Pewabic Pottery

Sunday, November 22 2009

Thanks to Dan Shaw, I read Bob Herbert's op-ed about Detroit in the Saturday NYT.  It begins,

"In many ways, it’s like a ghost town. It’s eerily quiet. Driving around in the middle of the afternoon, in a city that once was among the most productive on the planet, you see very little traffic, minimal commercial activity, hardly any pedestrians."

This is the same Detroit I wrote about on Friday when I described the pleasures of visiting the compelling African-America museum and the world-class Detroit Institue of the Arts.  After reading Herbert's op-ed, Dan wrote to say I sounded like Pollyana.  I told him that Herbert is correct, but that I'm not wrong.  Because I'm staying in a neighborhood  in the heart of the "cultural district."  And when they say cultural district, they're not exaggerating.  There is the African-American Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Science Museum, the Detroit History Museum, the DIA along with its Film Centre, the Detroit Public Library, not to mention Wayne State University.

This former mansion is on the corner of Woodward and E. Ferry Street (I'm staying on Ferry Street and Woodward Avenue is the main North-South artery of Detroit). Once a private home, it's now CPA offices.

This is the main building of the Inn on Ferry Street, where I'm staying. The Inn is actually five buildings that all look like this one, with high ceilings, lots of paneled wood, and elegantly appointed rooms.

This is a neighboring building of the Inn, illustrative of the elegance that characterized "midtown" when it developed in the last 19th century.  It is still quite impressive, although I don't think any of the buildings are actual homes any longer.

My new Detroit friend, Jane Duggan, whom I met through our mutual friend Margaret Hunt, lives in Lafayette Park, the largest Mies van der Rohe neighborhood ever built.  It's in Detroit proper, about a mile from Lake Detroit.  There are 4 groups of 46 units each in this complex, built from 1956-1959.  There's also the Pavilion built behind one of the complexes (see below) and two other residential Mies towers nearby

This picture is of Jane's apartment, one of ten in that building.

Each unit is 2-stories with a full basement.  Neighborhood boards decide on what can be planted outside, what type of renovation plans are acceptable for the apartments, and other things that co-op boards are wont to do.  Lafayette Park was built in the 1950's as an integrated community, and remains so today.  What was considered integration in the mid-1950's, racial, has been expanded to include single-sex and multi-racial families. 

I guess what I'm trying to tell Dan is is that in the macro sense Bob Herbert is right.  Detroit is a financial, industrial and polticial disaster with problems so severe the city may never recover.  Nonetheless, there are some bright spots around town that give one hope that maybe, just maybe, it's not the absolute disaster we think it is.  There are neighborhoods where young professionals with young children are moving in and changing the tenor of the local schools.  Serious attempts at greenways running through the city are succeeding.  Belle Isle, the heavenly island in the middle of the river that is to Detroit what Central Park is to NYC, is well cared for and well used.  There's a lively arts community. And extraordinarily good, decent people who are rooting for it. 

So yes, driving down Woodward, the north-south main drag, is spooky.  Where are all the people?  Why is an 8-lane road bereft of cars?  Will they ever be back?  The good news is that however down on its heels Detroit is, it's light years ahead of Cincinnati, which wins my prize for worst, most dismal, most fraudulent American "city."   Cincinnati's "downtown" is dominated by far too many interstate exchanges soaring above normal streets, far too few streets a pedestrain can cross without fear of dismemberment or death, too may huge stadiums dominating too few blocks, far too few reasons to even go downtown except to be disappointed.

But this is about Detroit, not Cincinnati.  So let's cut to the chase.  On Saturday, the highlight was visiting Pewabic Pottery, one of the oldest pottery companies in Detroit, and still one of its finest.  The building has two stories, the top one being the museum with early versions of the pottery that took the world by storm.  Because Christmas is almost upon us, some of the museum space was given over to work by younger artists, which, luckily, were on sale.  On the first floor, most of the space is devoted to Pewabic Pottery, which still uses its muted colors in tiles of all sizes and shapes, and vessels of many shapes and sizes.  This was the perfect place to buy presents, which I did with a determination I evince in the proper circumstances.  Without intending to sound too crass, I would like to return to Detroit, partly to revisit the DIA and partly to spend more money at Pewabic Pottery.  Those who know me will understand.

Before Jane and I left dinner, we asked the hostess to take a picture of us.  Here we are:

Jane was a mechanic with USPS, and is running in a hotly contested union election that won't be determined until Wednesday.  As the eldest of 11 siblings, she has scores of nieces and nephews.  She's a descendant of Irish-Americans, so it's fascinating to look over her family photographs, full of Chinese and Filipino and Kazatsistan (sp?) and Pakistani and Syrian children.  Delicious living proof that America has adapted in the last 50 years to changes in our society.  Jane teaches seminars on diversity to postal workers, and typically opens her first class by telling students that when her mother grew up, she had to walk one mile to the Irish Catholic school, passing along the way the French Catholic school and the German Catholic school and the Italian Catholic school so she could attend the "right" Catholic school.  Whe her mother died, the family was well represented with grandchildren of many racial variations.  I like this story.

Speaking of stories, Jane corrected me on the African-American Museum's DNA project.  It's not just for African-Americans.  Anyone who's willing to spring for a DNA swab test becomes part of the project, and receives information on where the individual's ancestors originated.  This goes back centuries, if not millenia.  Jane spoke of it in such moving terms that I'm thinking of doing this myself, which one can do by ordering the swab kit via internet.  Just imagine the possibilities.