(The President and Vice President announce a blitz two-day national tour in support of visits by the First and Second Ladies in support of military families. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images North America.) It is great to be out of the Beltway. People are nicer. Nothing is quite as crazy as it is back there […]

(The rock and snow poem of Pike’s Peak as Zebulon Pike might have seen it. Photo courtesy Destination 360.) I have been running on about my once and future city of Detroit, the broad-shouldered steel stamping town of yore, and the destination for the big government convention early next month. It is hard to concentrate […]

(Bob Seger at MT. Holly Ski Lodge near Pontiac. Real young.) Sorry, gentle readers, I am traveling this morning and this is not done with even my usual casual interest to prof-reading. The success of WABX inspired other Detroit stations WKNR-FM  to adopt the passive-aggressive-progressive-rock approach to the new music. Our pal Lynn was the […]

(A MoTown 45 RPM Record. TM Motown Records or whoever owns the rights now.) OK, we have done the city, done the region, all is not lost, well, maybe it is. But damn, Detroit was a vibrant place and it just seems like a crying shame that inept government, greed and a staggering level of […]

(Superbowl Night, 2006. Brand new Ford Field looms in the background. Photo Wiki Commons by ifmuth.) There is good stuff happening in Detroit; there must be. You can see some of it the picture above, from 2006. The downtown was spruced up for Super Bowl XL, when the Steelers cemented themselves as one of the […]

“At the end of the 2007 school year, Jane Cooper Elementary (built in 1920) was left unsecured in the middle of the wasteland where a middle-class neighborhood once stood. It took “scrappers” only a few months to strip the building of every last ounce of metal and leave it looking as though it hadn’t been […]

(Detroit Police Chief William Hart and Mayor Coleman A. Young in better days. Photo Detroit Free Press.) When you grow up in a town north of Canada, all directions are down from the Pole. That is the way it seems, anyway, since the accident of the Detroit River and the protrusion of Ontario below the […]

(Ford Model T assembly line. Photo FoMoCo.) With all the talk about jobs these days, it makes a Boomer sigh. We have all done some work we didn’t like much, but we lucky ones got a chance to see some things that really suck. I worked on a farm one summer, and that was an […]

I stopped at Willow after work, no surprise, still thinking about the husk of the city. I had looked for a limo to do a tour of some of the ruins, a delicate matter, since those that dwell too deeply on what is so sad are said to indulge in a fetish called “ruin porn,” […]

(Detroit Skyline, 1929.) Writing about Detroit means writing about The Line. Manufacturing stuff was what provided the economic base that produced the graceful boulevards and avenues that made the city once called- without irony- “The Paris of the Midwest.” Detroit ranked third in the nation, after New York and Chicago, in the number of major […]