haha... is detroit really that bad? were visiting from chicago... i think we'll be ok in the city...
but anyway simples, thanks a lot for those recomendations... midtown (as youve described and ive read) seems like what im looking for, hopefully i can drag the rest of the group with me...
what do people drink in detroit? whats the PBR of detroit? is it pbr?
letdownll have you been to detroit? just go up woodward, michigan, or gratiot a few blocks. downtown is okay, the suburbs are nice, but the area in-between looks like london around 1944
Travel Woodward between downtown and midtown, then avoid it like the plague until 8 Mile-ish after dark. Foran's Irish Pub was a great selection. Any bar that has only Michigan beer on tap is okay in my book.
If this dude's a hipster, why hasn't anyone recommended Corktown? you can catch a free party bus there from the game, dive as hell, and you guy's can party till 6am. nuf said.
-no windows
-smells faintly of stale beer with a side of puke and/or urine
-possible sawdust on floor
-half of the patrons wear the "10,000 miles of bad road" face
-fights break out frequently
-no stall doors in men's room
-pay phone taken out due to drug dealing problems
-taps have not been cleaned, ever
detroit definitely has a few of those...but i doubt many of us out-of-towners would be willing to set foot in them.
i didnt get jacked by 4 drunk girls and a sober one....hahahaha.... i was being a gentleman and making sure they got back to their car safe.....case in point....
Detroit: The Post-Apocalyptic Future of American Cities?
As foreclosures mount under the Obama Administration, the number of Urban Wasteland Zones (UMZ’s) are expanding in the cities.
Take Detroit for example – former HQ for General Motors. Accordingly, private management companies maintain control over areas of which 80% of the property has been foreclosed. These companies also regulate the amount of electricity and gas flow into these areas.
Surrounded large barbed wire fences, homes in UMZ’s that are not bulldozed or burned out are simply boarded up. Nightly, people living in on the streets receive water rations from company-sponsored trucks. The only food brought in comes in the form of week-old bread and Spam from charity organizations. However, in order to receive any of these privileges, residents must obtain a card to present before authorities. All the while, on the other side of the wire, wealthier neighborhoods enjoy the luxuries of private security, whom keep watch over nearby UMZ’s with searchlights.
This is just one case. However, with Fannie Mac announcing further foreclosures in the next year, more private management companies will continue to pop up as de facto dictatorships all over the country.
RUMORS are going around that the Positively 4th Street Fair is on for this saturday. In an effort to keep the event (increasingly popular) somewhat underground, and free of city involvement, they no longer publish when it will happen, but i've heard it's saturday from a couple of people now...could be a decoy, but if it's true, is one of the best street fair w/ 3 music stages around...and it's free...
The 4th Street Fair goes from noon to midnight on the 5800 block of 4th St. at Holden in Detroit, near Wayne State University (midtown).
blog has some interesting pictures of Detroit; also if you scroll down, there are some really beautiful pictures of Michigan in general (for all the talk about what a shitty place it is on this thread). I find the Great Lakes in winter to be one of the strangest and most intriguing landscapes in existence. There are other good pictures of the UP and other places around the country on his blog also.
wow...those are some nice photos. i'm surprised to see shots from the lighthouse up in port austin. i've been to the thumb a few times (including port austin) and was still unaware of that.
I find the Great Lakes in winter to be one of the strangest and most intriguing landscapes in existence.
it's not michigan (actually ohio), but jim jarmusch's scene in stranger than paradise on the banks of lake erie in the winter is one of my favorite depictions of the great lakes.
haha! no we made it out alive fear not... we actually didnt get a ton of time to explore outside the area between our hotel and the ball park...
general assessment...
a mixed bag... there were some things i really liked about detroit, some things i found really strange and a bit uncomfortable, and other things that flat out turned me off...
ill start with the positive... first of all, the street layout down town detroit is really strange... a weird array of circular streets and arteries... but no where is this array geometrically consistent... so what you end up with when you look across the city is a seemingly random smattering of old turn of the century high rises, competing and sometimes complementing one another in the sky line. I found this really interesting visually, especially when compared to the nazi like dedication to the rigid grid one sees in chicago. i can only imagine how amazing and sort of organically beautiful detroit would have looked in its prime when the city was fully populated...
