Hiram Walker & Sons, Walkerville, Ontario. Established in 1858, during Detroit’s first prohibition. Via Library of Congress.

The first-ever Nerd Nite 313 is happening this Thursday, March 28 at Great Lakes Coffee, and people (like Craig Fahle!) are psyched.

What to expect on this nerdiest of evenings? The usual! Drinking, getting excited, learning about things such as the circus, spiders, and Detroit’s first prohibition, 1855 – 1875 (presentation by guess who).

Come early and bring $5, as space at GLC is limited, and cover is $5.

Tours with the Detroit Bus Company continue to be crazy fun. After several successful runs on the near-east side (think Belle Isle, Elmwood, and the Two-Way Inn), on March 30, I’m refreshing the route and taking curious tour-goers west, from Ste. Anne’s and Capitol Park to Clark Park and Woodmere Cemetery (above), final resting place of James Vernor, among other notables. We’ll talk about tobacco magnates and tavern keepers, we’ll stop for a drink at Abick’s Bar (circa 1907), and there will be merriment. And history bingo.

Tours at 11 am and 3 pm; tickets here!

See you in the spring,

THE NIGHT TRAIN

Via Postcards From Detroit

This is the second, final, and much longer post in a two-part series about Detroit’s purchase of Belle Isle. Here’s part one.

Five years after the Mayor’s final refusal to sign the park bonds in 1874, the Park Question rose from the ashes.

As Detroit discussed digging a railroad tunnel underneath the Detroit River so trains could run to Canada, Robert E. Roberts suggested in an 1874 newspaper editorial that the city could build a railroad bridge across the River to Belle Isle, then continue the track via underground tunnel the rest of the way to Canada. I don’t know enough about railroads to understand the logic of this plan, which was not pursued. (Wrote Clarence M. Burton of the Belle Isle railroad bridge plan: “The matter did not take shape, though it was supposed the city would fall into immediate ruin unless the tunnel was built instantly.”)

But the railroad bridge was part of what made the purchase of Belle Isle intriguing when it came up a few years later, in 1879, after state senator Eber W. Cottrell introduced a bill for the creation of a boulevard in Detroit — which also included, sneakily, a clause for the purchase of a park. On Belle Isle.

Belle Isle was privately owned in 1879, as it had been since June 5, 1768, when Lieutenant George McDougall (with the blessing of King George III) purchased the island from local Ottowa and Ojibwa chiefs for, famously, five barrels of rum, three rolls of tobacco, three pounds of vermilion and a wampum belt. The McDougalls sold the island to the Macomb family (they also owned Grosse Ile! Own all the islands!) in 1793, and the Macomb family sold the island to Barnabas Campau in 1817. Descendants of Barney Campau lived and operated fisheries on the island until its sale to the city. But people continued to use the island more or less publicly, to picnic, wander, resort, and to fight duels. (One of these things is not like the other?)

The first French settlers had used the island as a commons and a pasturing ground for their livestock, and they called the place Ile aux Cochons — Hog Island. There’s a story — I’ve told as gospel lots of times — that the settlers brought the hogs there to fend off a rattlesnake infestation, a legend Clarence Burton called “preposterous.”

The name “Belle Isle” seems to have been arrived at during a public gathering on the island in 1845, where people decided, I don’t know, that Hog Island wasn’t a very nice name? The island was pretty, and pretty ladies were always hanging out there, so they chose “Belle Isle,” which is kind of self-explanatory. (One disgruntled woman claimed that they should have kept the original name, because husbands were always going there without their wives.)

Back to the proposal: The news about Eber Cottrell’s recommendation in Lansing spread quickly. Reported the Evening News on Feb. 28, 1879:

If as reported at Lansing, the city of Detroit can obtain the fee of Belle Isle for $180,000, we believe that it could not do better than to purchase it. The sum is a very small one indeed compared with the benefits that could be derived from it in time. … We are among those who believe Detroit has a future, and that it will need the improvements and means of health and civilization which other cities enjoy, and among them a park. It would be impossible to locate one in a more beautiful place than this island.”

