of trees and tall grass with houses in between, but in the background a casino rises above [...]
At the pawn shop, the line for loans ebbs and flows, but lately it’s been long.
The hard times are displayed every day here, as the desperate hock their belongings for fast cash.
“When it’s depressed like this, people are bringing in anything just to get by, whether it’s to [...]
Sometimes it’s tough being Exercise Man.
Burrell Solomon, the man behind the superhero-style moniker, is all about fitness in a city famous for fatness, a staunch nutritionist in a town whose food motto, repeated on signs everywhere, is “You Buy, We Fry.” So driven is Solomon to get the [...]
Stephen Hume feeds a strip of cloth into an antique sewing machine to demonstrate that it still works. It’s one of 15 he has scattered around the room, which is in the cabin of his huge tugboat, docked at a riverside yard filled with scores of sleek little [...]
The ham is carved, the stuffing is steaming and the rolls are buttered and passed around the table. It’s a traditional Sunday after-church meal, and overseeing it all is the head of the family, Kimberly Bennett, seated near a stack of Mother’s Day cards she has just been [...]
“How you doing, young fella!” shouts a jolly Mr. Boyd to the little kid standing at his store’s counter. The boy, probably about 7 years old, asks for a pack of gum. “Oh you’re gonna be doing some chewin’, huh?” Boyd replies enthusiastically. He gives him the gum [...]
The cops don’t believe him. Neither do some customers. But H.B. Lawrence, the manager of the All Star Gentleman’s Club on Eight Mile, is determined to prove that his strip club is now clean.
He took it over a few years ago, back when the place was notorious for [...]
Dean Aytes is stranded on an island.
His home’s an old house next to his store, Lafayette Bait and Tackle, and both are now surrounded by sheets of fresh, white concrete, part of the construction of a potential second bridge to Canada. The project has razed every structure in [...]
Clara Bradley’s ex once punched her face so hard he cracked her cheekbone. Then he broke a couple ribs. A good relationship went bad because of booze, and the whiskey made him violent.
She escaped to a safe house and eventually moved on, but the assaults led her to [...]
It’s midnight inside a dimly lit banquet room on Detroit’s near east side. The place is like any low-frills dining space — cheap carpeting, plain walls and rounded booths on the room’s edges, with padded seats and small tables.
But this one is different – people are having [...]
A pink bloom climbs a windowpane, and leans softly against the cold glass.
It shouldn’t be here at all, in late winter, hanging heavy on a thin stem. Yet it’s one of a handful of improbable flowers crowding the front window with a dozen other potted plants at Lip-Pan [...]
There’s a crowd milling outside the Tom Boy Super Market at Second Avenue and Alexandrine, even though it’s freezing outside. There’s always a crowd here.
This spot, underneath the awning over the front door, is where the area’s bums, beggars, hookers, and drug dealers have gathered for years. This [...]
A pretty Victorian house caught fire recently a little north of downtown, just off Park Avenue, which was once as nice as it sounds.
It was one of a very few of these grand homes left in the Cass Corridor, an area that was thick with them a [...]
Time stands still inside a little building on a dead street.
Red’s Jazz Shoe Shine Parlor is a living museum of an old way of life, a relic from a bygone era when the neighborhood it’s in was a city within the city, and Detroit movers and shakers got [...]
For a dozen years, a local couple ran a little bakery on Detroit’s west side, building a loyal customer base and becoming a neighborhood fixture. There was a sense of community there, and people knew each other.
Then one day a gunman walked in and changed everything.
Up [...]
The crude signs with crookedly stenciled letters started poking out of empty fields across town as winter approached, offering “Fresh Coons” and a phone number.
The only thing more down-home than that is the man who put them there.
Sixty-nine-year-old Glemie Dell Beasley is the real deal, a [...]
Throughout Detroit there are still little libraries full of books that half the residents can’t even read.
A typical one is the Chandler Park Branch Library, on Harper near Dickerson Street on the city’s east side, one of 23 branches of Detroit’s public library system currently open. Built in [...]
Some dogs are house pets and some are strays. Then there are the unfortunate pooches who find themselves homeless because their owners live on the streets.
Pudgy the dog has no home because he was found and adopted when he was three weeks old by homeless Detroiters Tim Taylor, [...]
Hangouts come in many forms, from bars and barber shops to the stoop on a porch’s steps. No matter where they’re found, though, they’re all simply places where people can be around their friends.
That’s the case at the Chip-in Sportsmen’s Club on Seven Mile near Dequindre, the stomping [...]
