Detroit thread. Post Kwame, Monica, and $1 houses here.

[MadImmortalMan]

This is pretty sad.

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089,00.html





Edit: I always thought that train station looked like some monstrous Soviet edifice. The Detroit Palace of Culture.

[The Brain]

Fucking cool.

Detroit needs to be destroyed. For universal failure.

[Savonarola]

Some quick notes on the picture

Michigan Central Station was in the Transformers movie    That's the prime area for urban spelunkers and graffiti artists.  They've been just about to refurbish it as long as I've lived in Detroit, but nothing ever gets done.

Before the Automobile era Brush Park was millionaire's row.  There are only a couple houses standing now; it's mostly gone back to an empty field.

The Catholic Schools are actually starting to make a comeback as more Hispanics move into the city.

The David Broderick Tower is one of the two skyscrapers on the edge of Woodward (our main street) right as you enter the core downtown.  Both are abandoned.

Detroit has a number of old movie palaces.  Today there are 3 movie theaters operating in the entire city; only the one located at the Detroit Institute of Arts is from that era; the other two are modern movie-plexes.  A couple of the others have been converted, one is now the opera house and a couple others are music venues.

The Packard Plant is a mile long and several blocks wide.  Right now there is one tennant in the entire place.  Ownership is disputed between the city and a private holding firm, and right now the place is crumbling.

I don't know anything about the Lee Plaza Hotel.  One of our old luxury hotels, the Book-Cadilac recently reopened; just in time for the auto industry to fall apart.

Detroit has a shrinking population, school of choice and vouchers for charter schools so there have been a dozens of school closings throught the past several years.  There probably will be many more in the next couple years as Detroit Public Schools are nearly half a billion dollars in the red.

[The Nickname Who Was Thursday]

Anyone else think that broken down dentist chair looked like a robot?  :-\

[The Brain]

Anyone else think that broken down dentist chair looked like a robot?  :-\

No.

[derspiess]

Sad but fascinating.  I go back to that forgottendetroit.com site from time to time.  Those old abandoned buildings are creepy.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Detroit should be turned into the military's urban combat training center.  At least something good would come out of that shit hole.

[The Nickname Who Was Thursday]

Your lack of imagination is unsurprising. :p

[DGuller]

Detroit should be turned into the military's urban combat training center.  At least something good would come out of that shit hole.

Just move out the residents beforehand.  We wouldn't want our men in uniform be massacred during training.

[Savonarola]

 

Legendary Detroit jazz club Baker's tries to stay open
Business down, bills up
BY MARK STRYKER • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER • March 18, 2009

Baker's Keyboard Lounge, the legendary Detroit jazz club at Livernois and 8 Mile, might be taking its final chorus.

Owner John Colbert said on Tuesday that without a significant uptick in business, he has only enough money and wherewithal to keep the club afloat for about two months. His major goal is to keep the doors open through the club's 75th anniversary in early May.

Business is off 35% to 40% in the last nine months, Colbert said, and a combination of factors -- the recession, road construction on Livernois, parking issues and a dramatic hike in the club's water bill -- have conspired to bring Baker's to the brink of extinction.

"Nobody gets rich running a jazz club, but in the 13 years since I've owned the place, we've never experienced anything like this," Colbert said.

Baker's has been integral to Detroit's cultural identity as a jazz mecca for so long, it's hard for musicians, aficionados and even casual fans to conceive of the city without it.

If metro Detroiters have been to one jazz club, it's likely been Baker's. With its hipster vibe, cozy banquets, art deco decor, rich history and bebop soundtrack, Baker's has long been regarded as the Platonic ideal of a jazz club.

The club, which opened in 1934, runs neck and neck with the Village Vanguard in New York for the title of world's oldest jazz club. Down Beat, a leading jazz magazine, routinely names Baker's on its list of the 100 great jazz clubs worldwide.

"It's like the Alamo in a sense -- it's the last real jazz club standing in Detroit," said Jim Gallert, a die-hard fan and historian of local jazz.

'Like working at Carnegie Hall'
There are other spots that showcase jazz in metro Detroit, including Bert's Marketplace, Cliff Bell's, Dirty Dog Jazz Cafe, Music Hall's Jazz Cafe and the Firefly Club, but Baker's legacy and longevity make it unique.

The club became a fixture on the national scene beginning in the 1950s under the leadership of former owner Clarence Baker. Jazz greats like John Coltrane, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck and Ella Fitzgerald were regulars, and performing at Baker's has long been a rite of passage for local musicians.


"When you work there, it's almost like working at Carnegie Hall because of who else has played there," trumpeter Johnny Trudell said. The Detroit veteran will lead a jam session on May 3 to raise money for the club during the anniversary celebration May 1-4.