Influential and wealthy Detroiters — as they notably had not in 1873 — mobilized behind the plan, perhaps figuring that it was just a good idea to own Belle Isle, be it for the purpose of a railroad bridge or a park or both. In April, a group of men led by Levi L. Barbour (the wheeling gazelle in front of the Belle Isle Conservatory honors his memory) and William Moran secured agreements from everyone who owned land on Belle Isle to sell to the city. In May, the Park Act authorizing Detroit’s purchase of the island passed the state Senate. (Again, there’s no “home rule” until 1909, which is why, as Stephen Henderson points out in a recent Free Press op ed, it was the state of Michigan that gave Detroit the go-ahead to purchase Belle Isle in the first place.)  It was a shockingly quick decision, considering — and perhaps so as not to repeat — the gridlock that had seized Detroit during the Park Question of 1871-1873. 

Which is not to say Belle Isle was without its opponents. One prominent detractor was the railroad baron James F. Joy, who wrote editorial after cranky editorial claiming, among many other grievances, that the Legislature and the press had exaggerated the level of public support for the Belle Isle project; that Belle Isle was too far away from the city to be available to most residents; that members of the Park Board stood to gain financially from the sale of the island; that the railroad bridge was a fraud meant to gin up anxiety and urgency; that there would be no public vote on Belle Isle; that the land was swampy, the fisheries decrepit, and the prospects for beautification dismal; and, of course, that it was all too expensive:

It produces little or no revenue. It never has been made available for any useful purpose and is not likely to be. And a park out there is the most useless of all purposes. Am I wrong, then, in saying that the price to be paid for it is enormous? Is it not three, four, five, or six times as much as it is worth? (Detroit Free Press, June 22, 1879)

An entertaining Free Press rebuttal called Joy an “old fogie” who just needed to get out of the way.

Here’s another protest from a July 4, 1879 pamphlet reproduced in a 1920 issue of the Detroit Public Library’s Library Service:

Would anyone go to Belle Isle?

Can the people pay the costs of going to and from Belle Isle? No! People who must walk miles to save five cents cannot pay from 30 to 50 cents for cars, ferries, etc. for selves and children in order to go to a park. This needs no further proof.

The laboring classes will never make use of Belle Isle. All the week they are employed at work or looking for work. On Sundays they are too poor to pay car fares, etc., too tired to walk around in the scorching sun, consequently they make Sunday what it should be, a day of rest in their own homes or those of their neighbors. It is only for a few months use of the park each summer, that the $200,000 is to be extracted from the sweat of the laborer. In Winter the park will of course be out of question. In Summer it is too hot; we cannot then use it on account of our poverty and inability to pay the cost of getting there and back.

We don’t want it!!!

But for the most part, people did want it — as evidenced by the thousands of signatures in support of the Belle Isle deal submitted by aldermen on the Common Council in the spring of 1879 (versus the hundreds submitted against its purchase). It took some time to settle the deeds and do legal stuff (boring!), but the purchase was more or less official by September. One firm congratulated the Common Council thusly:

As you have finished the purchase of Belle Isle for the city park, we cordially invite you and your friends to partake of a roasted ox. On any date you may appoint we will be happy to see you.

Yours respectfully,

Thos. Lorimer & Sons.

But it was so not over yet. After all, people who were still unhappy with the purchase figured the city could just sell the island back, which is what one Alderman, a Mr. Warriner, proposed in a resolution to the Common Council in 1880:

It is well known that this scheme was conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity. We have had one year of it, and can see what a precious time we will have if the city is to keep it.

That resolution wasn’t considered, but you know who else thought it was a good idea? The Mayor who had just purchased Belle Isle. Whyyyyyyyyy? 

