DETROIT THE RENAISSANCE IS REAL
Amelia Duggan enjoys all the pulse, grit and giddiness as America’s once-great motor city revs up again
‘Tell me, is this the city you expected to find?” I’ve been asked this question, in various forms, by half a dozen Detroiters since I arrived. This time I’m talking to Sergio Maclean in the art-filled lounge of the Shinola Hotel. He and his partner Audrey have been running operations here since January when, to much fanfare, the luxury goods brand Shinola opened the swish, valet-guarded doors of its first hotel, here in the heart of Downtown.
The property is sumptuous and welcoming. Sunlight floods through tall windows, glinting off bespoke furnishings and mirrors. Art-deco flourishes speak of the city’s heyday and, in a nod to its musical heritage, there’s a turntable in every room and a collection of Motown records to flick through. Outside, a wide boulevard cuts a canyon through roaring ’20s skyscrapers. For the first time in a generation, the city’s historic centre is flush with new boutiques, hotels and bars, and the streets are lively and safe into the small hours. I tell Maclean the truth: I’d envisioned something a little more dystopian.
Luckily, he doesn’t hold it against me. “For years the only story the media wanted to tell about Detroit was negative, about crime or depopulation. It was all ‘ruin porn’: photos of grand old buildings standing empty. It wasn’t nuanced. It’s an eclectic city, with an old soul. And the renaissance is real,” he adds. “You’re visiting at an incredible moment.”
BACK FROM BANKRUPTCY
If Detroit has now turned a page, the chapter began, disastrously, in July 2013 when the city filed for bankruptcy. For a metropolis that, for the first half of the 20th century, had been the most prosperous and innovative in America, it was the final ignominy. But hitting rock bottom had a galvanising effect: artists, entrepreneurs and investors began to reimagine Detroit.
So while the city is rich in history, soulful old music joints and impressive museums (the Detroit Institute of Arts, The Henry Ford and the Motown Museum, to name a few), I take Maclean’s advice: I spend my city break tuning into the pulse, grit and giddiness of the modern moment.
It’s Saturday and the neighbourhood of Eastern Market is thronging. Over 200 stalls fill the historic “sheds” at the heart of the 19th-century packing district, selling produce and plants grown by local smallholders or on collective urban farms. Ribs sizzle on the barbecue outside Bert’s, an old-timey music venue and packed-out lunch spot.
The market has been a fixture of city life since 1841, making it the oldest of its kind in the country. But the imaginative, large-scale murals, splashed across the area’s warehouses and water towers, are a much more recent addition.
“I like street art, but the graffiti in the city had gone too far. It didn’t feel safe,” Dan Armand, the man responsible for Eastern Market’s facelift, tells me.
In 2015, he launched Murals in the Market, a street-art festival now held each September. The walls of his neighbourhood became canvases for international heavyweights such as Richard Wilson and home-grown talents like Pat Perry and Ouizi. When I ask what motivated him, he says: “The people who stayed in Detroit, we’re passionate about this city.” He cites the “lawnmower brigades” organised by citizens to tidy up abandoned playgrounds. “There’s a can-do spirit in Detroiters, definitely.”
YOUNG, BOHO VIBES
Today, 125 murals bedazzle the area, helping to bring much-needed foot traffic to backstreets, even on quiet, non-market days. New bars like Gather and Eastern Market Brewing Co have opened, solidifying the area’s young, boho vibe. Tourists wanting to dive a little deeper into the stories and social messages behind the art can sign up for a bike tour with RiDetroit.
Just down the road, at Detroit Vineyards, Blake Kownacki pours me a glass of 2018 merlot rosé in his cavernous bar, renovated from the shell of an old ice-cream factory. It’s a gorgeous space: chandeliers dangle over machine parts, displayed like artworks, and the exposed guts of the factory gives the bar a steampunk feel.
“You’ll probably be surprised to hear winemaking in Michigan predates California — our shoreline offers an amazing microclimate for growing world-class grapes,” Kownacki says. “I took soil samples and crunched the data, and right here on the Detroit River is one of the best spots. My aim is to create the world’s biggest urban vineyard.”
And there’s certainly space. There are 80,000 vacant lots in the metropolitan area, the result of a vast exodus, triggered in the ’60s by post-industrial restructuring and bloody race rebellions.
Kownacki’s idea is for homeowners to buy up adjacent plots (which go for as little as $100/R1,500), plant grapes and sell the harvest to the winery.
He runs viticulture classes every other Saturday. “We want to impart skills and uplift communities. I could ship in grapes from Argentina or Chile, but I want to express regionalism in my wine. It’s not about sticking ‘Detroit’ on the label because it’s having this ‘cool’ moment. This is where I live. Where I’m from.”
COOL AND CREATIVE
The heart of the city seems flush with creative ventures, all just a few years old. I tour the quirky vinyl emporium, Third Man Records, opened in a newly-swish section of Midtown by Detroit-born musician Jack White (of the White Stripes fame); try the “ecstatic dance” classes offered in the Quonset cabins of the arty community of True North; and sample the new wave of high-end, experimental cocktail bars scattered around Downtown, including Bad Luck, tucked away in a back alley, and The Monarch Club.
Beyond these, there are larger-scale changes to appreciate. There are fresh infrastructure projects, such as the landscaped riverfront, stretching nearly
10km, and the pretty greenway of Dequindre Cut, running between the river and Eastern Market along sunken tracks once belonging to the Grand Trunk Railroad.
Even Michigan Central Station, the ruined Coliseum of Detroit that for so many decades symbolised the city’s misfortunes, has been purchased by Ford Motors and renovation works are under way that will transform it into a tech campus.
Detroit isn’t out of the woods yet. It has challenges ahead, one of them to update its reputation. After everything I’ve seen, talk of ruins and rust belts seems pretty passé. It’s definitely time we changed the record.
For more, see visitdetroit.com.
©Telegraph Media Group Limited [2019]