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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 remnants of their lives here are the flowering trees and shrubs that once decorated their yards but are the one thing that couldn’t be taken with those who left.

This lilac bush, once part of a border, gives a splash of color to this wide field. In the back, hiding in the trees, an old house slowly falls like its neighbors did one by one before it.

In the prairie neighborhoods, everything is some shade of brown or green, as the plain weeds and loose grasses have won the battle against the more delicate, cultivated flowering plants, and have choked most of them off. A few pretty things, though, hold their own out here.

This flowering cherry tree, a few streaks of pink against a barn-red house, was once along a fence but now stands beside an open field. With nothing there to block the sunlight, and nobody to shear its long, sloppy branches, it grows rangy and wild.

Years ago, someone buried the bulb that bears this little tulip, probably with many others.

Now it has to fight with thick grasses for rain and sunshine, yet still summons the strength to make a showing each spring.

It serves as a pointless display that nobody will see, a single surprise of beauty in an area where dreariness prevails.

The closest house left here is a full block over, and rots like an old country home.

Its drama wasted on a burned-out neighborhood, this red azalea has gone mad, streaming through a rusty old fence and past rotting wood posts, reaching out in all directions.

The houses here get stripped, the streets crumble or are piled with trash, but nothing happens to these plants, and nobody tries to steal or damage them.

They have no other use than to be lovely, and thus have little value in these parts, remaining essentially invisible, except for a few weeks each spring when they demand to be noticed.

In Detroit’s 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 Center’s Fisher Building for three years. Now, the store is gone and she finds herself alone.

The store sold an odd collection of novelty items whose only connection was some relation to music – mugs with musical phrases on them, plastic busts of famous composers, T-shirts with quaint slogans, and other hard-to-classify items like toilet paper with musical notes on it. They also had reeds, rosin, mouthpieces, tuners, and oils for musicians playing at the Fisher. “People keep saying that it’s an entirely new concept, that they so love the store,” she said in December.

West spent a life immersed in music. Her father, Walter West, was a locally renowned music teacher whose students included eventual Motown songwriters Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Edward Holland, as well as future orchestral musicians, composers, choir masters.

“I remember as a little girl all of these wonderful people that I had no clue what they were going to come to, people who ultimately became very famous coming to the house to study with Dad or work on a concert or whatever,” West says. “So I just grew up with that.” She still lives in the large family home just outside the Boston-Edison neighborhood on the west side.

She’s a flutist, a member of the flute performance ensemble Westminster Consort, which began more than two decades ago and which she named her store after. Occasionally they’d perform an intimate recital there. She’s also an adjunct professor of flute in Marygrove College’s Institute of Music and Dance.

“I realized that so many of the things that I needed either as a performer, or wanting to give presents to my colleagues or friends, I would always have to hunt them down, go through mail order, and wait and pray that it would come in good condition. So it popped in my head, why don’t I open a shop with these things?”

She ran the store with her older sister, Sandra. “My sister, I consider she’s part of me,” she said last year. “She helps me tremendously.” Sandra handled the books, Cheryl handled the retail. Both were unmarried. Their parents had died long ago; their brother passed away in June. “We’re getting down to a precious few,” she said then, “but were trying to hold on and keep good things alive, keep hope alive and keep things moving along in a positive vein.”

The store’s customers were orchestra performers, Fisher Theater audience members and classical music enthusiasts, a narrow customer base. Despite her enthusiasm, she admitted that the store struggled. “We are suffering, I will be quite honest with you,” she said just before Christmas. “We are suffering big time. You would think this would be a very enlivened area; it is not, partly because of the Michigan economy and because they keep pulling music out of the schools, which I still can’t understand.” Some days, she said, she didn’t get a single customer.

As winter took hold, everything fell apart. The sister she was inseparable from died suddenly in February, something she discovered when she went to visit her after phone calls to her went unreturned. “I was praying all the way there that God would hold me up, because I knew what I would find there,” she says.

Soon after the funeral she closed the store, the abysmal sales and loneliness taking their toll. Her demanor, previously cheerful, had darkened.

“People would not believe what goes on in that building,” she says now of the Fisher Building. In her three years there she was robbed six times and endured countless shoplifters, she says.

