It’s getting warmer, but it’s not as warm as you think it is, a lesson I have learned the hard way this week after multiple attempts to go outside without a coat and take some long walks.

My bright idea yesterday was a stroll on Belle Isle in a skirt and tights and flimsy flats. Luckily for people like me, who constantly find themselves under-dressed for the near-spring weather, the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory is open 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and it’s like a tiny tropical vacation under glass. When I walked past, an old man opened the door and shouted, “Get in here, where it’s warm!”

Built in 1904 and designed by Albert Kahn, the Conservatory is named after Anna Scripps Whitcomb, daughter of Detroit News founder James E. Scripps and bequeather of the massive orchid collection — now the largest city-owned orchid collection in the country — that makes the whole place smell like paradise. Many of her orchids were saved from Great Britain during Word War II.

Botanical gardens and conservatories (like their cousins, aquariums) seemed so boring and pointless to me, for the longest time. I’d say it’s because the pleasure and beauty they offer is subtle, except some of these plants are completely outlandish, and the fact that they’ve been collected from wild climates all over the world and thrive under one roof is astonishing.

I liked the common names of these whimsical creatures, for instance:

The felted pepperface, as well as:

The gold dust plant, and my favorite:

The shrimp plant.

Back out in the cold, almost-not-winter afternoon, in the formal gardens, the Levi L. Barbour Memorial statue of a wheeling gazelle, by Marshall Fredericks, is stunning:

This statue, which won a national prize in 1936, was Fredericks’ break-out success (he was commissioned for the Spirit of Detroit almost 20 years later). I love the lettering at the base of the fountain:

And even more, I love the four smaller statues at the foot of the sculpture, which represent wildlife local to the area: the grouse, the hawk, the otter and this adorable little rabbit:

I wish I had come to the Conservatory earlier in the winter; the greenery and the humidity and the smell of flowers and this incredible sculpture that I just fell in love with really did something good for my sinuses and for my heart.

At least now I know that it’s there when I need it.

I’ve sadly had to neglect the blog as a consequence, and this week won’t be any better, between settling in, taking tons of naps, not having internet at the house yet and spending free time at Blowout. Please forgive the temporary absence — we’ll be back in action next week.

In other news, today is Casimir Pulaski Day. In Illinois. That’s okay. We have a Pulaski statue, so I say it counts. Nationwide, Pulaski day is October 11, commemorating his death in Savannah.

I don’t really know a lot about Pulaski besides what most good Polish kids know (and that Sufjan song about him): that after escaping arrest and death in Europe after participating in a failed regicide conspiracy, Pulaski came to America to serve in the Revolutionary War; that he saved George Washington’s life, organized an independent cavalry and died in Georgia of wounds sustained in battle. Pulaski is one of just a handful of people ever granted honorary citizenship in the United States.

His statute in Detroit is on Washington Boulevard at Michigan Avenue, opposite the statue of General Macomb.

Another great excuse to eat paczki and/or hang out in Hamtramck this week/end.

So. Over the holidays, my fiancé’s uncle gave us a big box of antique books, figuring (uh, correctly) that we were into that sort of thing. We packed them up, brought them home and then forgot about them for a few months.

We’re moving at the end of the week, and I’ve never really unpacked since I moved here from Wisconsin, so we’ve spent some time purging our hoard of clothes we might wear sometime, disassembled bikes we might put back together and ride sometime, CDs from the mid-90s that we might enjoy hearing again some (far distant) time, and, in particular, long neglected books that we might read sometime. This included the box full of antique books from Christmas, water-spotted and redolent of mildew.

Scott was the one who noticed Experience.

Published in 1932 at the Lakeside Press in Chicago by the News, the book — edited by Nancy Brown herself — shares twelve years of her favorite letters, from run-of-the-mill domestic quandaries (”What to do about my husband? Mom doesn’t bake the cookies we like anymore!”) to pining letters from homesick expatriates and too-long notes just to say hello and share an idle opinion. A girl from London who went to University of Michigan and fell in love with the city, then felt lonely for it when she went home to England, and had her husband write back to Nancy when she went blind. A Japanese houseboy who loved Belle Isle, but thought that the city’s pace was the “speedometer of a bee hive” and struggled to adjust.