“Does anybody here have a problem with taking a life?” asks 69-year-old General Laney, owner of Laney’s Guns and Supplies on Detroit’s east side. “If you’re not capable of taking a life then you’re not in the right place,” he warns, “’cause you might have to take a [...]
Down by the river there’s a man living in a shanty.
His name is Manuel, he’s from Honduras and he says he’s lived around here for seven years. His home is a hovel of boards and plywood, though one wall is solid brick and mortar, over six feet tall. [...]
Sleazy acts sometimes call for sleazy settings, and when people want to do sordid things they can’t do at home, they visit places like the Cabana Motel on Harper.
The Cabana is a seedy, no-tell motel on Detroit’s east side that offers rates for stays as short as two [...]
Akbar’s Restaurant is so off the beaten path the phone book can’t even get its name right. It’s listed as Akbar’s Coffee Shop, though it’s no such thing. “We’ve called them to tell them it’s wrong,” says Nittie Akbar, 66, who co-owns the place with husband James, “but [...]
Death brought the birth of this little west side enterprise. And death sustains it.
Bryant’s consists of little more than a crumbling old house and a man’s little home next to it. After his wife of three decades died five years ago, owner Richard Bryant, 62, turned the couple’s [...]
In the life of some neighborhoods, a time comes when the social order falls apart, when the balance between those doing good things and those doing bad things shifts the wrong way, and the block becomes known as a place to do wrong.
In one east side neighborhood, just [...]
There are simple things in life that many of us take for granted, things that aren’t as common for those in poverty, like dental care.
George Rodgers knows that first hand. He owns a place called Customized Dental Laboratory on Mack Avenue near Joseph Campau, a little box of [...]
The food at El-Lynn’s Kitchen is so down home they serve grape Kool-Aid with their meals.
The tradition began when a spat with the soft drink distributor turned into a feud. “Now he won’t deliver anymore,” said Lynn Goldman, the 49-year-old owner of the west side soul shack. [...]
The main streets of the city are home to scores of little businesses with plain facades and without signs telling what they are, leaving no way of knowing at a glance what they hold inside.
On the west side, one of those bare storefronts hides a sea of grand [...]
In the heart of the city, little hidden gardens grow where they shouldn’t, high above us on the rooftops of buildings left empty years ago. Their summer up there flows with ours and fades just as fast when the air turns cool.
The tallest plants among them peek over [...]
Six years ago, Glendale Stewart took a look at the world around him and decided to drop out of it. He quit working, bought an empty plot of land at a city auction, parked an old trailer on it, built a wood privacy fence around it and made [...]
It’s a hot and sunny recent Friday afternoon, and a few men hide from the heat inside Bill’s Recreation, a pool room just south of Wayne State University’s campus. They’re playing a game called “Bank.”
“Go on!” yells Bill King to the ball he just shot at. “Get in [...]
For people growing up in poor neighborhoods in the city, nature is usually something ugly, little more than the weeds smothering fields or sprouting from sidewalk cracks.
Eight years ago, Detroiter Tom Milano, 60, wanted to show his eastside neighbors a glimpse of the beautiful side of nature [...]
You know those people who dress their dogs in sweaters and other miniature clothing, which rankles so many of us?
Meet Pat Jackson, their enabler.
Jackson’s the owner of Uncle Rah Ree’s Doggone Ties, makers of a full line of dog clothing. She operates it from her east side home [...]
A few days back a bunch of kids, until unexpectedly interrupted, were atop an abandoned downtown skyscraper at night, throwing these thick, heavy pieces of the cornice onto its skylight, hoping for a spectacular crash through to the floor 15 feet beneath it. The blocks are two [...]
He ambled half-naked down the middle of a main road, with long white whiskers and bushy white hair blowing away from his weatherworn face.
“They call me Santa Claus,” he said, and he does indeed share a resemblance, though he’s an inner-city Santa, with a shopping cart full of [...]
They were an odd sight — two clean-cut white kids wearing black pants and white shirts with neckties, wandering through the rubble of a burned-out house in the middle of a littered field on the east side of Detroit.
The pair, who go by the names Elder Porter and [...]
There’s an old building on lower Woodward whose interior could be part of a museum, but is instead just dirty floors in another empty high-rise.
The R.H. Traver Building is midway through a block of buildings almost as old as it is, some of which are empty and occasionally [...]
Some places are like ghosts, not quite dead, not quite alive, but lingering between the two as faded shadows of their old selves.
Paul’s Diner on Michigan Avenue at Cabot Street, less than a mile from the Dearborn border, looks at first glance to have died. It rarely has [...]