“Not only that, but the mental patients roam through there at will, they run through there screaming, cursing, from any number of group homes in the area. One actively lunged at me, and he was on a routine cycle, he would come back every Saturday at 1:30. He was always harassing me. Security is an absolute joke there and there was no security presence down that hallway. I’m so glad I’m out of there.” Fisher Building representatives could not be reached for comment.

West isn’t sure what the future holds. She might rent out rooms in her sister’s house for recitals, small chamber music concerts, maybe open a smaller version of the old store there. For now she’s only trying to make life normal again. But as it stands, the city lost another little business, the kind that make a city interesting.

“We tried to tough it out, but to no avail,” she says. “I guess it was not to be.”

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 dense the city really once was.

Here and there though, some small shops survive from the city’s heyday, with shorter hours and fewer products than before, but enduring as a link to the variety and diversity that was Detroit at its peak.

Sisters Cakery, a little cake shop on Warren Avenue just west of Greenfield Road on the city’s western border, is just such a place, persevering since the 1950s, when it was called Tysar’s.

The store’s run by two sisters, Susan Radovanovich, 59, and Kata Zlatich, 55, daughters of its late owners. Like many immigrant merchants, the family, which came here from Yugoslavia, toiled to establish themselves.

“They were all night in the back there, all day up front,” Susan says. “Even though it was so much work years ago, my mom never said once that it was hard for her. Day and night they were here, 16, 18 hours a day, and mother was always happy. She’d say ‘I’m with my kids, the family’s around me. Why would it be hard?’”

The store was in a Polish enclave, one of hundreds of businesses catering to the immigrants crammed into dense housing. The family sold such ethnic specialties as Polish rye bread, pumpernickel, angel wings and kolatchkies — little pastries with a sweet filling. “It was a Polish neighborhood, so that’s what you make,” Susan says. “The customers were Polish and that’s what they were asking for.

Over the years they stopped making donuts, pastries and most breads as demand declined. “All the old customers are old Polish people,” she says. “Now there’s hardly anybody. The old people are dying, and the young ones are moving away. There’s no demand for the stuff that we used to make.”

Now their focus is cakes, baked by Susan’s son Pero “Peter” Radovanovich, 37, and decorated by the sisters or by Kata’s daughters when they’re not at college. They also sell thick brownies, chocolate cake squares and marble pound cakes, all at prices frozen years ago.

Once in a while they have bread, when Dime “cousin Jimmy” Mihajlovski, 65, a former bakery owner, comes in to bake it, as he’s doing at left.

The neighborhood’s become one of the few in the city to see a real resurgence, with Middle Eastern immigrants now pouring in, as the Poles did a century ago. “They picked up Warren pretty good,” Susan says. “They’re building. Otherwise it would’ve been a ghost town,” she says.

Still, staying on in the inner city has its pitfalls, like a recent break-in. “They stole all the brownies, all the pies and two boxes of diet cookies,” Peter says, laughing. “But they were gentlemen about it; they didn’t break anything. They just picked the lock. They only stole edibles because there’s no money here. It does suck but it’s kind of funny. Nobody ever heard of someone coming in and stealing baked goods.” In an earlier burglary, someone took only a potted plant.

On a cold afternoon, 86-year-old Ted Sarr shuffled in, a longtime customer from the area who’s seen the offerings dwindle over the years as his neighbors moved on. “I like the breads, the cakes are pretty decent, but I used to love their éclairs,” he said. “But they don’t make them anymore. I miss those éclairs.”

In the back, by the ovens and shelves, family members — cousins, sisters, aunts — milled around a thick, wood table, baking pastries for themselves and hanging out, talking and gesturing with Old World mannerisms, as a TV sounded softly in the background. It’s become a meeting place for extended family members living in far-flung corners of the city, and for old friends passing through.

“It just takes long for the yeast to rise,” Peter said about the bread making, around which the family gathers. “You’ve got to wait for the dough to rise, you’ve got to cut the dough, you gotta let it cool, then you gotta bake it. So half the time when you’re making bread you gotta just hang out because it’s like six hours.”

Places like these are surviving traces of an old Detroit that is almost gone. The city had thousands of them, small family shops selling one or two particular things that they’d perfected over the years. Most died, except for a handful that are like charming little secrets, out of the way and mostly unknown.