I haven’t read a lot of these letters yet, but for the most part I love how rambling and earnest they are. They’re not Dear Abby-style, boiled down to the barest inquiry about in-law etiquette or what to do about a disloyal friend. Maybe they weren’t published in their entirety like they are in the book, but some of these letters are three or four pages long, full of asides, scene-setting and narrative development. Sometimes Nancy only responded with a sentence or two of thanks for sharing and a cheery “Write us again.”

The best one I’ve read so far is from “A Pioneer” (1928), who left his home in the city, doctor’s orders, when he contracted tuberculosis. He found a patch of woods he liked at the end of a rail line in Canada, started sleeping in a tent under a rock ledge, then he taught himself to trap furs, made a little extra money, built a log cabin by the lake, tried a little gardening and just sort of figured out how to live year-round in the wild.

I have kept buying a little at a time, till now I own over 2,000 acres, including the lake and the falls, all timber, except for my clearing. This is, in a sense, money wasted, for the land has no market value, and so long as I live I shall never cut a tree that is not necessary.

… There are neighbors two days trip to the South by canoe, while to the North, in two weeks I have found no sign that anything human had been there before me. I now have two horses, two cows and several chickens, a tractor and all the machinery I can use on the farm … I must get the work done in the least time possible for it is in the summer and early fall I study the game trails and plan my winter trap line.

So what’s the problem? The wife at home liked the farm and the up-north country folk, but one morning while they were eating breakfast, a bear (a friend of the pioneer’s since it crawled up in the tent with him one winter as a cub) wandered into the kitchen and asked for a biscuit or something. The wife freaked out, hit the bear, left town, then demanded her husband sell his land and come home! WHAT IS A PIONEER TO DO?

As ridiculous as this story is, Nancy recommends that the pioneer explain to his wife exactly how much money he’d managed to save as a trapper (seems he’d kept it kinda DL) and let her know that she could enjoy an occasional nice party and visitors at the farmstead in the summer and some alone cash-incentive’d alone time in the winter.

Not bad advice. I wish I knew what happened.

There’s so much more I want to share about this book, and I’ll try to post more terrific stories from Experience as I come across them. This book has made every stress of our move seem totally unimportant — a Christmas present I didn’t even know I had.

Success!

Near the former Power House. Dodger thought this would be a good place to become entangled.

The former site of the Women’s Dormitory

In the snow, it’s hard to tell what’s part of the trail system and what’s not. This is not, but I didn’t know that starting out.

This is great:

The idea of a radio broadcast system originated in 1932. A transformer was installed, making it possible to carry entertainments and church services to most patient buildings. Patients in the Annex and inmates of the Detroit House of Corrections built the boxes in which resistors and jacks were housed. The network also included a microphone line, enabling the superintendent of the sanitorium to address patients from his office.

I guess I half-expected crumbling buildings or re-purposed structures, even though I knew going in that only three or four of the original structures are still standing. My imagination refused to let my reading brain believe that the whole thing had been completely dismantled, but besides the trails themselves, many of which were roads and walkways through the complex, everything is groomed and grown over with decades-old forest. And even I know it was a rustic place to begin with, it still seems pretty miraculous to me that such a big man-made place can look so wild in just a generation or so.

The General, besides writing his own personal memoirs of  life in the city, collected historical records of his own, and dedicated an entire chapter in his book Early Days in Detroit to “Interesting facts gleaned from the columns of the Detroit Gazette of 1820-1822.” I’ll let him do the talking.

The old Detroit Gazette was an insignificant sheet both in size and appearance. The Democratic Free Press that followed it was a trifle larger, and a decided improvement, as regards typography, paper and contents.

… [The Gazette] was fairly patronized by the merchants and others with advertisements.

I have a file of the paper from July 21, 1820 to June 28, 1822, from which I make some extracts … They will serve to show the difference in many things between then and now.

The General then excerpts some of his favorite shipping notices, council meeting summaries, legal tedium, business articles and — his favorite and mine — advertisements:

Their issue July 21, 1820, has this notice:

Quills, etc: – Just received at this office. Also Flutes, Fifes, Flute Preceptors, Fife do, Blank Music Books, Record Books, etc.

And there’s this one, from a store between Bates and Randolph streets, west of Jefferson:

Paul Clapp has on hand, and will constantly keep for sale, at wholesale and retail, a large assortment of Hats. Beaver, Castor, Roram, Napt and Felt. Also – Ladies elegant Beaver Hats, with trimmings complete.

The whole will be sold very cheaf [sic] for CASH or PELTRY.