George C. Langdon was no longer the mayor, but among his last acts as mayor was the appointment of a commission to oversee Belle Isle. The new mayor, William Thompson, refused to work with Langdon’s commission, and instructed the Board of Estimates to delay improvements of the island until a new commission could be appointed. BUT! The Common Council President, Charles Ewers, had friends on the Langdon Commission, and while Mayor Thompson was away on business in Chicago, Alderman Ewers — as acting mayor — passed a resolution handing over Belle Isle to the Langdon Commission.

Did you just gasp a little? I DID.

Mayor Thompson received notice of the scandalous vote via telegram, came back to Detroit post haste, and vetoed the resolution, but because it had been passed by the acting mayor and that was confusing, the veto had to go to the Michigan Supreme Court. Former Mayor Langdon was so fed up that he thought maybe it would be better if the city would just sell the island:

It had better be sold … unless the municipal government can be placed in the power of men whose souls are large enough, whose ideas are broad enough, and whose principals are strong and honest enough to entirely ignore their personal grievances in the interests and for the improvement of the property of the city, and who are sufficiently considerate to show some regard for the welfare and health of the citizens.

It took until 1881 for the Supreme Court to resolve Mayor Thompson’s veto. In July, the Mayor was finally able to appoint his own commission, and plans for a park on Belle Isle were finally, for real, no seriously, underway.

Like I said in my first post, the cabinet drama / municipal bond-iness of the Belle Isle purchase is tedious. But I think it is important for us to think about today.

It’s not because the Park Question is “all too familiar” to what we are struggling through with Belle Isle today, or that “the more things change,” et cetera. I’m not even sure there are clear parallels between the city’s purchase of a private island to make a park out of it and the recent attempt by the state of Michigan to broker a deal with the council to lease the island as a state park.

But I think it’s worth remembering that it is hard, loud, fighting work to make a city. That this work is constant and never goes away.

That there may be no right answer, and even if there is, it’s more important to build consensus for a workable solution than to pursue the perfect fix.

That big decisions and best-laid plans could take ten years, or more, to bear fruit. And that even if it seems painful and discouraging to do the work now, someone could thank you for it in 100 years. And may also laugh at you. Don’t take it too personally.

See you on Belle Isle,

THE NIGHT TRAIN

Belle Isle, 1893. Source. 

 

Well, after all, the opposers of the park builded better than they knew. If the tide had turned the other way we would not now, perhaps, be the owners of the finest park in the world, Belle Isle. “All’s well that end’s well.” In the light of the present, what a queer proceeding the foregoing was, to determine a question. I don’t imagine that such a thing could happen now.

Friend Palmer, Early Days in Detroit

The story goes something like this: Detroiters wanted a park. Not a little neighborhood park with a tree and a bench, nothing like Grand Circus Park, which is very old (one of the oldest in the country) and very urban, what with the busiest and most important road in the city running right through the middle of it. Detroiters wanted a big landmark park, with sprawling lawns and boulevards and maybe some waterfront.

In 1871, the city appointed a Park Board to select an appropriate site. The Park Board’s recommendation? A wooded lot across the river from Belle Isle, boasting a half-mile of river frontage. At the time, it was part of Hamtramck. The Common Council just had to authorize the issue of $200,000 in bonds (“an appalling sum of money” in that day, wrote George Catlin) to purchase the land, and Detroit could cross “get a big park” off the to-do list.

Then things got weird, and the simple city-building task of creating a park became The Park Question (1871-1873).

To be honest, I usually skip over The Park Question in my imaginary chapter book about Detroit history, because I find it boring. (Something about municipal bonds?)

But with Belle Isle causing so much calamity in our present day, I feel it a duty to dig into this, as kind of a public service.

Like most things in Detroit, Belle Isle’s history is not as simple as “Once great / Fallen on hard times / Mixed prospects for future success.” The whole place was a rough bet, nearly didn’t happen, and was an object of controversy for years after its purchase. Belle Isle, wrote Clarence Burton, was “an unimproved area, abounding in … sloughs, swales, and was very unattractive.”