ive been describing it in this way... If you froze chicago's loop at about 1940, didnt build another thing, and took out 30-40% of the buildings you started with, replacing them with open parking lots... that would be downtown detroit.
now... that being said... downtown detroit is a pretty depressing place... it feels pretty deserted... we were there on a friday afternoon right around lunch time, and though there were a lot of people in the bars surrounding the park, when i went for a little stroll away from the park, id imagine i saw only a dozen people not there for baseball. the buses were empty, the monorail was empty, even most of the parking lots seemed empty.
on our cab ride from downtown to the bronx bar, we drove through some areas which i would describe as pretty dire... but what i found myself thinking is "this close to downtown, this must be just the tip of the iceberg" as far as abandoned neighborhoods...
those things being said... we went to the bronx bar and everyone agreed it was pretty much the best bar ever... if that one moved to chicago id most definitely be a regular...
last comment... friday night at tigers stadium after they had swept the double header, tigers fans were relentless, aggressive and in general, total jerks... probably the worst ive endured at an away game... even worse than boston... saturday though they were ok so ill chalk it up to drunkenness and exhaustion
overall, we had a lot of fun in detroit... id go back, but probably only if with a local so i could find the hidden gems im sure exist
"this close to downtown, this must be just the tip of the iceberg" as far as abandoned neighborhoods..." - that was a correct assumption, although, as you pointed out, there are lots of so-called "hidden gems" around (in terms of bars, music, some art, and urban experience)...really good stuff going here and there, you just have to keep looking, even when you live here...
next time you come down, we'll try to get you to hamtramck!!!
if you think downtown feels deserted now, you should've seen it about 15-20 years ago. before new tiger stadium and ford field, before super bowl, before gm moving downtown, before fox theatre re-opened, before hockeytown & chelios place, before new ymca, before westin-book cadillac, before campus martius and compuware building, before three casinos (mgm, greektown & motor city), before new bus terminal...back when cass corridor was synomyous with crack cocaine (prompting eddie murhpy to skip town for beverly hills) and hudson's was still a hulking empty behemoth of a dept store (but henry the hatter endures)...etc...etc...etc...
yeah, by comparison, downtown is booming these days...even has a hard rock cafe (which by the way is far cooler than most hard rock cafes...you might even get your ass kicked there just because it's in the d).
shoot puddles... not sure id have wanted to even visit d town 20 years ago... though id guess the same thing could be said for pretty much every city with a manufacturing presence in the 70's
aquapura...yes...and keeping it in the movie theme, lletdownl should've remembered that to buy cigarettes in Detroit, you have to go to downtwon alleys and look for semi trucks full of Luck-Strikes!
and remember that Cubans are available accross the river...
Detroit
keep your large bills in one pocket and your smaller bills in the other.....
dont park too far from your last place of drinking/etc...if you plan on staying out late....
don't plan on being drunk and roaming downtown thinking that your 'cool' cause your 'hanging in detroit'....
haha... is detroit really that bad? were visiting from chicago... i think we'll be ok in the city...
but anyway simples, thanks a lot for those recomendations... midtown (as youve described and ive read) seems like what im looking for, hopefully i can drag the rest of the group with me...
what do people drink in detroit? whats the PBR of detroit? is it pbr?
it's not bad.... but i can tell you first hand from getting jacked at gun point while walking 4 drunk girls to their car isn't that fun.....
and 1 sober girl that was the DD
detroit is definitely more gritty than that pretty-boy town chicago. you might actually get a chance to use your gun here.
ha ha...80grit was jacked by 4 drunk girls? that's pretty funny
letdownll have you been to detroit? just go up woodward, michigan, or gratiot a few blocks. downtown is okay, the suburbs are nice, but the area in-between looks like london around 1944
so it would seem... jacked at gun point no less... tough life
nope, never been to detroit.. it will be my first trip there
look on google maps. even the google mobile is afraid of huge swaths of detroit. you should be too...