In the early days of the suburbs, too,  readers wrote in to sing their praises and saw big things happening for these retreats just a week’s journey from New York:

A stranger contributing a long article to the Gazette, on the country around and adjacent to Detroit, among other things has this to say about the country around Pontiac:

“The little lakes I have mentioned (twenty-one of which I visited and from the best information I could obtain, there are upwards of sixty of them in all) abound with fish of various kinds, many of which I saw would weigh twelve pounds each; they are also in great abundance. The grey and black duck was frequently seen in large flocks on these unfrequented waters. These lakes are of various dimensions from one to four miles in circumference. Here may be found some of the most delightful retreats for gentlemen of taste and fortune and only a week’s journey from the city of New York. When the great Erie canal to Lake Erie is completed you need not be surprised at seeing gentlemen with their families coming to spend the summer months on their country seats near Pontiac.”

Ah yes. Summers in idyllic Pontiac! All thanks to the Erie Canal.

This last full month of winter has been busy, and it’s passed quickly, and at the end of the month (just a short week and some change away!) brings us to a charming new apartment in a new part of town. I also enjoy a birthday in March. Fresh. Until then, I’m shuffling around like a grumpy, listless hag, an unmovable object of dull anxiety, slight spirits and general boredom.

Today I worked on a service piece for a magazine in Wisconsin about weekend trips to the lake country west of Milwaukee, and whilst irritably Googling “Okauchee Lake rentals,” I found a mesmerizing trove of old postcards, hundreds of them, dating from 1906 to the mid-1930s.

Here are a few favorites. I know it’s a little outside of the area I typically cover on the blog, but I figure you all need a vacation as much as I do.

See more here, or visit the Village of Oconomowoc Lake website and select “Historic Views of the Area” for even more vintage Wisconsin pleasures.

Foxy swimmer!

Blatz!

Lover’s Lane

Ethnic joke! Not funny, but sort of funny.

A good catch, indeed.

Feel better yet?

Since my parents moved to Novi in 2004, I’ve driven past Maybury State Park, bordered by Seven Mile, Eight Mile, Beck and Napier, hundreds of times. A friend of mine from high school worked there the summer that their barn nearly burned down.

“Maybury State Park? What’s that?” Scott asked when we passed it.

“Uh … a State Park?” I said. But it got me wondering.

Lucky for me AND my blog, Maybury State Park has a pretty incredible story.

The manufacturing boom that brought prosperity to Detroit also brought overcrowding, poor sanitation conditions and plenty of disease, and the existing health care infrastructure struggled to meet increasing demand for treatment.

In 1919, the city planned a massive tuberculosis sanitorium to free up hospital beds in the city, contain the risk of contagion to the community and provide consumption sufferers proper care, clean conditions, lots of space and fresh air. They bought almost 1000 acres of land in Northville, out in what must have been rolling country at that time, but still within a day’s drive.

Up sprouted a sprawling, pastoral complex of dorms, a school, treatment facilities, residencies for doctors and nurses, even a farm that provided food and dairy for Maybury’s  boarders.

Maybury is named for William H. Maybury, cousin of former Detroit mayor and Grand Circus Park sitter William C. Maybury. William H. was a wealthy bachelor and real estate tycoon who sprang at the chance to get back into public eye when his cousin was elected to office. William H. basically built the place from the ground up, serving as project manager, architect and engineer. His facility opened in 1921 and was named after him in 1927. Maybury died of complications from … what else? … tuberculosis, in 1931. The facility remained in operation until 1969.

Today I went to Maybury to take a look around. I brought Dodger, the brattier of my mom’s border collies. We took a long, soggy walk on the snow-padded trail around the fishing pond, and Dodger ran laps on the piers. I knew about the new Maybury History Trail, which is really what I came to see, but after an hour of getting my feet wet and consoling the dog, who was a little wired from smelling so much horse pee and freaking out about some spooky uprooted trees, I had no idea where I was and just wanted to be warm again.

I realize now that I just used the wrong park entrance. So, I’ll be back again this week. CLIFFHANGER!

Meanwhile, read more about the Maybury Sanitorium at MayburySanitorium.com (right?!). Because I screwed this one up, here’s a video of my unusually confused dog. Why not.

(Harper’s Magazine, 1861. Library of Congress.)

I didn’t realize that Valentine’s Day was this weekend until late this afternoon. The fella and I don’t have anything planned, except we might have lunch with an out-of-town friend who’s flying into Ann Arbor to visit his long-distance girlfriend. For Valentine’s Day.