Colbert, 62, bought the place in 1996 from Clarence Baker and, with the help of partner Juanita Jackson, found a winning formula. Jackson reintroduced the kitchen and a stylish soul food menu, and Colbert instituted a mostly local and regional music policy, eliminating cover charges during the week and keeping them low on the weekend, and never wavering from a commitment to traditional acoustic jazz.

The joint packed them in for years, but business has soured. Colbert said median construction on Livernois, which has angered neighborhood residents and business owners, makes it difficult for customers to get to Baker's. Worse, he said, the project eliminated convenient street parking in front of the club.

"It's just killed my lunch and happy hour business," he said.

Soaring notes, soaring bills
On another front, Colbert said his water rates skyrocketed after the city replaced a broken meter and began charging for actual usage instead of an estimated cost. The city also imposed a $27,000 retroactive charge, which meant that his monthly payment, including servicing his debt, has increased from $800 to $1,800. Colbert said he was denied a hearing to contest the charges.

George Ellenwood, a spokesman for the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, said he did not have immediate access to Baker's records Tuesday but that a retroactive charge of such size "would not be inconceivable" for a business but would be surprising.

"It's certainly a matter that needs to be looked into," he said.

Colbert has owned the club and accompanying real estate outright since paying off the mortgage in 2001. He said the recession is keeping neighborhood patrons at home, and weekend surges are not great enough to cover losses sustained on weekdays.

Colbert has cut back on costs by using younger musicians and eliminating larger ensembles in favor of compact trios and the like. He's added a weekly comedy night and included more blues and popular genres into his mix. He said he had resisted raising prices because he knows his clientele is hurting, too.

"Business just needs to take a turn in the other direction and we can survive," Colbert said. "Maybe somebody will buy it from me and continue the tradition, but I can't continue with the anxiety of not knowing whether I have to be the person to turn the lights out. I don't want to be the one to do that."

The Village Vanguard opened the year before Baker's, but it wasn't exclusively a jazz club for a couple years later.  This is why Baker's claims to be the oldest jazz club in the world.  Not that it matters, generally you'll see a higher caliber of talent at the Village Vanguard than you would at Baker's.  Detroit has long had a vibrant jazz scene; (Motown's house band, The Funk Brothers, was almost entirely composed of local jazz talent,) but New York City is the American Mecca for jazz.

My Grandparents went to Baker's when they were young.  It still has the look and feel of a 30s Jazz Club (just like the Village Vanguard, in fact.)  I hope they can save this one, but this being Detroit I'm not optimistic.  The worst part of it is that nothing new will move in (unless it turns into a crack house) it'll just be another abandoned building.

[Savonarola]

http://apps.detnews.com/apps/blogs/detroitcityhallinsider/index.php

Here is a link for the Detroit News blog of people who cover city hall.  There's a lot of mundane articles, but there is the occasionaly a gem like the following exchange between Monica Conyers and Foolish from the WJLB morning show:

Friday, she got into it with CoCo, Foolish and Mr. Chase when she called WJLB FM 98 to talk about her stance on Cobo Center. It was the day after a Cobo discussion in council chambers, when Conyer's colleague Barbara-Rose Collins gave an impassioned 17-minute speech that took on suburban leaders and global imperialism, followed by singing "Onward Christian Soldiers."

Here are highlights from the interview that immediately took a bad turn when Foolish asked Conyers about the meeting:

Foolish: What the hell is wrong with the rest of the City Council members? How can we have meetings publicly televised all over the world where people are singing and getting into it with each other, and you are the leader? They sound immature. They sound like grown folks who are confused.

Conyers: Why is it you always have to attack the black people of Detroit?

Foolish: What do you mean, black people? We are attacking the ignorant.

Conyers: Why we gotta be ignorant? We don't call you ignorant.

Foolish: My job is to be ignorant. You all's job is to be what?

Conyers: Our job is to be human. That's our job.

You're doing a great job at that, Monica.  The impersonation is so good it's almost convincing.   

WJLB is a hip hop station and the three morning DJs, Foolish, Mr. Chase and Coco are all black.  I don't listen to their show; but I would doubt they regularly attack the black people of Detroit.

[saskganesh]

maybe its because they are not "black" enough?

[DisturbedPervert]

This is pretty sad.

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089,00.html





Edit: I always thought that train station looked like some monstrous Soviet edifice. The Detroit Palace of Culture.

Looks like post colonial sub saharan Africa.

[Savonarola]

La Mort des Pauvres:

The last sad days of the Detroit man found frozen
Charlie LeDuff / The Detroit News
DETROIT -- Johnnie Redding's body had not even been put in its grave before another man had moved into his house.

