"Some Signs of Life in Motor City" a Detroit Travel Page by yooperprof

For several years, I've used this house as my "cover shot" for the city of Detroit, because to me it represented the comfortable past of the city and its decaying, squalid present. I took the picture in 1996 while on a visit to the city; it stands just a few blocks from the Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the great Art Museums in the USA.

But times change. Sometimes things do get better. Detroit still struggles, certainly, but the last few years have seen positive developments in the heart of the cities urban core. The new baseball stadium. A computer firm moving its corporate headquarters downtown. Opening up a new bookstore on the campus of Wayne State. A few new restaurants and nightclubs. The Super Bowl this year. And the redevelopment of the neighborhood around the Art Institute, restoring much of the dignity and pride that it once held.

I've got to thank fellow VT member dtownkitty for noticing this house on my Detroit page, and then putting it on the her Detroit front page. She says that the condos in the house are going for $400,000 each! (I hope she doesn't mind that I've borrowed her picture for the dramatic contrast it makes.)

Of course, gentrification in big city america is a complicated issue, and one doesn't want to see any city become simply a playground for the rich. But at a very basic level, it's good to see investment in Detroit's urban core - I hope there's a lot more of it in the future.

(With the dispersal of the poor from New Orleans, Detroit is now the city in America with the largest concentration of urban poverty.)

The beautiful bronze people have landed and taken over Cranbrook!

Cranbrook is a beautiful place in the desert of Detroit's suburban sprawl. It's a large estate dedicated to humanistic education and art, and since the 1920s it has served as a beacon of enlightenment throughout the Middle West, and indeed, around the world. For more info, check out my new Cranbrook Travelogue.