A small, relatively obscure apartment building in the Cass Corridor is getting attention as part of the loft-mania sweeping the city, and before they began rebuilding it I went in to take a look around.

The apartments, located just north of the corner of Cass and Martin Luther King Drive, were built in 1913. The four-story, 26-unit structure was called the Chesterfield at the time. By the end of World War I it was renamed the Bon Rae apartments. City records claim it was built in 1900, but no record of it exists before 1913, when it began being registered all over the place. And when it comes to city property records, they’re about as accurate and reliable as a Kilpatrick Administration budget forecast.

In 1924 a much larger complex was built next door at the corner of Cass and Stimson, later renamed Martin Luther King Drive. Known as the Naomi Apartments, the building contained 78 apartments. It was renamed the Cass Plaza Apartments in the late 1930s, the name it retained until it, too, became vacant and a source of free housing for Cass Corridor wanderers. Across from the Bon Rae, the Wayne Court Apartments were built in 1928, rounding out the area of Cass and Stimpson as a nice little residential district.

I remember the Bon Rae being occupied, sometime in the 1980s and maybe into the 1990s, when it was a rock-bottom, out-of-luck kind of place that prostitutes, junkies and mentally ill people flop in. Even after it was shuttered, its stoop served as a loitering spot for the Cass Corridor’s always colorful residents, particularly in the days before Wayne State University’s outward expansion into school buildings and student housing, which has brought loft development with it and has driven many of the area’s original denizens elsewhere.

The Bon Rae is relatively unremarkable in a city of rather remarkable buildings, one of hundreds of similar apartment buildings scattered throughout Detroit, hence the small amount of information out there on it. The building is now being renovated and renamed the Chesterfield in honor of the apartment building’s original designation. So before they tore it up and overlaid the original hardwood and brick with all sorts of loft elements, I went in and had a look at turn-of-the-century building style.

There’s not much to see inside. It’s been gutted down to the original brick, so apart from some interesting arch work, it looks like any century-old brick structure, the kind that Greenfield Village is loaded with. The upper level back stairwell, with rotten wood steps, was covered in about two inches of pigeon droppings and pigeon remnants like feathers, skeletons and beaks, all stirred up by the manic wing-flapping of the birds as I walked through.

The Bon Rae also provided this window view of a next door apartment building, the Davenport, built in 1918, still surprisingly occupied despite growing increasingly dilapidated inside, though it retains an ornate front entrance. But what struck me was the view, a view I’ve had often in my life, the same view you find throughout the city’s neighborhoods.

It’s my mental image of Detroit – looking out the window and seeing a century-old brick house or building, with a Tree of Heaven or wild grape vine growing in the small walkway between you and the neighbor, the sun beating down, heating the bricks, illuminating the flecks of magenta and russet paint still on the wall, the exotic and always different brick patterns, the unique creativity and artistry in something as simple as windowsills, brick arches for no reason other than to arch, wonderfully crafted buildings from decades before I was born.

In the suburbs the view out the window is of a neighbor’s siding, of wide gaps between homes, of shingles on ranch homes. It’s a totally different view. It’s not until you leave Detroit and travel elsewhere that you realize that the Detroit view is not normal, that Detroit is unique and beautiful in its own ugly way, and you learn to appreciate the rich history and everyday loveliness to be found all over town.

Life is tough in Detroit, no doubt about it. So tough, in fact, that you can’t even escape it in death.

This week, cops doing the detroitblog thing by entering an abandoned building and looking around found more than the usual pigeon droppings and empty liquor bottles:

Clad in suits, their arms crossed and their bodies laid out peacefully in their caskets, these two were ready for eternity.
But their final resting place wasn’t supposed to be a second-floor room in a shuttered funeral home.
Instead of being buried or cremated, the two unidentified men apparently were in the building for at least a year until Thursday, when Detroit police officers found them while checking for vagrants at the old Pope Funeral Home on Plymouth Road.
They were badly decomposed, but still waiting to be put to rest.

I swear, that would’ve been the blog post to end all blog posts, had I been the one to come across that scene. Though holding the camera steady while pissing my pants might’ve made for some blurry photos.