My blog has lately suffered at the hands of a story I’m putting together for the weekly about accordions in Detroit, so the chance to take advantage of an easy editorial plug-in would have been really appealing, had I not completely forgotten that it’s happening in like two days. And everyone knows that despite our 24/7 communications-saturated society, no one really reads blogs on the weekends. Okay, that’s not true. But if you post on the weekend, it doesn’t count. That’s what I was taught in internet school, anyway.

So, in between checking Facebook and not working on my story, I thought about some lesser-known famous romances. Mary Vining and Mad Anthony Wayne? I don’t really know enough about that one to know if it even happened.

Captain Frederick and Maria Pabst? A handsome couple, magnanimous citizens, upstanding Germans and good parents, but I don’t really know anything about their love. Just their beer. There’s an arcane story that delights me about Frederick saving Maria from a shipwreck when he was still a Great Lakes captain, but chances are better that Maria’s father, the brewer Philip Best, just wanted Frederick in his camp.

Mostly I’ve been thinking about love affairs that are a little closer to home.

(Family photos courtesy my mom.)

This is my Aunt Margaret and Uncle Bill in 1963 or 1964. They met on a blind date when Margaret was 19. Uncle Bill used to tell me that Margaret wore all blue on their first night out: a blue dress, blue stockings, blue shoes, a blue handbag. I bet she looked incredible.

Bill and Margaret got married seven years later, at a hunt club in Farmington Hills. They spent the rest of their lives, as far as I could tell, marvelously in love.

My mother was nine years old when they were wed, so she grew up with Bill and Margaret as much as I did. They were like grandparents to me in a lot of ways: Margaret picked us up after school, cooked us fishticks and frozen vegetables or macaroni and cheese for dinner, read to us. But more importantly, she tended to the small, real people growing inside of us. We had conversations with her. We shared ideas, defended convictions, talked about books we liked, boys we liked, places we wanted to see. She was honest, and joyous. It’s hard to even write about her without stooping to tripe; I can walk my brain through every corner of her house,  but the influence she had on my life and the incredible love I still feel for her really overpowers any constructive details I can remember about her besides the last three agonizing weeks of her life.

So thank god for old family photos; I can see them like this, 20 years before I was even born, when they were gorgeous and adorable. Even when they were aging, Margaret grey and papery from decades of cigarettes, Bill bald and permanently sun-leathered, both of them losing their teeth, their love for each other was radiant, and together, they were a pretty beautiful thing to behold.

When Margaret died of lung cancer in 2001, Uncle Bill was permanently wrecked. It took years for him to cut his trips to the cemetery from twice a day to once. When we buried him in 2008, we arrived at the mausoleum to find the flowers he’d taped to the marble wall of her crypt the day before he died, peacefully, while he was napping on the couch.

I have a fiancé now, and it tears my heart out that Margaret and Bill don’t get to meet him — and that he has to settle for an occasional teary (and usually sad-tipsy) monologue from me about how great they were. On our first date, we went to the opera. I tried not to think too much about it, but my favorite vintage shopkeeper talked me into a stunning wool shift dress, with sheer mesh netting at the neck, dotted with tiny sequins.

It’s royal blue.

Sometimes it’s so mind-boggling to remember that people who lived in the past really lived, you know? Ate, and drank, looked around, talked to each other, made love, fell in love, had bad days and good days and boring days, and maybe sometimes thought to themselves, how weird is it to be alive?

I don’t know why this is especially resonating with me in the run-up to Valentine’s Day. Maybe because even though it’s hard to understand, emotionally, what it might have been like to live without electricity, paved roads, heat, grocery stores, or to be the commander of an army, the governor of a frontier state, the wife of an aristocrat or the daughter of a beer baron, the capacity to understand a love affair is readily accessible to just about everyone.

Those are my great-grandparents in the black-and-white picture above, dolled up in their Sunday clothes. I don’t know anything about them, not even how they felt about each other, but I’m glad they got it on at some point. Happy Valentine’s Day to them, and to you.

A few months ago I was intrigued to find a headstone in Farmington’s Quaker Cemetery for Oliver Perry Hazard, March 17, 1836 — September 16, 1923. It gave me a brain glitch. For a few moments I could not remember why I knew that name nor why it seemed somehow wrong.