We’ll tackle the Park Question in two parts, starting with the initial controversy of 1871-1873, followed by the actual purchase of Belle Isle in 1879 (which is kind of a coda to the Park Question). We’ll breeze through the pre-purchase history of Belle Isle, too, for context.

But first, let’s get back to 1871, the year of The Park Question.

Should Detroit build a park on the site the Park Board recommended? Yea or nay? The Mayor held a citizen’s meeting to decide. Wrote one eye witness — none other than General Friend Palmer —

Well, Mr. W. W. Wheaton, mayor at that time, did call a mass meeting of citizens to assemble in front of the rear entrance to the city hall, on Griswold Street, to determine the question. Those who were in favor of the park were to bunch themselves together on one side of the entrance, and those opposed on the other. The mayor, stationed at an upper window, was to decide. After all had taken their places he took a long and critical look at the assembly beneath him, and decided no park.

“I was there,” Palmer added, “and it seemed a mighty close squeak.”

People started to think maybe these citizen’s meetings weren’t working so well, and maybe there should be a better plan for deciding how to give the city permission to spend huge sums of money. The Common Council scrapped the citizen’s meetings and appointed a Board of Estimates in their place.

In 1873, the Park Board appealed to the state Legislature to have their powers expanded. (This was before the Home Rule Cities Act of 1909, so changes to city charters and matters involving municipal bonds had to go through Lansing.)  They expected to make a purchase decision, have the Council issue the bonds, and let everyone move on with their lives.

They expected wrong.

If Hazen Pingree had his Immortal Nineteen, the Park Question had its Committee of Twenty: a group of private land-owner bullies who had twenty better ideas about what the city should do about a park (ranging from “buy the land I own” to “buy something closer to my house” to “don’t buy anything because I don’t like taxes”). Led by Eber Brock Ward, the richest man in Michigan, the Committee of Twenty were “constantly attempting to create a public dissatisfaction,” quoth this 1890 Annual Report of the Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards to the Common Council.

One member of the Committee of Twenty was A. Smith Bagg, a disaffected former member of the Park Board, whose minority opinion on the park site back in 1871 was NO PARK. Because of taxes.

Oh and who else was a member of the Committee of Twenty? The f’king MAYOR OF DETROIT, Hugh Moffatt.

If you’ll allow me to embellish (and I promise this makes a dispute over municipal bonds much less boring), the entire year of 1873 goes like this:

The Park Board says: Hey, we are going to buy this land, please issue the bonds. And the Common Council says, But you’re just the Park Board, and you have no constitutional authority to make us buy the land. And the Park Board says, Okay, but you told us to pick out a park, and we did, and now you should issue the bonds, unless you have a better idea. And the Common Council says, Let’s take a vote. Oh! The vote failed. Eventually the Park Board goes to the Michigan Supreme Court and says, Please, God, make the Council issue the bonds, and the Supreme Court says, Sorry, it’s their right to vote “No” on the bonds.

Finally, in December 1873 — who knows what has changed! — the Common Council passes a resolution to authorize the bonds.

The Mayor vetoes the resolution.

The Council overrides the veto. The Controller issues the bonds. The bonds go to the Mayor’s desk.

The Mayor refuses to sign the bonds. 

And that is how the Park Question is resolved. The Mayor decides: No park.

And that might have been the end of the story — but of course, it was not. To be continued in part two.

Adorable memento mori! And/or something about the circle of life! I love this very much, is all.