Poor bastards. But at least they made it to the funeral home rather than being swiped:

Three men were arraigned Friday following the discovery of a body stolen from a Southfield hospital and dumped in a trash bin behind a Detroit shopping center.
The men are accused of posing as funeral home workers Sunday night, going to Providence Hospital in Southfield and taking from the hospital’s morgue the body of a man in his mid-80s who had died of natural causes.
Police say the defendants had planned to take the stolen body to a funeral home, claim it was that of a man for whom they had purchased a life insurance policy, obtain a death certificate and cash in the policy.
When the plan fell apart, the body was dumped.

It’s tough being a dead body in the city. No wonder the dead are asking their relatives to dig them up and haul them out to the suburbs:

“Suburbanites are taking the bodies of their relatives out of cemeteries because they’re afraid to come to the city,”said Stephen Vogel, dean of the school of architecture at University of Detroit Mercy. “There are about 400 to 500 hundred (being moved) a year which shows you the depth of racism and fear.”

This is nothing new; the Freep reported on this several years ago:

Half a century after the living started leaving Detroit, the dead are following.
A growing number of suburban families are unearthing the bodies of their loved ones from Detroit cemeteries and spending thousands of dollars to move them closer to their new homes.
The trend has spread mostly by word of mouth among older Catholics in Macomb County. They are from some of the same families whose departures from Detroit’s east side after World War II contributed to an eventual loss of one million Detroit residents — half its peak population.
Although no one keeps statistics on the phenomenon, the rate of after-death migration in southeast Michigan may rank first in the nation, said David Walkinshaw in Boston, a spokesman for the National Funeral Directors Association.

This isn’t nearly as crazy as it seems at first glance; older people who moved miles away years ago don’t like driving an hour each way to visit people who aren’t exactly lively when they get there. Might as well drive around the corner to visit these deadbeats.

I’m not sure, as the quote from the dean claims, that fear and racism are necessarily to blame. Fear, maybe, due to things like signs at places like local historic cemeteries warning visitors to lock their car doors while driving through. When the signs at the local cemetery, of all places, tell you to be fearful, you’re probably should worry a bit.

Racism? That’s the usual kneejerk excuse provided by academics like Vogel, who is actually a dean of architecture at U of D. Not sure why he feels himself qualified to make sweeping sociological statements despite having no sociological background, and tarnish whole groups of people he’ll never meet while he’s tucked away in his cocoon in academia.

Ah, but many academics in the liberal arts are convinced of their superiority over the stupid masses. He doesn’t have to be a real sociologist; just by virtue of being an academic he still knows more about us than we dumb rednecks do. He’s so far removed from normal people that he postulates them as stupid, wicked bigots, not like his peers in the corridors of knowledge, who are wonderful, brilliant, caring people.

People left (and still leave) Detroit for various reasons, many having nothing to do with racism. Perhaps if he condescended to mingle with real people, he’d realize this.

While walking around before the Tigers game the other night on my way to Comerica Park to unburden myself of sobriety, faith in my hometown team and a lot of cash, it struck me how different Washington Boulevard looks nowadays. The old layout of the street was torn up in a Super-Bowl-inspired renovation that restored it to its pre-1970s appearance, an appearance admittedly without the overflow of functioning businesses, bustling crowds, and swank cachet it once had as an attempt to replicate the streets of Paris.

The street was originally called Washington Grand Boulevard, so named by Augustus Woodward after the great fire of 1805, when he designed the distinctive spokes-in-a-wheel pattern for Detroit’s streets that is still in existence today. In 1828 it was renamed Wayne Street after General Anthony Wayne, but was changed back to Washington once again a few decades later.

Before the economic boom of the 1920s, during which most of downtown Detroit as we know it was built, Washington was lined with homes and small businesses. In the next couple decades, it became a focus of the City Beautiful movement, which espoused the idea that beautification of a city would inspire civic loyalty, reduce social problems, bring American cities to equal cultural status with European cities, and draw the upper classes to the city center to spend money.