“There’s not that many left,” Peter says. “I hate it when mom-and-pop shops go out of business. I prefer them. Meijer and stuff are all useful stores, but I like when they’re like, ‘My dad owned this’ or ‘My grandpa bought it when he came from Poland.’ I like that.”

Sisters Cakery is at 15730 W. Warren Ave., Detroit. For more information, call 313-846-4777.

This article originally appeared in the Metro Times.

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 destination for vice — still has several of them catering to those who enjoy being aroused in public.

Fifth Wheel Books, on Michigan Avenue east of Wyoming, is an anachronism. It’s an old brick-and-mortar porno store complete with individual and “buddy” booths for peep-shows.

Named for the hitch that joins a semi-trailer with a truck, the store’s owned by camera-shy Ray and Mary Kay Bauer, who took over after its last owner, Mary Kay’s mom, died a few years ago.

There are two Fifth Wheel stores: The original opened between truck stops on Schaefer Highway in 1970, and the Michigan Avenue shop, the larger of the two, opened a year or so later. Ray, 65, runs the store on Michigan; his wife, 45, is behind the counter at the other.

As Mary Kay recounts the history, her father, Earl Prieur, started the business, and when he died years ago, his wife, Irene, had to step in. “My mother was a housewife, and she knew nothing about nothing,” Mary Kay says. “She had to walk into it and figure out what to do and how to do it.”

“In the ’70s, it was totally different than it is now,” she says. “People are more open to sex and sexual-oriented things. Back then it was kind of like a taboo thing, especially with her running the store. She’d be behind the register and men would come in and walk out. They’d say, ‘Oh, my God’ and she’d have to explain, ‘I’m Earl’s wife. He died and here I am. I’m staying.’”

The store is divided into two parts. The front sells dozens of lubricants and hundreds of DVDs sorted according to various sexual predispositions and racial categories. Scores of colorful dildos line the shelves, pointing stiffly skyward.

The back part of the store houses the darkened peep-show room, featuring a dozen cramped booths, each outfitted with a small bench, a wastebasket and a 17-inch video screen with 32 flicks to choose from.

A minute of porn costs a 25-cent token. To keep the merriment going, a customer needs to insert a token into the slot every minute until self-satisfied. Though patrons are expected to clean up any DNA samples left behind, an employee also scrubs each booth daily.

Half the booths include a 22-inch-by-22-inch opaque window. These are what Ray calls “buddy booths,” where men in adjoining booths can agree to watch each other’s style. “Somebody goes into one door, somebody goes into the next one; if they choose they can hit a button, the fog clears, you can see each other,” Ray says. “It’s a glass, but both parties have to hit a button and it clears.” Often, movie buffs emerge from the booths and leave together, or ask Ray for a pen to exchange phone numbers.

Years back, the store was targeted by an anti-pornography neighborhood group. “All of a sudden they discovered the store was here,” Mary Kay says. “We had nuns in here trying to take pictures of things. They went to the house too; they thought they were going to shock the neighbors. They had the camera crews and everybody there. And the neighbors told them, ‘Get off our property.’”

Despite more relaxed attitudes nowadays, some still chafe at having a pornographic establishment in the neighborhood — the place was set on fire twice last year, according to the Bauers. It survived, but smoke damage and insurance delays closed it for eight months. “The insurance guy told me, ‘Don’t worry, you can wash off some of this stuff and resell it,’” Mary Kay says. “I said ‘I’ll tell you what — you take that dong home to your wife, stick it up her wazoo, call me and tell me how she likes it.” They replaced every last smoke-stained dildo, pocket pal and lube bottle in the store, she says.

Prostitutes used to loiter outside the store, which is by a squalid motel, itself next to a shabby strip club. For all the changes in Detroit, parts of Michigan Avenue are still sleazy. The police cleared most of the hookers away, though now and then Ray says he might chase off a stray, interrupting a day otherwise spent dispensing tokens for the steady stream of lone men coming through the door.

“They’re gentlemen, they just take care of themselves,” he says. “If they wanna go into the buddy booths, they can do that and look at each other. I don’t give a shit, if that’s their cup of tea. Whatever floats your boat, you go for it.”

Fifth Wheel Books II is located at 9320 Michigan Ave., Detroit. For more information call 313-846-8613.

This article originally appeared in the Metro Times.

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, an assistant to George Washington Carver, the famed former slave who became a renowned agricultural chemist noted for his many innovative uses of the peanut.