This was an outrage, and one of Johnnie's friends threatened to evict the interloper by force. Even the people of the rough and raw streets have their law. Johnnie's friend pounded on the door of the little A-frame wigwam, made of felt and perched on top of an abandoned garage. The wigwam had a framed window and a chimney. It had a river view and a garden.

The interloper cowered inside.

"You's probably the one who killed Johnnie," Johnnie's friend barked at the plank-board door, alcohol vapors tumbling from his mouth. "You killed Johnnie and now you sleeping in his bed! You bes' be gone by sundown."

Of course, Johnnie's friend would not return at sundown, what with the small matter of scrounging up a dinner and another pint of vodka. The interloper would still be sleeping in the wigwam. And by the time the sun had set, there would be no more reminders that Johnnie walked these streets.

Johnnie Redding died of a cocaine overdose, coroners said Wednesday. It was the final word on a man whose death might have gone unnoticed.

His body was found at the bottom of an open elevator shaft last month, encased in ice, only his legs jutting out. Adding to the surreal picture was a pillow that gently propped up his left foot, dressed in a clean white sock and shoe with fresh laces. He looked almost peaceful.

The photograph of Johnnie would make its way around the world, along with the details that many knew his cadaver was down there but did little, if anything, about it. City boosters complained it was another case of the media focusing on the bad in a city with many wonderful qualities.

Except that Johnnie was found in a gaping elevator shaft owned by a local billionaire in a city with tens of thousands of abandoned buildings. And still, some of these decaying buildings keep people alive. Almost 20,000 homeless people drift through the streets of Detroit, meaning that one in 47 here is without a bed, according to the Homeless Management Information System, which tracks people who seek services. With too few shelter beds and too little money to help the walking poor, places like the crumbling warehouse where Johnnie was found have become the de facto shelters.

"People accept it, and it is not normal," said Durene L. Brown, the Detroit ombudsman. "It's not normal for a child to walk out of her house and see all these abandoned buildings and blight. It's not normal for a man to be frozen at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

"City officials must drive around with their windows tinted too dark."

Johnnie's last moments

Johnnie killed himself. His autopsy revealed no broken bones, no wounds and no water in his lungs, which means he did not fall into the flooded shaft and drown. Most likely, Johnnie was smoking cocaine with somebody and died, coroners suspect. Johnnie's party pal may have panicked and tossed his body down the water-filled shaft.

"Last year, a man overdosed and his colleagues stuffed him in a suitcase, put him in an SUV and lit it on fire," Dr. Carl J. Schmidt, Wayne County's chief medical examiner. "The point is there are people out there like that. The way a member of society dies is a reflection of the way society lives."

His given name was Johnnie Lewis Redding. But his street name was Johnnie Dollar. He was described by people who knew him on the street as a consummate hustler, a pool shark, a block captain who liked a little liquor and a little cocaine. He took handouts and mission food, but he didn't walk around with his hat in his hand and he didn't get Social Security.

Johnnie, 56, painted houses. Johnnie hustled pool tables from Ann Arbor to southwest Detroit. When he was low on money, he would sort clothing at the Most Holy Trinity rectory for $10. Sometimes, the church would give him charity bus tickets that he would turn around and sell.

"He didn't have to be out on the streets, but the street life is an adrenaline rush," said Dennis Mugridge, the church's outreach director. "If this was the 1800s, Johnnie would have been a mountain man."

Johnnie came to Most Holy Trinity four years ago asking for money to help pay for his pain medication after having all his teeth removed. Mugridge last saw him in November.

"He wanted bus fare to get out of town," Mugridge remembered. "I wouldn't give it to him. I regret it now."

A rough place
Detroit is a hard place to be homeless. There is little milk, little honey and little sun. Johnnie may have been frozen in the shaft for more than a month, but nobody knew he was missing except the homeless men who had been living next to the shaft, who figured someone else had called the authorities.

Johnnie moved around. When he grew weary of the street life, when his body began to shut down, Johnnie would go home to relatives and dry out. To get himself right, he liked to say. He stayed with his brother, Homer, in River Rouge. He stayed with his sister in Atlanta for six months last year and then, feeling the itch, he came back to Detroit in September and got lost again.

"He promised he'd be back," said his niece, Tanya Coleman of Atlanta. "I said, 'Uncle you ain't coming back.' He said, 'Yes I am. I'm just going up to get an ID then I'll be back, I promise.' I knew he wasn't."

So Johnnie came back to Michigan to get his driver's license straightened out, with every intention of returning to Georgia. But like a moth to the light, Johnnie gravitated to the corner near Happy liquor store on Fort Street, hanging around with his friends who call themselves the Bus Stop Boys. Wearing a trench coat and with his pockets bulging, Johnnie passed out $10 bills to his friends and told them to buy themselves beer. "That's why we called him Johnnie Dollar," said Delaney Windom. "He was one of the good ones."