Luckily, I have an iPhone these days, so I just looked it up when I got back to my car.

Of course, I was thinking about Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, the hero of the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812. Not the same guy buried in the Quaker Cemetery in Farmington, Michigan, but how did a guy with the name “Oliver Perry Hazard” end up buried in the Quaker Cemetry in Farmington, Michigan? That couldn’t just be a coincidence.

Here’s his obituary:

Oliver Perry Hazard passed away at his home, 3439 Cass Avenue, Detroit, Sunday, September 16, 1923. Mr. Hazard was a direct descendent of the renowned Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, passing the name on to his grandson, Oliver P.H. Crane of Los Angeles. He was born near Penn Yan, New York … and when very young, came west ith his parents, who settled in Novi, Michigan.

… At one time during his last years he gave to the late Fred M. Warner and Nathan H. power many interesting incidents of the early history of Farmington. This historical data was taken down in shorthand, by a stenographer.

… Mr. Hazard was a man of strong convictions, ever ready to champion what he believed to be right regardless of the attitude that others might take. He had hosts of friends and was a man among men. A devoted husband and a kind father, his domestic life was ideal.

So, that settles that. The obit also does not mention that Oliver Perry Hazard’s wife was Lucy Botsford, and at one point in his diverse business career, he took over the General store at the Botsford Inn (a place that well deserves a post all its own).

I read the historical notes compiled by Nathan H. Power and Governor Warner (it’s pretty great that the Governor was really excited about history, by the way), but it’s not sourced very well, so there’s no indication of what Oliver Hazard remembered in particular about Farmington. The record (written in 1921) did note that Mr. Hazard, the very first secretary of the Farmington Masonic Lodge, “at 86 retains his health and mental vigor to a remarkable degree.”

Today I also learned about Oliver Hazard Perry (the war hero)’s life-long feud with Jesse Duncan Elliott, and idly mused about whether we might be related.

I’d like to post more obituaries more often. Old ones like this always seems so sincere, like even if you didn’t know him, you could appreciate what he was like and why he was important.

But while I’m convalescing, here are some things you might like to know:

The Night Train now booked (on your FACE)

We’re on Facebook. Befriend us and enjoy more photos, delightful commentary, daily links to interesting things, friendship.

Old Detroit footage at MOCAD

Films from the Prelinger Archives: Lost Landscapes of Detroit is tomorrow night at MOCAD, so get out your shovel and some tough winter boots (no, I still haven’t bought any) and resist the temptation of your warm couch. This should be great. From the press release:

… An eclectic montage of rediscovered and rarely-seen archival film clips exhibiting life; cityscapes, labor and leisure from ‘vanishing Detroit’, as captured by amateurs, newsreel cameramen and industrial filmmakers from the 1920’s to the 1960’s …

“How we remember and record the past reveals much about how we address the future” points out archivist Rick Prelinger, who will be on hand to preface the screening with a brief talk on the value of ephemeral films, on the changing nature of historical memory, and what consequences will arise from the emerging massive matrix of personal records.

You know what’s great? The Prelinger Archives are available for free on the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons License.

Bottled Monsters

If you like Letters of Note, you may or may not love A Repository for Bottled Monsters, the blog of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C.

Among the many papers published near-daily on the blog are letters home from army surgeons, correspondence from the Surgeon General’s office, thank-yous for donations, inventories both routine and outlandish and requests for authorization to purchase artifacts. Some of this stuff is tedious but a lot of it is absurd and delightful, like this 1878 letter from Francis Atkins, Army Surgeon, to the Surgeon General:

Sir

I have the honor to enclose copy of receipt issued this day to me by Post Quartermaster for one box addressed to the Army Medical Museum.

The contents are,

1)      One Golden Eagle – shot near here Dec 2, 1877. I have roughly dressed it so as to leave the plumage on the skeleton, that the curator may use it as preferred, applying salt or alum.

2)      One skull & bal. [balance] of skeleton of a male Raccoon found dead here Dec 2, 1877.

3)      I also send in behalf of Asst. Surg. W.E. Whitehead the skin & extremities of one whooping crane (I believe) shot near here in fall of 1877 – arsenic and Plaster of Paris were used.

Once in a while this blog also publishes freaky medical photography, intriguing books and fun facts, like: did you know that Alexander Graham Bell wrote a book about eugenics?

I have Suzanne Fischer, Public Historian, to thank for this fabulous discovery.