The museum was established by Douglas “Dickie” Crawford, 80, and his wife Christine, 77, who knew Curtis from his years in Detroit. But the museum is more than a tribute to its owner’s friend; it’s a sprawling monument to various figures in black history who have inspired him, an utterly unique exhibition of Detroit’s past.

Curtis was born in West Virginia in 1911, graduated from Cornell in 1932, and became Carver’s assistant at the Tuskegee Institute in 1935, where he remained until his mentor’s death in 1943. Soon after, he moved to Detroit and opened Curtis Laboratories, which produced a number of health and hair care products based on peanut oil, until it closed in 2001.

Douglas Crawford first met Curtis in the ’50s. “We were so different,” he says. “He really didn’t like me. I wasn’t one of them.”

Crawford overcame a troubled early life to become a successful businessman. Born in 1927 to a family with 11 other children, his education abruptly ended in fifth grade, when he brought a knife to school to retaliate against students from the nearby black neighborhood who’d been bothering him for living in a white area.

“They were mad at me ’cause they thought I’m white or something, and they started kicking my ass, putting sand in my mouth, picking on me,” he says.

He was removed from the general student population over the incident. “They took me and put me in a special room, with no books,” he says. “I never saw a book after fifth grade.”

He left home at 16 and headed to Paradise Valley, whiling away days at his brother’s flower shop there, getting an alternate education. “I met every businessman there,” he says. “I knew every man who owned a bar. I knew everybody down there, and I learned what I needed to learn.”

He spent nights sleeping in a laundry truck until a streetwalker named Jessie found him and took him in. “This was my savior,” he says. “She taught me what I needed to know to carry me through life.”

His brother found him and dragged him home, getting him a job as a mechanic at City Airport. Eventually, he says, he followed in his father’s footsteps and became one of the city’s most successful minority contractors; at one point he was awarded the contracts to move homes that were displaced to make way for the Lodge and Ford freeways. Over time he also purchased and rehabbed a number of buildings around town; the largest was a 50-unit hotel on the west side.

In 1977 he bought and renovated four buildings at McNichols and Ardmore, connecting all four to create a 8,000-square-foot, indoor hair care mall called the House of Beauty.

The black history museum was born in 2000 when the Crawfords were cleaning Curtis Laboratories for a renovation and found piles of old photos, correspondence and articles tossed in garbage bags, forgotten. They rescued the materials, making them the core of the museum in a wing of the House of Beauty mall, where it has grown ever since, funded entirely by Crawford.

His museum twists and turns, spilling from each room into the next. Blue-sky paintings are the backdrop of the brightly lit rooms, whose walls are covered with framed photos of Curtis and Carver, correspondence preserved under glass, and numerous awards given to the doctor during his life. Everything’s attached to seared wood that Crawford has slowly blackened with a blowtorch, creating a rustic look.

Though the museum focuses on Curtis, it also presents information about disparate black luminaries who Crawford feels deserve a place of honor, such as newsman Ed Bradley, Gen. Colin Powell and author Alex Haley. His lack of formal education has fueled his reverence for educated people of accomplishment.

Mary Jones, the museum’s spokesperson and co-founder, leads the infrequent tours, though if Crawford is there he’ll provide input.

“I love it when he’s here,” Jones says, “because he does a wonderful tour, especially with the teenagers. They not only get a history lesson, they get a fatherly lesson as well. He’ll say, ‘This is something you need to know!’”

Jones, 59, was a tester at Curtis Laboratories when she came to work at the House of Beauty. She reunited Crawford and Curtis, who remained close friends until Curtis died in 2004, after which his business was bought and moved to Washington, D.C., leaving the museum as the only trace of the doctor’s long stay here in Detroit.

Tours are infrequent, and visitors are sparse. “Look how many people here walk by and see a big sign like that — ‘Black History’ — and have never stopped in, even if they come to get their hair done,” Crawford says. “And they don’t seem to get excited. And that’s the way it is.”

Despite being under the radar, he moves forward with the museum, to ensure not only that the doctor gets recognition, but also as a sincere tribute to those he feels need to be known and remembered.

The Curtis Museum is located at 14034 McNichols Rd., Detroit. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m. For more information, call 313-341-1512.

This article originally appeared in the Metro Times.