Wealthy Detroiters like the Book family hired noted architects such as Albert Kahn and Louis Kamper to design the Book Building, Book Tower and Book Cadillac Hotel.

Other notable buildings on the street include the lovely St. Aloysius Church, founded in 1873 and featuring elaborate stone detailing in its facade; the Chancery Building, constructed at the same time and used by the Archdiocese of Detroit; the century-old Washington Arcade Building, known as Himeloch’s department store until 1977; and the Julian Madison building, another example of 1920s architecture. The strip of Washington between Michigan Avenue and Grand Circus Park was known at the time as the “Fifth Avenue of the Midwest.”

In the 1920s, when Detroit was the nation’s fifth-largest retail market, Washington Boulevard was the place to be if you owned a business. Modeled after the boulevards of Paris, Washington featured lush landscaping, large storefronts, and wide sidewalks for window shopping at the strip’s dozens of businesses, anchored by the Book Cadillac Hotel at one end and Grand Circus Park at the other, with the David Whitney Building hosting upscale retailers opposite the equally upscale Statler Hotel across the street.

As the 60s and 70s wore on, Washington Boulevard’s fortunes began sinking with the rest of downtown’s. Businesses began closing, the Statler Hotel shut its doors, the David Whitney Building grew emptier, and the Book Cadillac Hotel started closing floors to save money. Lower-rent businesses moved into the ground-floor storefronts. The grand buildings inspired by the City Beautiful movement gave way to architecturally uninspiring structures like the massive Trolley Plaza apartment building.

By the late 70s and early 80s the City tried to revive the strip through a questionable redesign, roughly coinciding with the decision to turn part of Woodward into a pedestrian mall, a fetish of 1970s urban planners. The decision was made to tear up Washington Boulevard and make the boulevard not actually a boulevard, but rather the staging area for a giant, red, erector set designed by Birmingham-based architect Gino Rosetti, who later designed the Compuware Building and Ford Field.

Among other things, it contained James Pallas’ art installation tribute to Thomas Edison, featuring giant light bulbs arranged in large circles. Contained beneath the metal maze were large fountains, small trees, benches and tables, drinking fountains, elaborate brick patterns, and lots and lots of drab concrete, the kind of meaningless blocks of concrete that Soviet planners would’ve heartily approved of. The City also plopped down fine examples of 1970s public sculpture, mostly pieces depicting things like the artists’ agonized rendition of a blob.

By the 1990s it became a version of Capital Park North, with hobos lounging against the fountains and in the shaded benches provided up and down the strip.

This whole monstrosity stretched up and down the east side of Washington Boulevard, pushing traffic into four, distinctly non-boulevard lanes on the west side of the street. After the People Mover was built a decade or so later, the area was swarming with all sorts of overhead stuff like concrete rail tracks and red monkey bars.

All of this didn’t exactly distract from the presence of abandoned dinosaurs like the Book Cadillac or Statler, but neither did Mayor Coleman Young’s fake awnings on the latter to hide the fact that it was empty during the Republican National Convention in 1980. The concrete and red metal installation did, however, separate foot traffic from window shopping and blocked the views of the buildings you’d want to see. If the intention was to totally mess up what had been a nice area, the City did a marvelous job.

In addition, the City added a bicentennial-era trolley system which utilized nine, 100-year-old street trolleys, a reminder of the era when hundreds of streetcars operated on Detroit’s streets. The Washington trolleys had to be purchased from Spain, since Detroit’s original trolleys were sold to Mexico in the 1950s when the system was shut down for good in Detroit. The trolleys attracted only about 3,000 riders per year, and at 50 cents per rider, the City was subsidizing the system to the tune of $100 per person each year. The system became a money pit, and a couple years ago the trolleys were removed permanently.

Now with its return to planning sanity spurred by the Superbowl next year, Washington Boulevard is wide open (seen at right), with lots of space to match the gaping hole that will soon be left where the Statler stood for 90 years, right next to the hole where the Tuller Hotel stood for over 80 years, itself just across from the likely hole where the Fine Arts Building has stood for 100 years.