The domed monument at the top of the hill is that of Halmor Hull Emmons, a railroad lawyer who made bundles of money in the 1850s, then became a U.S. Circuit Judge. He lived in Ecorse. Take it away Friend Palmer:

A large share of the community wondered why Hal Emmons located down at the Ecorse, and why he spent so much money on that swamp of a place. What a world of evergreens and other fine trees and flowering shrubs he planted there. When he was holding court, he was quite a picturesque character, mounted on his horse, with his saddle bags behind him, going to and from his farm in Ecorse. It reminded one of the itinerant Methodist preacher, who in the earlier days rode his circuit on horseback with his saddle bags behind him, and also the doctor of those days, visiting his patients by the same means, up and down the river …

In his book about the early bench and bar in Detroit, Robert B. Ross describes Emmons as “one of the brightest and brainiest of the galaxy of Detroit lawyers in the [18]40s” but also “impulsive in manner and excitable in speech,” and in “vituperative profanity,” “he excelled any other Michigan lawyer, living or dead.”

Photo from the Burton Historical Collection.

(Stairway to the forward gallery deck of the City of Detroit III. Source. Full story and better pictures in Dan Austin’s new book, Forgotten Landmarks of Detroit.)

TONIGHT: The Detroit Drunken Historical Society welcomes Dan Austin! FINALLY!

You may know Dan from his first book, Lost Detroit, a history of 12 abandoned buildings in Detroit. The gorgeous glossy photos (by Sean Doerr) have fooled some into shuffling this book into the “ruin porn” bin, but make no mistake: Dan’s work is the antidote to ruin porn. Through his books and his website HistoricDetroit.org, Dan creates historical context for Detroit’s gawked-at gap-toothed structures (as well as many that are still occupied and in great shape). Ruin porn doesn’t ask: When was that building built? What public impression did it make when it opened? Does anyone remember what it used to be like? What are its best hopes for the future? Dan asks those questions, and tries to answer them, every single day.

His new book, Forgotten Landmarks of Detroit, tell stories of buildings we’ve lost: Old City Hall (demolished 1961), Union Depot (demolished 1974), the Water Works Park Tower (demolished 1960), even a big old steamboat (the City of Detroit III, pictured above, scrapped 1956).

Detroit has a great tradition of passionate people with day jobs creating rich, extraordinary, encyclopedic works of history in their free time. Silas Farmer, a publisher and mapmaker, did not need to write a 1,000-plus page book of Detroit history. He did anyway, and we are all still using A History of Detroit and Wayne County as our first, best reference for local historical questions. Clarence Burton, a title lawyer, could have called it a day after donating his massive collection of papers to the Detroit Public Library. But he also left us, in several volumes, The City of Detroit, Michigan, 1701-1922, because why not do as much as you possibly can? Dan seems to me spiritually related to these love-laborers, especially in his work with HistoricDetroit.org. Because why tell the story of one building when you can collect the stories of all of them? We’re lucky to have him, is what I’m saying. (Dan is also close personal friend of mine, without whom I would not, and could not, have written my own book.)

What I’m saying is, Come see Dan! We’ll be at McShane’s, on the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, starting around 7:00 p.m. for drinks and mingling. (Talks tend to start around 7:30.) Dan will sell & sign books afterward and we’ll all have a ball.

Here’s a great recent interview Dan did with Found Michigan. As always, more info about Detroit Drunken Historical Society events is available on Facebook and Meetup.

Hope to see some of you there!

Mount Clemens is one of those lucky Metro Detroit communities that cares a lot about its history. When I spoke at the Mt. Clemens Public Library in November, someone told me that the turnout for my talk — maybe twenty-five people — was about average for someone who wasn’t talking about Mt. Clemens. A talk about Mt. Clemens, he said, would draw a standing-room-only crowd.

The “Bath City” era — when Mt. Clemens’ supposedly curative mineral baths attracted celebrity visitors and resort hotels — is the big historical ticket here. But before it was busy tourist town, Mt. Clemens was an outpost in the woods, about a days’ journey from Detroit.