Among the ugly houses and grassy blocks in an east side neighborhood is an old dollhouse of a home.
It rises three floors above its surroundings like a fairy tale house, with whimsical frames around windows, teardrop shingles whose edges overlap, all topped by a pointy hat of a [...]
Brightmoor is like any other poor neighborhood in Detroit, with plenty of empty houses, empty stores and empty lots between it all. Many residents here are dirt poor, and though a few hundred low-income houses have gone up in little clusters in recent years, the neighborhood remains one [...]
As spring turns to summer in Detroit, the riverfront becomes lined with anglers, their baited hooks sunk into the water, trying to fool fish into taking their last bite.
Fishing’s always been a popular warm-weather pastime in the city. The Detroit River snakes for miles along the city’s edge, [...]
Last Friday, Woodward was lined with partiers spilling into the streets and cops trying to keep them in line. No, it wasn’t another shootout at Bleu. Or the old State. Or (insert Woodward club name here). It was the Red Wings victory parade!
We’ve had huge parades in [...]
From inside an old house in a bleak patch of the east side, Bilal Hajj delivers a message that proposes to transform the lives of the downtrodden.
He runs the Zakat Institute, on Willis Street near Mount Elliot, a house-turned-school-turned-grass-roots-Islamic-organization, named for the Muslim concept of alms and [...]
There are times in life – at the end of a long bar crawl, for example – when you need a big, greasy meal in the middle of the night.
That’s what places like Elmer’s Hamburgers are for.
Elmer’s is off the city’s beaten paths, located deep within the [...]
Some neighborhoods are nearly barren after their residents moved on, took what they could and left their houses to their fates. But little signs of their presence still remain in the wild, like driveways gobbled by grasses or stop signs where there?s no traffic anymore.
One of the prettier [...]
In Detroits fragile business climate, things can change in the blink of an eye.
Cheryl West learned that first hand. A few months back, West, 61, was operating her music-themed store the Westminster Consort Music Room which had been open on the ground floor of the New [...]
As half the city’s residents moved away over the years, long stretches of Detroit’s main roads that were once packed with mom-and-pop businesses have become desolate and abandoned. What’s left now between empty lots are hundreds of closed little buildings, boarded up or broken into, reminders of how [...]
In the old days, if you wanted porn you had to go buy it at a seedy store or watch it at a peep show among the raincoat crowd. Though most of them were put out of business by home media and the Internet, Detroit long a [...]
As Black History Month came and went once again, a small, little-known museum dedicated to a local part of that history saw few visitors and little attention.
The Curtis Museum, on McNichols Road west of Schaefer Highway on the city’s west side, commemorates the life of Dr. Austin Curtis, [...]
When a neighborhood empties and its buildings are locked shut, they freeze a moment in time inside. There are countless places like this around town, sealed tombs holding the decaying remains of the citys history.
The east side has a magnificent old one containing ancient symbols and primitive imagery [...]
Behind closed doors, in the privacy of their homes, there are Detroiters out there performing magic rituals and trying to cast spells to get what they cant get otherwise.
The tools they use in their ceremonies, including candles, scented aerosol sprays, incense and aromatherapy oils, often come from Discount [...]
While small record and CD stores are vanishing as digital media takes over, one little shop on Detroits west side still thrives by selling music in handheld form.
Damons Record Center, on Plymouth just west of Evergreen on the citys west side, has not only weathered the digital age [...]
It was Christmastime, and the little chocolate shop had been making holiday candies for a while now. Yet its display cases were meagerly stocked, with empty shelves outnumbering those that were carefully arranged with pretty candies.
Colored bows topped small bags of old-time treats lined atop the counter, [...]
As they have done every holiday season for 75 years, the Detroit Popcorn Company just finished churning out thousands of decorative tins full of flavored popcorn. But this past Christmas was the last time they were made in Detroit.
The company, founded in 1923 by Samuel Carmas in a [...]
Sometimes while driving through the neighborhoods for other reasons you find odd things that add up to little glimpses of life in the forgotten parts of Detroit. Here are a few random ones:
People here sure dont like this house. Theyve broken in, stripped everything of value from it, [...]
Its time again for the North American International Auto Show press days, that swarming mass of auto execs, journalists in a hunt for gratuities, and freestanding models, all crammed into cramped Cobo Hall like tenement dwellers because L. Brooks is selfishly keeping the otherwise willing residents of Oakland [...]
In Delray’s south end, where dying neighborhoods border the river’s edge, a ramshackle home stands out among the empty fields.
