Dive bar holds on next to glitzy new arena
DETROIT » It was 1988, and a gritty stretch of Detroit known as the Cass Corridor was still many years away from getting rebranded and becoming home to the new Little Caesars Arena.
That was the year George Boukas, then in his late 20s, decided to buy the Temple Bar, a dive bar that his family previously had owned for decades. The bar stands today as one of the few businesses and properties near the arena that weren’t sold to land speculators or real estate entities linked to the Ilitch organization, the developer of the newly opened $863 million sports and entertainment venue.
The bar is a recurring setting in the Comedy Central TV series “Detroiters.”
But the Cass Corridor’s streets in the late 1980s were rougher than when Boukas’ family last owned the Temple Bar in the 1970s. So he set out to befriend the drug dealers and prostitutes hanging out in the neighborhood, offering the bar as a refuge and place where they might start reordering their lives.
“One of the very first things I did when I bought the bar is I befriended pretty much all of the dope boys on the street and pretty much all the hookers,” Boukas, now 57, recalled in a recent interview.
“I told the young girls especially, I don’t care what they did on the street. I’m not here to judge them, I’m not the police. But if they were ever in trouble, that they needed to come in here, because nobody would mess with them in here.
“And that created a loyalty and an amazing friendship. I have four that still come through that have left that life behind.”
Boukas has been watching the new arena’s opening with a mixture of amusement and cautious optimism.
Boukas says he turned down offers several years ago from mysterious businessmen who sought to buy his bar before the area was formally announced in 2013 as the new arena’s location. The men wouldn’t identify who they represented.
Many nearby property owners accepted such offers and became instant millionaires, their former buildings either boarded up or bulldozed to make way for the Red Wings’ and Pistons’ new home and the arena’s stillto-come commercial and residential district.
One family netted $5 million for a boarded-up party store in the arena’s footprint. And the Temple Hotel, a flophouse that let rooms for as long as a month or as short as an hour, listed for $3.7 million and sold for what the owner’s accountant described as “like maybe we hit the lottery.”
Boukas said one of the visiting businessmen gave him “a solid offer,” but he wasn’t ready to sell.
Several now-vacant apartment buildings near Temple Bar also were sold during the frenzy, and their low-income tenants ultimately had to move out. Some of them had been Boukas’ patrons. The whole phenomenon contributed to the neighborhood’s blight and desolation in the years leading up to arena groundbreaking.
“The unfortunate part about what’s happening today is the long-term residents of this community have been displaced in a very horrific fashion,” he said.
The Temple Bar was a popular spot in the early 1990s for interracial couples, and later a part of the city’s black gay scene. Today it attracts people of all class, race and lifestyle backgrounds.
“We’re probably the most diverse bar in the city as far as clientele goes — hipsters, gay people, interracial couples, drag queens,” Boukas said. “I tell everybody to just come and be yourself and have a good time.”
Tens of thousands of sports and music fans are now converging on the same streets near his bar that Detroit visitors avoided in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Cass Corridor was commonly seen as a dangerous and drug-infested stretch between downtown and Wayne State University.
There was some truth to the old perceptions, Boukas said, but fewer people were aware of the courtesies and respect that existed between many of the Corridor’s residents, business owners and street people.
“The Cass Corridor was a hard place,” he said. “But no matter what anybody tells you, this was still a loving community.”
Boukas said he anticipates picking up new business with the arena next door, even though his bar lacks a sports or entertainment theme. “There is always interest in historic dive bars,” he said.
However, that crowd will likely be different from the Temple Bar regulars who stop in during the week or come to its weekend dance parties.
“We deal with Opening Day, and this is basically the type of crowd it’s going to be, a lot of new people that have never been here before,” he said. “I’m going in with a very open mind. We treat people the same way they treat us.”