General Friend Palmer remembered Mt. Clemens in the pioneer days:

It was at best only a straggling village, with the business, etc., centering around the square in which was the old wooden court house, jail, and meeting house as well, patterned after the St. Clair county court house, or the latter was patterned after the former, I don’t know which.

… The passenger to and from Mt. Clemens at the present day, comfortably seated in the luxurious electric cars, can hardly realize, in passing over the road, the different aspect the same route presented in the ’30s and ’40s. Then it was almost a dense wilderness, relieved now and then by a settler’s log dwelling; now it is a continuous settlement the entire route of prosperous farmers, with their commodious dwellings, in lieu of the rude log cabin.

Christian Clemens, pioneer settler of Mt. Clemens (every historical record calls him that! as if it were his title!), was born in 1768, and came to Detroit from his native Pennsylvania in 1795. In 1798, he was a member of the party that surveyed what would become Mt. Clemens. Around 1800, Christian Clemens moved from Detroit to his wilderness home in Mt. Clemens and opened a distillery on the banks of the Clinton River. During the War of 1812, Clemens was captured by the British and held prisoner at Fort Detroit. According to a strange story in History of Macomb County, Clemens was friends with his jailers and sometimes, you know just casually, scaled the walls of the Fort at night and went to hang out with his family in town.

For at time, Christian Clemens’ house in Mt. Clemens was a stopover for settlers coming to town. General John Stockton, in an account delivered to the Michigan Pioneer Society in 1883, writes that his was one of five families staying at the place in 1817:

We came through from Detroit in a day on the Lake road. There were already four families in Judge Clemens’ house, but we moved in, making the fifth family, and remained there till we could build a log house, which was not many days.

In 1818, the village of Mt. Clemens was named after its most prominent settler and — perhaps because Christian Clemens owned most of the land in the town, and agreed to convey land and money for the courthouse — appointed it the seat of newly-established Macomb County. Christian Clemens became Chief Justice of the County Court, County Treasurer, and Probate Judge.

The best way to get to Mt. Clemens from Detroit was once by water — up the shore of Lake St. Claire and up the Clinton River, “a journey of some sixty or seventy miles to get eighteen or twenty,” B.F.H. Witherell once wrote, and early residents of Mt. Clemens traveled in big canoes, hauling provisions in from Detroit. In 1822, Judge Clemens founded a stage line that ran weekly between Detroit and Mt. Clemens. It took a day, cost a dollar, and Clemens claimed it was the first public stage line established in Michigan.

Was Mt. Clemens the most fun pioneer settlement ever? Writes John Stockton:

In the winter season we had no lack of amusements. Not unfrequently twenty and even thirty sleighs well filled, and provided with music, would come to Mt. Clemens and dance till 2 or 3 o’clock, then go to st. Clair and dance, come back here and dance, then go to Detroit and dance again. At another time we would go from here to Detroit, thence to Monroe, and thence to Maumee, and dance at every place.

General Palmer once encountered a brass band hanging out in the woods on his way up to Mt. Clemens:

We had proceeded a mile or so thusly, when all at once from the side of the road, apparently in the dense forest and from out the inky darkness, came the sounding rattle of a snare drum. Goodness, gracious! how it startled us, the horse swerved into the bushes on the side of the track …

After getting the horse on the right track again and finding my cousin all right, I sung out to some one to find what all this disturbance was, and the cause. A voice in German-English said that the owner of it and the drum had been a short distance up and off the road to a friend’s house where a rehearsal of a brass band they were forming had been going on, ad hoped his sudden serenade had not rattled us and the horse. I told him I thought it a queer time and place to raise such an alarm without notice.

I like to tell the story of Stevens T. Mason celebrating the groundbreaking of the ill-fated Clinton-Kalamazoo Canal at a banquet in Mt. Clemens in 1838; he is said to have drunk 14 toasts and jumped up on the banquet table. What I didn’t know is that in 1831, Stevens T. Mason sought the blessing of Christian Clemens himself in his campaign for support of the canal. What? How was he still alive? Oh gosh, and he told Governor Mason: “Do your duty, boy, and we will stand by you.” And he was at the banquet! By then a vaunted elder of the old days! Christian Clemens!