“The Delray Crib in the Hood,” an old house surrounded by fortress-like plywood walls, has for several years been a local curiosity. Passers-by often slow down to stare at [...]
The best Christmas displays in the city are usually on houses in the well-to-do areas like the University District, Indian Village or Palmer Woods. In contrast, whole blocks in the citys impoverished neighborhoods remain unlit through the holidays. Poor people often cant afford flashy holiday displays, and some [...]
With all the higher-tech options everywhere, it’s endearing that, even today, inserting a hand into a sock and pretending it can talk enchants children, who happily suspend disbelief and become entranced by the puppets brought to life before them.
But puppets can charm us at any age. And even [...]
Of all the people to find behind the counter at an antique store, most people wouldn’t expect to see two gruff, retired Detroit firefighters. Norm Smith, 65, and Joe Bozich, 69, owners of Junque Shop Antiques on Michigan Avenue near Central, are well aware of the prevailing stereotypes.
“Usually, [...]
Death begins in the colon, reads the sign on the door of the Community Health Hut, on the corner of Wyoming and Eight Mile. A more arresting slogan would be hard to imagine.
Hakim Aleem, 79, who for years has owned the store with his wife Sahirah Muhammad, 77, [...]
Hats off Detroit! Thats was the Thanksgiving Day parade slogan this year! Excitement expressed through exclamation! In that spirit, a fitting recap! We found a parade viewing spot in front of the bleachers! A security guard then said get the hell out! So much for that!
New spot not [...]
Some guys are simply cool cats, and 76-year-old Detroiter Kasuku Mafia is one man who’s brimming with throwback hipness.
“Gimme some skin!” he exclaims, extending a hand as he answers the door of his Success Academy of Fine Arts, on Ridgewood near Livernois and Grand River on Detroit’s west [...]
In the world of hip hop, calling someone a clown seems like it would be a major dis. But for Detroit artist DeMarcus Hughes, it’s a compliment.
Hughes, 37, a.k.a Smiley the Hip Hop Clown, is a Detroit-based rapper, a G-rated G, an MC whose M.O. is to [...]
Detroit is a city of bars. Over the years a lot of businesses and people have left, but there are still lots of places to drink here, hundreds of little dive bars whose customers live in the surrounding blocks and are a reflection of a neighborhood’s composition and [...]
On a chilly Sunday, an organ plays a somber hymn during Mass at an old Catholic church in Delray, in southwest Detroit. The words of the priest echo through the mostly empty wooden pews. A handful of elderly parishioners sit solemly, some teary-eyed, all dutifully present to witness [...]
Posts slowing to a trickle recently? Guilty. Autumn laziness creeping in? Jaccuse! Events temporarily slowing blog things down? Bingo.
Things pick up again in a couple days. In the meantime, filler! This piece of scrawl (as referenced by editors in the Metro Times, my new favorite publication!) that [...]
While some main streets in Detroit are almost a graveyard of defunct mom-and-pop businesses, a handful of old shops still dot the landscape, having survived the changes the city has gone through, continuing their traditions and somehow thriving despite the chaos around them.
Korash Florists, at the corner of [...]
There arent many bookstores in Detroit. In a city where statistically half the population cant even read, theres not much demand for the written word.
The few that are here are either specialty stores that are often religious in focus, or else little bookshops that sell used books [...]
It would be difficult to find a more unfortunate spot for an elderly man’s small business than a storefront in a crackwhore motel. But thats where 80-year-old Joe Castiglione and his barber shop have persevered for 51 years, in a little storefront facing Eight Mile Road, connected to [...]
The city contains hundreds of neat little places; small stores or restaurants or shops tucked deep inside neighborhoods, too small for advertising budgets or media attention, which get by on their owners’ devotion, loyal regulars and word of mouth.
They’re often cool little niche businesses, the kind that [...]
Minnie’s Cakes, a tiny bakery on the city’s west side, can be accurately summed up like this: it’s basically someone’s grandma in a small kitchen baking delicious little cakes for everyone.
The bakery, located on Wyoming just south of McNichols, is owned and operated by 67-year-old Lemuriel Delthina Woods, [...]
On a blown-out stretch of Grand River, where the street was long ago stripped of life, a muraled building dappled with shards of mirrors hints at the unique things inside.
Dabls African Bead Gallery, located where Grand Boulevard splits Grand River, is one of the few eye-catching facades in [...]
