I\u2019m currently sitting in my apartment, where it is warm, humid and half-way packed up. It\u2019s been exactly a year (plus a few days) since I moved in, and the weather is remarkably the same. I guess living in the midwest has turned me into some sort of weather obsessive, but after this winter, all I want to do is comment on how warm and pleasant it suddenly is.<\/p>\n
Ben and I spent memorial weekend gardening, picnicking on Belle Isle, BBQ\u2019ing with his neighbors, and driving around. Despite my own personal distaste for driving, Detroit really is a city best seen by car.\u00a0Luckily, Ben is happy to drive us (and battle I-75 traffic!) around Detroit and her suburbs, while I stare out the windows and we discuss the various emotional and sociological messages the passing\u00a0architecture tells\u00a0us. This weekend, we went on lots of walks and drives, trying to divine the importance of place, neighborhood, and community\u00a0from the houses around us. The craftsmen bungalows and GI houses of Ferndale were in marked contrast to the brick and stone mansions of University District; the brick duplexes of Jefferson Chalmers (in various states of decay and order) whispered stories worlds apart from their 1920\u2032s story-book cottages a block over in Grosse Pointe. I\u2019ve been known to get emotional on these neighborhood tours, from skipping down Ferndale\u2019s long blocks, to crying at gas stations on the East Side.<\/p>\n
I would guess that many people have had some emotional reaction to architecture, but mostly in grand, dramatic\u00a0spaces. My mother, during a trip to Europe, dragged me to every cathedral she could find (which is IMPRESSIVE), and in each space she gasped and awed over the flying buttresses, arches, and vaulted ceilings. When she and I drove up and down Woodward a year ago, she gasped and awed in the same way when we passed abandoned churches and synagogue. Cathedrals, churches, memorials, civic centers, etc., are all designed to be dramatic, gasp-worthy memorable. The walls, ceilings, ornamentation, all shout to be remembered and noted, and visitors hear that.<\/p>\n
But there is something inherently different about the stance of domestic architecture. Some of the Tudors and Italianente mansions of University District, Sherwood Forest, Indian Village, are decidedly grand, memorable and different than the bungalows, duplexes, row homes and GI homes of Ferndale, the\u00a0West\u00a0Village, East English Village, Jefferson-Chalmers, and many other neighborhoods in and around Detroit. Those smaller homes, usually on narrow streets, lined with old, overgrown trees, are the ones cause me to cry. Each house\u2013 no matter the stage of care or upkeep\u2013 is so heavy with dreams, ideas, hopes, and possibilities. They have many messages; in Ferndale, the modest, four-square and cape cods, tightly squeezed together seem to smile and say, \u201cwe don\u2019t have much, but we have each other!\u201d The American Dream of working hard and having a decent life seems obtainable there, and like it always was and will be. Other neighborhoods in Detroit feel like they\u00a0once<\/i>\u00a0felt this way. But whatever quality of life was once obtainable, isn\u2019t any more. Depleted and deferred dreams line the sidewalks along with classic, turn of the century wood-frame homes and studier, brick duplexes, their porches shaded but empty.<\/p>\n
How could that not drive me to tears? Its hard to be confronted with the inherent\u00a0unfairness of it all. The same wood-frame home\u00a0treated with love and care can be\u00a0be a home to friendly backyard barbecues, bushes heavy with lilacs lining the sidewalk. That house could be in Jefferson Chalmers\u00a0or in Ferndale (and there are plenty of manicured houses and gardens scattering Detroit neighborhoods). But without good company\u2013 an entire street of such hope\u2013 that home becomes a lone example, rather than the norm. Ben and I discovered some pretty forlorn and loveless streets in Ferndale too, so hopeful\u00a0streets and homes isn\u2019t so much a matter of place as it is community.<\/p>\n