He died in 1844, and was buried in what is now Clemens Park. He’s still there! You can go visit. I did.

The Mt. Clemens Public Library has tons of local history resources if you want to learn more.

Witnesseth: We the undersigned, hereby known as the Detroit Drunken Historical Society, Declare the chartering of this fraternity of enthusiasts, dedicated to the pursuit of suds, stories and ceremony. No story too short, no beer too tall.

Together, this year, we learned about Gabriel Richard, the history of the labor movement, Motown, turtle soup, the Underground Railroad, the role of alcohol in the War of 1812. We went on bike rides, and bar crawls, and started a book club.

It was the year of the bus tour, a kind of experiment with the Detroit Bus Company (which is itself a kind of experiment) that is now sold out until February (with March tours in the works).

Central to my experience of Detroit history has been the nagging question: Do I actually know anything about any of this? And does anyone actually want to hear me talk about it? But the bus tours gave me a chance to do what I love best, what this blog has been for years: a chance to make friends, tell funny stories, look at old things in new (which sometimes means old) ways, and take the back alleys toward understanding our city’s past. And of course go to the bar. Because history is fun.

Me, my buddies from the Detroit Bus Company, & the James Scott Fountain on Belle Isle. Photo by Lisa Waud.

It has also been, for me, the year of the full-time job, the first such job I have had in years, which I started in March. As a creative-type writer-y media-world young person who has always wanted to work-to-live, not live-to-work (or more accurately, work-to-work-on-other-stuff-that-doesn’t-pay-well-or-at-all-for-instance-local-history-possibly-also-media), my career has always been a moving target. This year, in an unexpected turn of events, I started to nail it. So in 2012, a lot of my heart and energy went toward my real-life job.

All of this is just to say why it hasn’t, so much, been the year of the blog post. (Another reason; It has been the year of using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to share things when I’m not sure I need to spend hours and hours working on a post.) When I met writer David Sax (formerly of the blog Save The Deli and author of the book of the same name) last year, he asked if I was keeping the blog up. I said yes, that it had been two years, and I was still excited to work on it every day. He said, Give it four years. And this year we are rounding the bend into year four of THE NIGHT TRAIN.

I can’t promise 2013 won’t be the year that I mothball this place and move on to other projects. But on the edge of a brave new year, I hope that won’t happen. Like a camera (even that dumb one in my phone that’s usually in front of my face no matter how hard I try to put it down and pay attention with my goddamn eyes), the blog has helped remind me to be constantly adjusting my view, to seek out new opportunities and angles, give me an excuse to be curious, approach people I wouldn’t have the nerve to say hello to otherwise (even if those people are mostly dead).

Where to in 2013? Off the top of my head: Grosse Ile, every cemetery in Detroit, Conner Creek, Southwest Detroit, finally (finally!) Windsor, and maybe even (also finally!) the Upper Peninsula. Probably some familiar places, too. And maybe you’ll come say hello to me at drunk history, on a bus tour, a cemetery tour, or a visit to the log cabin in Palmer Park. But just to give us a jump-start, and to refresh my commitment to the blog, I’ll be introducing you to a few people I met in 2012 (all dead) in a blitz of year-end and year-beginning posts.

Happy New Year,

THE NIGHT TRAIN

Some of my favorite posts from 2012:

The history of the Belle Isle Aquarium, which re-opened this year

Meeting Alexander Macomb, quite by coincidence, in Washington D.C.’s Congressional Cemetery

Cyclorama painting in Detroit, Parts I and II

Mother Handsome, the homeliest woman out west

Meditations on a boat club

Birmingham’s Greenwood Cemetery

John J. Bagley (Michigan’s beardo governor, 1873-1877) …

[Detail from this beautiful photograph, ca. 1890]

The ladies at work in this shop window (!) …

[via Virtual Motor City, 1930s]

The ladies on strike in this factory …

[Fort St. and W. Grand Blvd., 1881. Source.]