Detroit, it seems, has always been a city of eccentrics and artists who can express themselves comfortably here, with few real restrictions or worries about code enforcement. Outside of downtown, the rest of Detroit’s still the kind of place where you can paint an abandoned bus in polka [...]
For much of its history, Detroit was a patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods, each consisting largely of immigrants from a single place. Whole sections of the city were Italian, Polish, Hungarian, or Jewish, among others. As immigrants flooded these neighborhoods and solidified their particular character, churches, stores, social clubs [...]
The riot whose scars are still visible throughout the city began 40 years ago this Monday, on July 23, 1967, when police raided an after-hours bar located atop a printing shop at 9125 12th Street at Clairmount, and all hell broke loose.
Depending on which school of thought [...]
In an age when bars often jam the walls with faux historical trinkets, load the shelves with fancy liquors, serve a few dozen dishes and stick a wide-screen TV on the wall, you don’t often find one that strips all that down to the basics of beer, a [...]
Some things in Detroit pass so far under the radar they’re in danger of vanishing for lack of support.
Though Eastern Market is Detroit’s central location to purchase farm produce, a number of smaller sites throughout the city serve as mini versions of the original, bringing farmers markets [...]
Without major furniture chains within the city limits, Detroiters have traditionally had two choices: stores that sell used items in varying degrees of wornness or stainedness. or else places offering contemporary but gaudy items for people who want to force their visitors to acknowledge their appalling taste.
But sitting [...]
In a city packed with Soul Food shacks, Mama’s Place on Seven Mile stands out by offering both down-home, southern-style food and a clean place to eat it.
The restaurant serves southern staples like catfish seared on the grill, ribs cooked in the smoky, oil-drum barbecue out front, and [...]
It’s now time for detroitblog’s summer guide!
“But you already said that!” one might note with irritation. True. But after pursuing the idea for a couple weeks I decided to expand the concept and actually offer a real summer guide with more comprehensive accounts of interesting places to visit [...]
Whether you’re a downtown office worker on their lunch hour or part of the brown-bagged bottle crowd on a permanent lunch break, the Greening of Detroit Park, on Jefferson between St. Aubin and Rivard, offers a nice little haven of flowers and trees in the middle of downtown’s [...]
Sure, eBay’s fancy and convenient and all, but sometimes, when you’re shopping for miscellany, nothing beats looking at and pawing potential purchases up close.
That’s why places like the Dot Zee Flea Market come in so handy. You can stroll the outdoor shopping area, and fondle everything on display [...]
Detroit is nothing if not a down-home city. The hordes of southern blacks and Appalachian whites who flooded this city seeking auto jobs during the past century have given a distinctly southern air to Detroit, from the southern accents still common among older Detroiters to the homestyle and [...]
Everybody loves a parade, unless it’s in southwest Detroit, apparently.
That’s the case, it seems, with last week’s Cinco de Mayo parade, probably the most fascinating and varied parade in the city, but which draws about 17 people from outside the neighborhood to join the thousands lining the street.
The [...]
The building had been crawling with junkies, alcoholics, ex-convicts and homeless people. And that was before the building was abandoned.
After it closed, the same hobos and addicts who had been there simply let themselves back in, spending nights in their old rooms, this time unsupervised and free to [...]
Check out what I’ve got - a catalogue of the T.B. Rayl hardware store’s offerings from 1926. Presenting Rayl’s Christmas - From the fiery depths of hell!
This old catalogue is full of old-fashioned toys, obsolete devices and old-time strangeness. Here, two people with indifferent expressions open [...]
I could sum up this story with the mad scramble from the burglar alarm while wearing a woman’s wig. Or the part where the burly weirdo who’d watched us get in the building stood outside and menacingly stared straight up at us for what seemed like forever. Or [...]
As winter fades and spring eases in, it’s hunker-down time here at photo-heavy detroitblog. A couple of links to this on apparently well-read websites have somehow evaporated the month’s bandwidth, and so until April 1 it’s text only around these parts. What dreary fun!
Not like winter was a flurry of [...]
Before it was the repository for the city’s derelicts, Cass Corridor was actually a genteel area of small, modified Victorian and Queen Anne residences in the early part of the 20th century, before downtown swelled and swallowed its bordering neighborhoods, and commercial buildings began replacing homes.
In a few [...]
Cass Corridor looks bleak enough from the ground, but the scattered buildings and wandering people belie the true degree of its emptiness. Seen from up high, though, its desolation becomes obvious.
From the top of its tallest building, the Hotel Fort Wayne, its blocks spread outward in all [...]
In 1961, when Detroit’s beautiful 