#detroit riverfront

[walkingdetroit]

Sunday in Rivertown

[ausetkmt]

[chopthepieup]

Detroit riverfront August 2024

[mea-cuppa-part-2]

Milliken State Park lighthouse, Detroit riverfront

[boymosher-420]

[jmpphoto]

Renaissance Center by James Marvin Phelps Via Flickr: Flashback Friday The Detroit Riverfront comes alive on a radiant summer morning, A mighty Great Lakes freighter glides gracefully along the river, a testament to the city’s rich maritime history. This moment was captured from the serene shores of Belle Isle Park. Summer 2005

[detroitography]

Map: Where Not to Watch the Ford Fireworks, Detroit

What a day, a long, hot, sad day. Detroit loves to roll out the welcome mat for major events for visitors Downtown, but closed down numerous city parks along the entire roughly 10 miles of Detroit coastline from Riverside Park in Southwest to Mariner Park at the Grosse Pointes border. Detroit limited viewing areas to Spirit Plaza and Hart Plaza downtown while Belle Isle was limited to capacity…

[lesoreillesouvertes]

Une petite matinée à ♥️ Detroit ♥️

[nightpool]

If you are an auditor, and you call up the chief financial officer of the company you are auditing and ask “hey when is a convenient time for me to come to your office to review the books,” and he replies “no, no office, parking lot,” and you say “okay I’ll drive to your office and you’ll come down—” and he says “oh no, not our parking lot, a different parking lot,” and you meet him in a parking lot 40 miles from his office, and he hands you printouts of the financial statements and drives away, how should you begin your audit? Which of the financial statements is most likely to contain red flags or discrepancies to be addressed? I feel like the answer is “the parking lot”? If I were auditing those financial statements, most of my questions would not be about technical accounting matters but “why are we meeting in a parking lot again?”

Here is a story about the CFO of the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, William Smith, who was arrested last week for allegedly stealing $40 million from the nonprofit:

"Mr. Smith’s grip on the nonprofit’s finances was so tight that even the nonprofit’s accountant, charged with tracking spending, could not log into one of the group’s bank accounts. Only Mr. Smith had the password. He gave her the bank statements on paper and met her only four times a year, in the parking lot of a Honey Baked Ham store 40 miles from the office. […]

"Brian Mittendorf, a professor who studies nonprofit accounting at Ohio State University, said that the conservancy’s official documents show that it took steps to safeguard its finances — including oversight from its board of directors and annual audits.

"‘All these things sound as if it’s an organization with a pretty robust review in place. On the other hand, only one person can access the money, and provides paper copies in a Honey Baked Ham parking lot?’ Mr. Mittendorf said. ‘Those sound like the opposite of a robust governance mechanism.’"

As it happens, Smith allegedly altered the bank statements by “[removing] the payments to himself and [replacing] them with fake payments to other vendors.” I still don’t fully understand the parking lot, though? Like you can meet the accountant in your office to hand over the doctored paper financial statements; just unplug your computer first. I just feel like meeting in the parking lot sends a pretty strong message of “I AM DOING CRIME” that you might want to avoid, if you are doing crime.

[federer7]

Lower Manhattan and the East River. Riverfront from the Brooklyn Bridge, New York. Circa 1901

Photo: Detroit Photographic Company.

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[walkingdetroit]

Along the Riverwalk

[thebuckblogimo]

What kind of city might Detroit have become had these things not happened?

February 9, 2025

I have long followed developments in the Motor City in the way that some people follow their favorite sports teams. Most of what I know comes from reading the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News for the last 60 years, as well as having lived in the city from 1974 to 1989. So I have many opinions about what might have been had certain events not occurred or had certain decisions been made differently:

Smokestacks on the river. When my wife and I lived in Detroit we often crossed the border to Windsor, Ontario, to shop or visit restaurants on the other side of the Detroit River. When we did so we felt envious of the Canadian waterfront where, other than a Holiday Inn, there were strictly parks and gardens, all the way from the Ambassador Bridge to the Hiram Walker Distillery (a distance of about four miles), enabling picnicking, jogging, strolling, dog walking, sun bathing, etc., on the river's shore. Similarly, in Chicago, from downtown to a point about 20 miles north, there is little else but parkland, public spaces and recreational options along the Lake Michigan shore. In Detroit, however, going all the way back to the middle of the 19th Century, the city built factories, warehouses, power plants, silos, storage areas for raw materials, etc., right up to the river's edge. Now, after 20 years--and an expense of over $300 million for land acquisition, remediation and recreational attractions--the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy is nearing completion of five-and-a-half miles of the Detroit River Walk, from the Ambassador Bridge to the MacArthur Bridge. True, industrialization transformed Detroit into one of the great American cities during the 1920s. And its industrial power made it the Arsenal of Democracy during World War II. However, in addition to its many other problems, the city never really had a "place to go" on its river. Until now.

