Exploring the Motor City without a car
renaissance of the city really taking hold,” he says. “It’s a special time to take part of what’s going on in Detroit.”
Food, food and more food (and drinks)
“Rebirth” and “renaissance” are words you hear a lot when people talk about the Motor City. It’s understandable, considering the rapid redevelopment that’s taken place downtown, even as the city has come out of the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.
About five years had passed since my last visit. This time, it might as well have been another city. (Admittedly, that previous visit was in the winter.) Downtown is vibrant, from the raucous nightlife of Greektown to the peaceful path that meanders along the Detroit River (wave to Canada across the way!).
The food and cocktail scene is on fire. At Sugar House, in the Corktown neighborhood, I was impressed by the ingenious cocktail menu featuring drinks inspired by local statues and monuments. I ordered the Codename: Midnight, dedicated to the Gateway to Freedom International Memorial to the Underground Railroad along the RiverWalk. It’s made with Canadian rye, orgeat, South African spice syrup and lemon and is served with peanut candy, made in house. While savoring the creation, we sat at the bar and chatted with the friendly bartender, who was kind enough to share the names of some of her favorite restaurants and bars. We managed to hit most of them, many of which overlapped with Lents’ recommendations.
At Lady of the House, we had the kind of meal I would put on par with Chicago’s Girl & the Goat. The menu is small — as are the shareable plates — but every item we had showed pure mastery: green beans with Parmesan sauce, roasted eggplant soup, corn agnolotti, and heavenly potato doughnuts with chamomile, dried yogurt and sugared thyme for dessert.
At Selden Standard, we had no problem getting a table for brunch. We oohed and aahed our way through shakshuka (eggs baked in a tomato sauce) and a Thai sausage sandwich with an egg. And Candy Bar in the the Siren Hotel was a Pepto-Bismolcolored dream. Everything, from the walls to the velvety seats, is pink, and a disco ball casts sparkles all around the tiny, dimly lit room. My Lola Old Fashioned, made with bourbon, Black Strap rum, homemade cola syrup, and Angostura and mole bitters, felt far heavier and more serious than the whimsical ambiance.
Ditching the car
I think what struck me most on this visit, as my husband and I made our way around town for three days, was this: You can get around the Motor City without a motor. That’s because there’s also something of a renaissance happening with transportation, with a bike share program (MoGo), an electric scooter share program (Bird) and a streetcar (QLine). When my husband and I arrived on a Saturday, we decided to leave the car parked and see where our feet would take us.
First we downloaded the Bird app to check out this whole electric scooter thing. I know, I know, many people who live in cities with scooter-share programs hate them. But as a novelty for a visitor, the scooters are kind of awesome. Imagine a game of Pokemon Go that has a real-life reward at the end, in the form of zippy transportation. At least, when you can find a working one; by our count, only one out of three actually functioned.
After passing multiple duds, we hit the jackpot at Eastern Market, an expansive series of looming buildings that, on different days of the week, host craft vendors, farmers and food trucks. We took the scooters to the streets, my husband zipping off at max speed and me following a bit more cautiously. Along the way we were stopped a couple of times, first by a little boy asking where he could rent one (“Sorry, you have to be 18”), next by a couple of guys in a truck who hollered out the window at us, wanting to know where we’d found them. Through a combination of scooters and then, for good measure, bikes, we made our way to the Motown Museum, about 4 miles north of our hotel.
We happened to be there the weekend after Aretha Franklin died. Goosebumps rose on my arm as “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” poured out of the speakers, swirling around the modest, two-story white home with “Hitsville” written in blue cursive.
On our sold-out tour, we learned that the songwriter Berry Gordy Jr. founded Motown Records in 1959 after borrowing $800 from his family. He was driven to launch a label where artists would be paid well for their work. This, after he’d been paid $3.19 in royalties for two of his songs. What he created was so much more than a label. It was, in essence, a factory line for training and grooming musical artists.
Gordy had spent some time working on the assembly line of a Ford plant, our tour guide told us. Thinking back to the line, he was inspired to create a school where, he hoped, any person could walk out the door a polished performer. In assembly-line-inspired style, they would learn to play musical instruments, sing, dance, dress and behave like royalty (for real, they had an in-house charm school run by a woman named Maxine Powell). The school and record label flourished in Detroit, and chart-topping artists poured out of its doors — Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops and Gladys Knight & the Pips — before Motown moved to Los Angeles in 1972.
The tour ended in the frozenin-time recording studio where Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, the Jackson 5 and so many others had sung their hearts out. Our guide told us that this was the point on the tour when we were going to sing in the very room where they had sung. She led our entire group in a heartfelt rendition of “My Girl.” “I’ve got sunshine ….” I never would have expected to tear up here, in the studio, but the once-in-a-lifetimeness of it all got to me.
Throughout my visit, one of the things that Lents had said about Detroit kept coming back to me.
“There’s a lot less pressure to succeed, so I think there are a lot less barriers for people to get involved in what they really have passion about,” he said.
You can see that in ventures that are historical, like the Motown Museum, and modern, like the restaurants and bars making waves across the Motor City, and even in the decision of a talented chef to start anew.
In my case, you could maybe even see it in the sense of adventure of a travel writer hopping on an electric scooter and going something like 15 mph down the open road. It’s something I’d likely talk myself out of in my hometown. But here in Detroit — why not?