But beyond the demolition mania sweeping the city, at least the City recognized the planning mistakes of the 70s and 80s and acted to correct them, both on Washington and on Woodward. The addition of Bookies bar, in the ground floor of the Book Tower, has brought suburbanites back to the strip, an area most of them were hard-pressed to find a few years ago.

The demolition of ugly awnings over business storefronts on the boulevard’s east side has revealed a number of 1970s-era and 80s-era businesses like Ebony House and Downtown Fish and Seafood. But at least the building’s original 1928 stone facade is also exposed, showing it has more potential than one might’ve guessed. And foot traffic from football and baseball fans parking all around downtown and passing through Washington Boulevard on their way to the stadiums is revealing Detroit’s former “Fifth Avenue” to lots of people who were never aware of its existence.

This post features something not seen in a while on the blog – urban exploration.

The inferno known as Summer of Hell 2005 finally seems to have subsided, allowing people to venture outside and participate in activities like sitting, or breathing without breaking into a profuse, uncomfortable sweat.

Some explorer friends called me Saturday morning, rousing me out of my Friday night clubbing hangover with an invitation to check out the recently scraped-out Book Cadillac Hotel. And seeing as how the weather was bearable bordering on nice, I joined in for the first time in months.

We found a relatively straightforward though somewhat harrowing way into the shuttered hotel, and two of us made our way inside. As the third and last one of us was entering the hotel, stuck half-inside and half-outside, a security guard walked up and started shouting for him to get out, or he’d call the police. Then he called the police anyway.

The whole scene was like those nature films shot in the African wild, where the last one in the fleeing gazelle herd is caught by the lion, or panther, or tiger, or some other such imperfect metaphor for a relatively low-end security guard who just happened upon us at the wrong time. The rest of the herd just looks on at the carnage, regretful and sad, but also not wanting to get caught themselves. Sorry, little explorer gazelle!

Luckily, the police never bothered to show up, or else the guard never actually called them; for all I know, he was calling his supervisor or his girlfriend or something. Since the police have an infamous track record of slow response time to even relatively major crimes, it would’ve been pretty absurd if they rushed over for something as benign as this while people who are beaten senseless or shot at wait two hours for attention from them.

So now one of us was screwed out of the experience that he initiated in the first place, and two of us were stuck inside the hotel for a while, feeling bad that one of us was alone, outside. The security guard either saw all of us going in or else assumed he didn’t catch everyone, because he sat himself directly outside our entrance to the hotel, waiting for us to emerge. Suddenly we were in it for the long haul, our day dictated not by our timetable, but by his. We figured we’d outwait him and he’d grow bored and leave. We were wrong.

In preparation for either demolition or renovation the hotel was scraped clean earlier this year, down to the concrete and steel skeleton inside. Holes were punched in the facade and side walls so debris could be shoveled out, and every artifact that had been inside was now gone. I had been in the hotel several times before, both during the day and at night, but it was nice being inside again. It’s still the king of abandoned buildings in Detroit. The David Broderick Tower probably has a slight edge in coolness, but the Book Cadillac, as the king of Detroit hotels, has the edge with its notoriety.

The famous third-floor Grand Ballroom, the most striking room that had been remaining in the hotel, was scraped clean. Here is how it appeared for years after its closing in 1983, complete with elaborate balconies, glass doors, mirrored walls, curtained windows, decorative plaster angel faces jutting out from the upper walls, and two inches of plaster muck on the floor, a trail of destruction left by the elements, vandals and scavengers.

This is the Grand Ballroom now, scraped bare to the concrete, the doors removed, the balcony railngs gone, the remaining plaster decor smashed off the walls, and the bases for the balconies intact but with all evidence of the room’s former grandeur gone forever.

Surprisingly, some of the middle and upper floors weren’t cleaned out at all. Walls were simply knocked into piles of rubble, which were left sitting in place. Old mattresses remained on some floors, while some shelves still contained 20-year-old phone books. Old ceiling tiles, the kind that usually contain asbestos, remained in place, some half torn down.