This haunted factory …

[Source]

These naughty newsboys?

I bet you guessed cigars! You guessed right.

Tobacco was once big business in Detroit — for a brief time, in the 1890s, it was the city’s leading industry. Its presence made magnates of some (like Gov. John J. Bagley, above, whose corner shop became the behemoth Mayflower Tobacco Co.), gave good-paying jobs to others (in the 1920s, Detroit’s cigar manufacturers mostly employed women, many of them immigrants), and left a legacy of factory-lofts for today’s hip Detroiters. Thanks, tobacco companies!

Tonight, join the Detroit Drunken Historical Society at 1701 Cigar Bar in Cadillac Square. We’ll have a drink and a talk, take a walking tour of nearby sites from Detroit’s tobacco history, then stop for a nightcap at Habana.

More info on Facebook and Meetup. Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em. (Or get ‘em at the cigar bar.)

[Raid on a Detroit speakeasy, 1929. Source.]

Huzzah! On Dec. 5, 1933, Congress ratified the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, which ended 13 BORING years of Prohibition. As is now an annual tradition, we will gather at the Sugar House to celebrate our right to celebrate, and to toast Detroit’s singular role during Prohibition as one of the wettest cities in America, and all of our grandfather gangsters and grandmother flappers, and all of the blind pigs that still flicker under basement lights, and all of our beer barons and grocery store whiskey slingers and even Hiram Walker who built his distillery in Canada, and our very way of life, timeless and drenched, which led Secretary of the Territory William Woodbridge to complain to his wife in 1815 that Detroit “society” was nothing more than “one constant succession of amusements.”

Come out. Come as you are, or in spats or in fringes and feathers. I’ll lead a welcome address. Then there will be music, drink, and fellowship. Six p.m. to whenever the bathtub gin runs out.

See you there,

THE NIGHT TRAIN

‘Tis the season for cheer, tinsel, decorating your house, family, gifts, slacking off at work, mittens, craft projects, waiting for snow while fretting about global climate change. But most of all, ’tis the season for cooking, baking, eating, and drinking. This Thursday, Nov. 29, the Detroit Drunken Historical Society is thrilled to welcome Bill Loomis to St. Cece’s. We’ll talk about Detroit’s history through food and drink, from grand hotel dining rooms of the Gilded Age to home remedies for ague to forgotten delicacies like frogs, mutton, and muskrat. Also, taverns. So many taverns.

Bill just wrote Detroit’s Delectable Past. This book is so much fun. I recommend it for any bon vivant in your life, as well as anyone you know (maybe a novelist?) who is looking for vibrant, tactile detail about what kitchens looked like in pioneer homes, how to make turtle soup, milk peddler wars, methods for keeping rats out of restaurant kitchens, and the people who used to hang out at Eastern Market in the old days. An excerpt:

 One man in particular stood out: Francis Benson, the Central Market Terror. Benson — or, as he was called by the papers, “Lord Benson” — was a stall owner who sold vegetables at the market starting in the 1860s with his fiancee and, unfortunately, later his wife. He was immediately considered a troublemaker and, as reported in the Detroit newspapers, was arrested over twenty-five times over the next twenty years, including a charge of manslaughter in the death of his wife, for which he was acquitted. … He was arrested for every conceivable offense at the market, including assault, abusive language, disturbing the peace, punching a market clerk, false weights on blueberries, drunkenness, obnoxious behavior, indecent exposure, shooting his pistol into a crowd and “acting insane.” (He probably didn’t know it was a crime.)

We’ll gather at St. Cece’s around 7 p.m. for drinks; talks tend to start around 7:30 or shortly after. RSVP on Meetup or Facebook — or just show up.