Road Trips : Midwest Tour 2006 : Page Five
Thursday 19 October 2006:
After finding just the right spot for car repairs in Skokie, dropping it off, and navigating the miserable suburban transit back to a El station, we headed south to Standee's for breakfast. I'd been wanting to eat there since we first saw the place a few days before. It's a classic "joint" in the purest sense of the world, run-down and home to a rather colorful cast of characters, good food, and cheap prices.
We killed a little more time in our own neighborhood, finding a passably good used bookstore, and finally were able to pick up the car and dispose of several hundred bucks for the new brakes.
We drove around the northern suburbs a bit, noting happily that they pretty much all seemed to date from between 1940 and 1960. And then it was off to Superdawg for hot dogs, followed by a Milwaukee Avenue tour, ending in a nighttime drive through The Loop.
Friday 20 October 2006
As luck would have it, the day dawned sunny, which finally allowed me to take some decent photos.
Morning brought a southbound tour of Western Avenue, a stop in The Loop, a northbound tour of Lincoln Avenue, and then a southbound exit from the city just as rush hour was beginning. We departed via Lakeshore Drive and through a relatively safe chunk of the south side. I'd love to see more of the southside, but with a guide who knows his way around.
I realized upon leaving Chicago that most of my best stuff was shot on video as we drove through the never-ending commercial strips and neighborhoods of the city. One of the things I love most about Chicago (and one that's hard to capture with a still camera) is the very "old meets new" texture of the city, where a hundred-year-old streetcar strip may very well contain a 1970s shopping center with a Kmart (or a Googie coffee shop or a motel) in its midst. The whole city has grown organically rather than by way of a master plan, and it's urban in a way that most "new urban" complexes can never be.
Anyway, our drive from Chicago to Detroit was pretty uneventful. I'm pretty sure we ate someplace, but I have no idea where.
Saturday 21 October 2006
After breakfast at a coffee shop on Woodward Avenue in some suburb, we headed into Detroit. It'd been eight years since my last visit, and I was without a tour guide this trip, so I fear I may have been too nervous to show Mark any of the really heavy-duty decay. It is, however, still there, if a little harder to find because of "gentrification" downtown and demolition elsewhere.
To make things more interesting, we just happened to arrive the day the first game of the World Series was being played in the new Comerica Stadium downtown, so the whole area seemed disorientingly occupied.
The Book-Cadillac Hotel is apparently being converted into condos. I'll believe it when I see it. While there seems to be a lot of money flowing into downtown Detroit right now, I have my doubts that it will stick, or that it will even continue flowing. It all seems a little forced to me.
There's even a Borders downtown now in the Compuware Center, a new building in the middle of a sea of abandoned skyscrapers dating from the 1920s to the 1970s. It has a nice parking garage where we were able to get some great pictures -- and park for free.
After downtown, we drove out Michigan Avenue to Dearborn and circled back across the northern border, covering the whole length of 8-Mile Road. I made my annual pilgrimage to whatever A&P-owned store I was near (Farmer Jack in this case) to pick up some Jane Parker fruitcakes for my uncle.
Back in Detroit, we visited what was left of Brush Park, an amazing area of Victorian mansions which was in serious decay ten years ago, and is now almost nonexistant. Apparently, whichever houses can be rehabbed are being rehabbed, but there's just not much left to work with.
We did some more driving in the evening before having dinner at an Olive Garden in Dearborn.