We climbed our way up to the roof, just as the sun broke through the rainy clouds, dousing the surrounding buildings with a soft, yellow light. We lounged up there for a while; walking various ledges; climbing the decorative copper terraced peaks; taking photos as another Louis Kamper structure, the Book Building, loomed in the background, appearing very much at that height like a architectural relative of the Book Cadillac.

We headed back down the 33 flights of stairs. But we couldn’t leave. We figured the security guard would grow bored, but he was still in place, patiently waiting for us to come out. The building was very well boarded up, so blasting out way out by sheer force wasn’t an option, even if we could get over the inelegance and undesirability of such an exit.

Maybe, we thought, we could create a diversion to compel him to the other side of the building; hundreds of pounds of debris, perhaps, loudly raining on top of his vehicle from an upper floor might grab his attention quickly. As cinematically appealing as that was, we immediately ruled it out.

We wasted more time taking photos, including the one at the beginning of the post showing General Anthony Wayne standing guard over Layafette Boulevard and the abandoned Lafayette Building. I even snapped a shot of our gung-ho security man patiently awaiting our exit.

We did eventually find a way out, and leapt wildly over the fence surrounding the hotel, emerging in broad daylight in front of about a dozen very surprised bus riders waiting for the next bus. We hightailed it out of there. Back safely in my car, I circled around and saw Kojak, still waiting at our entrance. Can’t blame him, really; his job – guarding an empty shell of a building that you can’t even get developers to visit, it seems – has got to be boredom itself. At least we provided him with a rush that day.

Not to pat ourselves on the back, but I’m gonna do it anyway – we got into and out of this building, one of the better sealed ones in the city, without removing a single board or screw, without breaking a window or shredding plywood. Nothing in or on that building is any different than before we got in, unlike the current trend (for some) in urban exploration in Detroit, which can best be described as “crash and burn,” considering the amount of ganked plywood, smashed windows and kicked-in doors we’ve encountered around town.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – if you know what you’re doing, there’s no reason whatsoever to ever break anything. There’s always a way in other than through vandalism. You just have to use your brain. Unfortunately, that’s too much strain for some people. They’re like those who go to campgrounds at a public park and leave trash everywhere, cut down saplings for wood and set fires that spread beyond the pit. Because of those people, the park is soon closed to everyone. Unfortunately, the same thing happens here too.

The city of Detroit has a very strange, wild appearance, in some parts like a city of ruins many years older than it actually is, where nature reasserts itself in vegetation that spreads over the city’s crumbling structures.

Detroit is far greener than most major cities, as seen in the runaway vines swarming old mansions in Brush Park, trees sprouting from the rooftops of skyscrapers, tall fields of grass encircling a lone house still standing on a residential block, and abandoned homes swallowed by shrubs thriving unchecked.

Whole neighborhood blocks cleared of their houses by arson and then bulldozers have reverted to urban prairies. They’re visible in satellite photos as unusually large green patches in the middle of the inner city. Sidewalks vanish beneath creeping grasses, while aluminum fences between homes become entwined with the branches of dozens of saplings growing as high as the droopy utility wires.

Alleys in parts of the city resemble hiking trails, as growth from the yards on both sides narrows their width. All around town, even smaller empty lots become thick, green fields, because the city doesn’t often mow in easements and right-of-way areas, and the weeds grow waist high.

Throughout Detroit, as half the population fled in the last half-century outward towards the suburbs and later towards more rural areas, the city itself has, ironically, become more rural, with wild animals and lush green plants coexisting with an industrial, modern metropolis. Nature, driven back by progress during the city’s 300 years, has aggressively reasserted itself in recent years, reclaiming land that people have given up on.

Animals normally scared out to the perimeter of the exurban rural areas are wandering back, sometimes finding more green space in parts of the city than they do in the increasingly developed parts of the exurbs like northern Macomb County.

As homes in residential areas became abandoned and either crumbled, burned or were demolished, whole blocks became empty in the middle of neighborhoods, and grasses, trees, wildflowers and vines have overrun the brick, wood and concrete that stood there for a century, leaving only crisscrossing streets as reminders that they were once inhabited.

It’s gotten to the point that various groups over the years have floated the ideas of turning some of the empty lots around the city into small farming plots for neighborhood residents to farm, reminiscent of Detroit Mayor Hazen Pingree’s program that turned city plots into potato farms to feed the hungry in the 1890s.