Thumbs down on subways. I was working at the Auto Club of Michigan during the '70s when I was assigned to do research pertaining to the 60th anniversary of the company. While thumbing through old issues of Motor News, AAA's monthly magazine, I came across a story about three different plans in the 1920s for a Detroit subway system and how they were killed due to political squabbling, the parochial interests of the automotive industry and unreconcilable differences over funding. After doing some digging, I learned that there had been other plans for a subway in Detroit before and after the '20s. The city, however, was never able to come up with the money or muster the political will to get it done. It's difficult for me to imagine what a subway would have meant for Detroit, because even when it was a city of almost 2 million people, Detroit never had the kind of "density" that cities such as New York and Chicago always had due to their preponderance of apartment buildings. Still, if the early plans for a subway system in Detroit would have come to fruition, perhaps there would have been a de-emphasis on the bulldozing of Detroit neighborhoods to make way for the freeways that were eventually built.

Canyons in the city. When I was a kid during the '50s, my Dad usually took surface streets on Sunday drives for family visits to my grandparents' house in Detroit. Sometimes, however, he took the Edsel Ford Freeway. During those drives I recall looking out the back window of the car and noticing homes on both sides of the "ditch," about 25 to 30 feet above the freeway's pavement. It was obvious to me, even then, that heavy equipment had plowed through neighborhoods to build the roadway. I recently did some reading about Detroit roads and freeways and discovered these facts: When Detroit built the Davidson Freeway in 1942, it was the first urban freeway in the country. Then came the aforementioned Ford Freeway, with part of it finished during World War II and the rest completed in the mid '50s. Its construction eliminated 2,800 homes and businesses. Next came the Lodge, with segments built during both the '50s and '60s. Its construction displaced 2,200 homes and businesses. Then came the Southfield Freeway, completed during the early-to-mid '60s. (I was unable to find how many homes and businesses it displaced.) Next came the Chrysler Freeway in the summer of '64. It eliminated 300 black businesses along Hastings Street alone. (I couldn't find how many homes were demolished.) And, finally, the Jeffries Freeway was completed during the early '70s. Its construction consumed 3,600 homes and businesses. Imagine all the Detroit neighborhoods disconnected by freeway construction. Imagine all the stores, tool and die shops, manufacturing facilities, etc. that must have been shuttered. Imagine the lost income for the city from properties being taken off the tax rolls. How about all the grocery stores, bakeries, butcher shops, doctors offices and jazz bars--where many musicians you've heard on Motown records first cut their chops--were lost when Hastings was obliterated? If only Detroit would have built a ring road around the city instead of so many freeways cutting through it. Ultimately, the expressways facilitated the beginning of the outbound migration of Detroit's middle-class and led to urban sprawl throughout metropolitan Detroit.

Fortress with a 73-story hotel. In the early '70s, I saved a copy of the Sunday magazine section of the Detroit Free Press, featuring a nice rendering of the yet-to-be-built Renaissance Center. Surely, I thought at the time, its 73-story hotel and four 39-story office towers, would help to turn the city around. The RenCen was officially dedicated in the spring of 1977. I left Ross Roy for a year in 1984 and went to work in the RenCen at Young & Rubicam. As a result, I can tell you the following: Parking at the RenCen was an enormous challenge and its buildings were difficult to access. It was confusing to navigate once inside. It felt too big and impersonal throughout the complex. Outside, it blocked the public's view of the Detroit River. In fact, the whole thing felt like a fortress, with massive concrete berms to house heating and cooling equipment, that walled off the RenCen from the rest of downtown. And when exiting the tower I worked in, it took at least 15 minutes just to get out of the building, onto the street, and cross eight lanes of Jefferson Avenue traffic to get into the downtown area at lunch time. Props to GM for moving its headquarters into the RenCen in 1996 and attempting to improve it by taking down the berms, building a pedestrian-friendly front entrance and creating a massive glass atrium that looks out to the Detroit River. Now, however, GM is moving its headquarters out of the RenCen into a brand new building on Woodward Avenue. There's speculation that two of the RenCen's towers will be demolished. It remains possible that the whole underused facility could come down. If only the Renaissance Center had been designed to be smaller and built in a different location, allowing it to be fully integrated into the downtown footprint, perhaps then it would have had the effect on the city that it was intended to have.