Johnnie Dollar did not have to be on the streets, said those who knew him. "It's the only place he could be hisself," Windom said.

That's one way to put it. "At some point in his life, he didn't want to work anymore," said his brother, Homer. "He got laid off from the steel plant about 15 years ago and that was it. But he wasn't homeless. Too many people loved him."

What homelessness is, is a matter of opinion. The Department of Housing and Urban Development defines it as anyone living in a shelter or on the streets. HUD estimates there are 700,000 homeless people in America, but federal dollars finance fewer than 200,000 beds. The U.S. Department of Education counts homeless children as those who live doubled up in another family's home or in motels. In 2007, they counted almost 700,000 homeless children, one-third living in shelters or outdoors. The Wayne County Medical Examiner considers a homeless person to have no permanent address -- which includes Johnnie. Jerry Davis, one of the Bus Stop Boys, put it like this: "Homeless means nobody wants you no more. So you can't consider Johnnie homeless."

Except that Johnnie did consider himself homeless. He was given a meal on Oct. 25 by the Ark Foundation, an outreach program run by former drug addicts and homeless people. In exchange for the meal, he had to sign his name, age and address in a manifest. On line number seven, in shaky block lettering he wrote: Johnnie Redding, 56, Homless.

Homer almost cried when he saw Johnnie's signature. "I don't know why he said that. He was a person. He was a person. He was a person."

Perhaps 300 people came to Johnnie's memorial service Saturday, including Mimi, one of the Bus Stop Boys. It was paid for by an insurance policy left on his life by his mother, Orlene. She suspected something like this might happen, Homer said. She did not want her children drifting around the Earth in death. "She seen too much in life," Homer said.

In the end, Johnnie was buried in Westland in a box that was more expensive than anything he owned in life.

And back at his wigwam, the tenant opened the door a crack. "Nothing's permanent," he said. "We all end up in a box. What do you think this is?"

Johnnie, it turns out, did not live in the wigwam anymore, since the new man had claimed it while he was away. Finders keepers: That, too, is the law of the street.

So Johnnie built himself another abode of wood and tarpaulin in the culvert below. Near his pillow were two silk neckties and a book: "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."

[Savonarola]

City Hall has phone hangups

A certain City Council member borrows her grandchild's telephone when she makes confidential calls. Political consultant Adolph Mongo keeps hearing, "Don't go to (a downtown restaurant) because the whole place is bugged."

Maybe they've watched too many episodes of "The Wire" or read a couple of hundred too many lurid mayoral SkyTel text messages. Maybe, as Christine Beatty's lawyer Mayer Morganroth contends, Detroit's political players are merely exercising due diligence "because you have to always treat the telephone as if it were (bugged.)"

Or maybe there really is a wire under that plate of lasagna.

Exercising caution
From elite downtown law firms to City Hall corridors, the vogue for verbal caution is more pronounced than at any time since the height of the Coleman A. Young era, when jurors strained to understand fuzzy telephone recordings played in another era's sludge-hauling contractor scandal.

On Friday, Sam Riddle -- the Detroit political consultant and former chief of staff to Council President Monica Conyers -- greeted passersby on Campus Martius and acknowledged that freedom of speech had taken a hit. "I could probably sell T-shirts that say, 'Let's talk about it in person,' " he says, referring to noticeable fall-off among those willing to speak on the phone with him.

"It's not so much the conversations people are having as the ones they aren't." Birmingham lawyer Patrick Barone was trying to plead a case in Detroit last month when he was warned about a big chill in the climate for making deals. A politically astute attorney observed: "There's more wire in this town than there's ever been," Barone says.

The perception of ears tuned in to private frequencies may or may not be creating a new era of ethics, but it's definitely cramping styles, stimulating cell phone borrowing and cutting down on phone calls.

Are federal agents really tuning in to every City Hall call? It may not matter, so long as people assume they are.

Surveillance law tough
"People are so paranoid, they don't even want to talk to their relatives," Mongo says.

The law is tougher than most think, says Steve Fishman, the criminal defense lawyer. Even so, he says, "I absolutely think that (the fear of surveillance) is inhibiting the way people do things in the city. I can tell you I wouldn't call an official I've known for 40 years in this climate."

Legally, prosecutors are required to jump through hoops before getting legal authorization for electronic surveillance, and "minimization" rules dictate that agents can't listen to conversations if they're not specifically related to the authorized investigation.

Morganroth, who represented Young, remembers him at the Manoogian Mansion. The mayor cranked up the TV volume, turned it down, loudly uttered an expletive, then cranked up the volume. Over and over.

In that spirit, Riddle says he keeps talking because "being free is fraught with risk."

Mongo only pawn in game of life.