Abandoned industrial sites like the Fisher Body 21 plant, the Studebaker plant, the Continental Aluminum plant and the Detroit Screw Works plant have been overrun by trees growing through walls and roofs, unaffected by the chemicals and toxins left behind.

Even downtown, abandoned skyscrapers, with windows left open to the elements, become giant pigeon coops, their upper floors covered in inches of pigeon droppings, as generation after generation of pigeons live uninterrupted by humans in the middle of a major downtown. Buildings like the Wurlitzer, the Lafer and the Broderick house hundreds of pigeons between them.

Trees up to two or three stories tall rise up from the roofs of a number of local skyscrapers, like the Metropolitan, Charlevoix and Lafayette buildings, and hotels like the Fort-Shelby, and used to rise from the Statler and Book Cadillac hotels. A bushy tree rises higher each year from the Detroit Building’s roof on Park Avenue (above).

Probably the most visible wildlife in the city are the roving packs of wild dogs in Detroit neighborhoods. Groups of four to seven dogs, each litter progressively wilder and stranger-looking than their predecessors, roam through even well-kept neighborhoods, occasionally making the news when they attack someone, usually children or mail carriers.

Feral cats don’t just thrive by stalking mice through fields of wildflower and grass; sometimes take over entire buildings downtown. The Film Exchange Building has dozens of cats swarming the first floor; some maniac had been leaving cat food for them every few days, allowing them to rapidly multiply in a filthy environment. The Blenheim Apartment building on Park Avenue similarly has its share of cats sustained by someone shoving food into a small hole under the door.

Dogs and cats aren’t the only animals roaming the city; true wildlife has made its way back into Detroit after being pushed to the edges of the suburbs years ago. Pheasants have become commonplace in areas like Brush Park and Woodbridge, along the East riverfront, and in grassy parts of Highland Park. Even foxes, opossums, turkeys, roosters and raccoons have been spotted deep inside the city, some animals even roaming downtown where very little street-level brush exists as places to hide.

Opossums occasionally are spotted wandering alongside buildings in the Central Business District. In the Detroit Building on Park, I once found raccoon tracks on floors that also contained foot-high vegetation growing in floor mush. Impressions of raccoon paws were along windowsills and the edges of doors. In the Charlevoix Building down the street, I came across a dead raccoon on an upper floor, inside a closet (seen at left).

Some wildlife doesn’t come to the city on its own. In 1987, five Peregrine falcons were released in Detroit as part of a national program to restore them to the Midwest and East Coast. They nested on the Fischer Building, the Book Building and the Whittier Apartments.

I encountered one of them on an upper-floor fire escape of the Book Building a while back. It startled me by squawking loudly at me while perched a few feet away, staring intently at me, long enough to snap a photo of it before it flew off with slow, heavy flaps of its large wings, flying towards the abandoned Fort Shelby Hotel, itself the site of a turkey vulture’s nest this year, sharing roof space with several large trees.

Probably the most famous symbol of wildlife’s reclamation of the city are the stubborn trees referred to locally as ghetto palms. Known for their ubiquity in Detroit’s alleys, empty lots and fence borders between homes, the Ailanthus altissima, also called the Tree of Heaven, was imported from China in 1784 and spread through the city like a weed. It’s a very hardy species, able to grow in very small amounts of soil, requiring little sunlight or water, and able to withstand all sorts of soil pollutants, as anyone who’s tried to rid their property of them can confirm.

Their height is a gauge of how long a particular parcel has been neglected. In some areas they reach several stories high.

The gradual greening of Detroit adds to its fascination as a place of contrasts, where century-old mansions share borders with burned-out crackhouses, where urbane lofts exist in the same city as crumbling homes in the deep neighborhoods, where unrestrained nature is intertwined with the sharp lines and angles of the cement and steel of factories, where blocks of skyscrapers stand only a mile away from grassy expanses and wildflower-filled meadows whose small flowers bloom as colorful as any up north.

Also see: Wild neighborhoods