48 Hours, 48 Months, 48 Years: A Planning Innovation – Oyster Bay, New York
Have you heard of Oyster Bay, Long Island? The place where Theodore Roosevelt spent his summers as a youth, built his home (today Sagamore Hill National Historic Site), and later operated the “Summer White House”? Oyster Bay hopes to add some community planning innovations to its claim to fame. Over...
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Historic Preservation and Master Planning in Flat Rock
In recent years Flat Rock has made great strides with historic preservation. This includes successful moving and rehabilitation of buildings which otherwise would have been demolished; rehabilitation of several other buildings on site; applying for a state historical marker and National Register listing for the Ford Motor Co. Lamp Factory;...
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Case Study of ‘Detroit Through the Years’
An increasing amount of place-based data is being made available via the Internet, though the implication this will have on historic preservation are unclear. The National Register Information System (or NRIS) is a workhorse. This database has thousands of records searchable by geography and keywords. While lacking on aesthetics and...
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Downriver Review – Every End Leads to a Start
After a nine-month stint with the Downriver Review, I am regrettably bringing my article writing to a close. Writing a weekly article for a local paper is a revealing experience. Deadlines repeating again and again each week bring a certain regularity to one’s thoughts. Just after finishing the article for...
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Downriver Review – Letters from Louisiana
Letters from Louisiana, Letter 1, published January 22, 2006 The call came in late on Friday afternoon – I was to leave for Louisiana in three days. From that moment a sense of apprehension grew inside of me like hunger. Actually, it probably was hunger because for the next several...
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Does Wyandotte Need an Arts Foundation?
Those who know Wyandotte well, can easily list its assets and strengths: a nice small-town feel, several historic buildings, an attractive riverfront location, and Wyandotte’s increasingly prominent role as a center for arts and culture. Then it might be useful to ask what do other communities that used arts and...
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A New Year’s Resolution for Wyandotte
There is a growing sense of enthusiasm and excitement as Wyandotte emerges as the premier destination Downriver for dining, entertainment, arts and culture, and shopping. Though is it as one source quoted in a December 22, Detroit Free Press article stated, that “in the future Wyandotte will be a town...
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Two Approaches to City Building
This week we take two examples locally, to demonstrate how city building should and should not be done. The Bank One building on the north-west corner of the important intersection of Biddle and Eureka Ave. is a product of urban renewal and the idea that we need to save a...
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Combining Arts & Culture and Heritage to Spur Renaissance
We would be misled to look to our past with nostalgia. Ask those who can remember what life was like 80 or 90 years ago and they will likely tell you about unsanitary conditions, difficulty traveling between different places and transporting goods, insular attitudes and small-mindedness of villagers, but above...
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Creating Experiences on Main Street
Wyandotte is starting to discover now what other historic cities like Charleston and Savannah have known for nearly seventy years, and what cities across the U.S. have realized since the advent of the historic preservation movement in the 1960’s – that places which are interesting, distinct, visually stimulating, historically rich,...
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The Spirit of Wyandotte
Wyandotte has embraced a spirit of ceaseless change and unbounded growth from its very start, or what Joseph Schumpter and Max Page term “creative destruction.” Being an industrial boom-town as it was in the 1850s and afterwards, time was not taken to create a city much worth saving, and when...
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Creating Cool Downriver
“Cool” no longer means those people you did or did not sit with at lunch. Now, cool and creating cool means economic development and generating cold, hard cash for communities throughout Michigan. Richard Florida in his widely read book The Rise of the Creative Class identified a group of 38...
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What Will Happen With the Marx Brewing Company Site?
What is today a parking lot between Oak and Elm streets, and between the backs of buildings that line Biddle Ave and the Detroit River, was once the heart of our busy waterfront in Wyandotte. What is today a parking lot between Oak and Elm streets, and between the backs...
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Preserving Wyandotte’s Theater
Wyandotte has enjoyed live performance and entertainment downtown for well over a century – but not today. In previous articles we spoke about the Marx/Rialto Theater that was on the site of the Stroh’s Ice Cream Parlor. This was joined by several other theaters downtown, which added to the vitality...
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Nine New Michigan Historical Markers for Wyandotte
Laura Ashlee may have the best job in Michigan state government. For that matter, she, and all of her colleagues at the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) do deeply meaningful and rewarding work. The SHPO helps to connect Michigan communities to their heritage, and to use that heritage to strengthen...
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Why Not Wyandotte?
Main Street has had many commentators, bards, and prophets through the years. When Sinclair Lewis published his classic book, “Main Street” in 1920, it was a scathing critique of the small-mindedness and parochial views of the inhabitants of Gopher Prairie. Residents there opposed efforts of the books’ protagonist Carol Kennicot...
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The Wyandotte Scene
Capturing the essence of Wyandotte today is much like trying to photograph a quickly moving object – things are just moving so fast, and change and transformation are constant and ongoing – resulting in an incomplete or blurry picture at best. But here is my attempt to tag and label...
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Delirious Wyandotte
In writing Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas intended to provide a “retroactive manifesto” for how New York City and its unique urban form came to be. In it he cites things such as the grid, the tower, and the architecture of fantasy. What might a retroactive manifesto for Wyandotte include?...
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Making Better Public Spaces in Downtown Wyandotte
Over the past several decades Wyandotte has transformed from an industrial economy dominated by large factories lining the river, to a more exclusively residential one with many of these factories being replaced by houses and parks. The entire east side of Biddle Ave. between Elm and Eureka was occupied by...
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Good Design Downtown – Turn Benches Around
Preservation is not merely about protecting old buildings, but also preserving communities and a way-of-life. For over 150 years there has been a downtown Wyandotte way-of-life. It has had its ups and downs no doubt, but goes on to this very day. I know this to be true, for now...
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