The work of the God of Hellfire. It was the summer of 1967, after my sophomore year in college, and the second of five days of rioting in the streets of Detroit. I was working the afternoon shift in the bull gang at Rinshed-Mason, a supplier of paints to the automobile industry on the west side of the city. During a coffee break I climbed to the top of Building 42 with a couple of co-workers, and looked out over a ledge all the way to the river. I counted over 50 fires. The two daily newspapers were filled with graphic photos of the mayhem. The three local TV stations delivered continuous coverage. A daily 9:00 p.m. curfew was imposed, and except for where the craziness was going on, the streets were mostly deserted. It was an eerie feeling, to say the least. The initial disturbance had taken place on a sweltering July night at a blind pig on 12th Street where a party for two black GIs who had just returned home from Vietnam was in progress. As Detroit police began making arrests on the street, there was trash talk and insults from black folks who felt embittered about everything from a lack of affordable housing to strained relations with the cops. As I recall, someone threw a brick. And things soon got out of control. So much so that the Michigan National Guard, the U.S. Army's 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were soon called in to quell the disturbance that grew throughout the inner city. When it ended, 43 people had been killed and more than 2,000 buildings had been destroyed. The riot caused many people in the white middle-class to leave Detroit for the suburbs. In 1967, 30 percent of the city's population was black. Ten years later, 60 percent of the city was black and largely poor.

The fuss over bussing. I was probably 12 when I first learned about bussing to achieve racial integration in America's schools. At the time, the idea of creating classrooms with a mix of black and white kids who maybe didn't have the same prejudices as their parents seemed like a good one to me. In 1971, four years after the Detroit riots, bussing came to the city despite law suits, organized protests and school bus bombings (in Pontiac, Michigan, where bussing was being instituted at the same time). As it turned out, however, many parents (mostly white, some black) begrudged the idea of their kids' sudden inability to walk to school in Detroit, a place long thought of as a "small big city" of tree-lined neighborhoods. Also, they vehemently disagreed with what they saw as a significant hit to parent-teacher relationships in the loss of "neighborhood schools." (I eventually came to agree with those arguments.) And so the white middle-class began to leave the city en masse. Some families from the black middle class left, too. By 1980, Detroit was 63 percent black. By 1990 it was 76 percent black and largely low-income. Maybe, just maybe, Detroit could have gotten up off the mat after the riots of '67 and returned to some form of normalcy. But then came bussing, and it proved to be, in my estimation, the knockout blow for the city.

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There are so many what ifs that come to mind when discussing what might have been had certain other things turned out differently in the Motor City. For example, what if Detroit had been awarded the 1968 Summer Olympic Games? (It finished second to Mexico City in voting by the International Olympic Committee, followed by Lyons, France and Buenos Aries.) Would an Olympic Stadium proposed for the Michigan State Fair Grounds and an Olympic Village planned for the Wayne State University have created a "can do" sense of optimism and kickstarted a rebuilding effort from the inside out? Or, what if the Big Three had not gotten complacent about quality issues like "fit and finish" in the early '70s, allowing Japanese automakers to eat its lunch? How many of the area's plants and automotive suppliers might have remained open, providing good-paying jobs and impetus to the local economy? How much more of a player would Detroit have become in the global automotive market?

Ah, but as is often said, hindsight is 20/20.

Detroit is certainly in a much better place today than it was when I was a young adult. The riverfront, the downtown area, Midtown (formerly known as the Case Corridor), Corktown and other areas of the city are all on the upswing. In fact, the improvements have been such that those areas are almost unrecognizable compared to the blight of, say, 20 years ago. But there's still a long way to go in the neighborhoods of the city and especially in the all-important areas of public safety and quality of the public schools. And so I just keep on rooting for Detroit in the way I have always rooted for the Tigers and Lions, especially, as well as for the Red Wings and Pistons.

[farlane]

Bedrock & GM announce Renaissance Center Redesign

Bedrock and General Motors have announced a conceptual plan to redevelop the Renaissance Center (RenCen) and 27 acres along the Detroit riverfront.

[allmichigan]

Bedrock & GM announce Renaissance Center Redesign

Bedrock and General Motors have announced a conceptual plan to redevelop the Renaissance Center (RenCen) and 27 acres along the Detroit riverfront.

[baller-alert-com]

Ex-Detroit Riverfront Conservancy CFO Admits to Stealing at Least $44.3M Meant to Revitalize the City’s Industrial Riverfront http://dlvr.it/TGD3sl