Travel Woodward between downtown and midtown, then avoid it like the plague until 8 Mile-ish after dark. Foran's Irish Pub was a great selection. Any bar that has only Michigan beer on tap is okay in my book.
If this dude's a hipster, why hasn't anyone recommended Corktown? you can catch a free party bus there from the game, dive as hell, and you guy's can party till 6am. nuf said.
btw, STROH'S is the pbr of Detroit.
strohs eh... makes sense... alright ill drink it
also im not a hipster... not even nearly cool enough... i just like their girls... and their bars have better music
you could go to lager house in corktown. another dive bar. man, one thing detroit's got is an endless selection of dive bars.
are any of these places really dive bars? i tend to agree with this guy's definition of a dive:
-no windows
-smells faintly of stale beer with a side of puke and/or urine
-possible sawdust on floor
-half of the patrons wear the "10,000 miles of bad road" face
-fights break out frequently
-no stall doors in men's room
-pay phone taken out due to drug dealing problems
-taps have not been cleaned, ever
detroit definitely has a few of those...but i doubt many of us out-of-towners would be willing to set foot in them.
i didnt get jacked by 4 drunk girls and a sober one....hahahaha.... i was being a gentleman and making sure they got back to their car safe.....case in point....
Detroit: The Post-Apocalyptic Future of American Cities?
As foreclosures mount under the Obama Administration, the number of Urban Wasteland Zones (UMZ’s) are expanding in the cities.
Take Detroit for example – former HQ for General Motors. Accordingly, private management companies maintain control over areas of which 80% of the property has been foreclosed. These companies also regulate the amount of electricity and gas flow into these areas.
Surrounded large barbed wire fences, homes in UMZ’s that are not bulldozed or burned out are simply boarded up. Nightly, people living in on the streets receive water rations from company-sponsored trucks. The only food brought in comes in the form of week-old bread and Spam from charity organizations. However, in order to receive any of these privileges, residents must obtain a card to present before authorities. All the while, on the other side of the wire, wealthier neighborhoods enjoy the luxuries of private security, whom keep watch over nearby UMZ’s with searchlights.
This is just one case. However, with Fannie Mac announcing further foreclosures in the next year, more private management companies will continue to pop up as de facto dictatorships all over the country.
Urban Wasteland Zones = UMZ = huh?
UWZ?
my post on 07/22/09 9:17 above, links to what seems to be a great free music event in corktown...here is the link again:
http://www.metromodemedia.com/filterd/corktownmusic709.aspx
RUMORS are going around that the Positively 4th Street Fair is on for this saturday. In an effort to keep the event (increasingly popular) somewhat underground, and free of city involvement, they no longer publish when it will happen, but i've heard it's saturday from a couple of people now...could be a decoy, but if it's true, is one of the best street fair w/ 3 music stages around...and it's free...
The 4th Street Fair goes from noon to midnight on the 5800 block of 4th St. at Holden in Detroit, near Wayne State University (midtown).
blog has some interesting pictures of Detroit; also if you scroll down, there are some really beautiful pictures of Michigan in general (for all the talk about what a shitty place it is on this thread). I find the Great Lakes in winter to be one of the strangest and most intriguing landscapes in existence. There are other good pictures of the UP and other places around the country on his blog also.
wow...those are some nice photos. i'm surprised to see shots from the lighthouse up in port austin. i've been to the thumb a few times (including port austin) and was still unaware of that.
it's not michigan (actually ohio), but jim jarmusch's scene in stranger than paradise on the banks of lake erie in the winter is one of my favorite depictions of the great lakes.
lletdownl...how about them Sox!??! hope you are still having a good time...let us know what you thought of the D!!!!
the 4th street fair was cancelled..i was hanging out at the old train station festival on michigan ave all day.....
how was that?! good vibes???...corktown kind of could use a festival to get people in there...
it was ok...seemed like poor organization in the beginning though....
lletdownl has not updated us on his thoughts on the D...i hope he made it out alive!!!
i doubt it. he probably got jacked by some drunk girls on their way to little caesar's for the $5 hot-n-ready special.
haha! no we made it out alive fear not... we actually didnt get a ton of time to explore outside the area between our hotel and the ball park...
general assessment...
a mixed bag... there were some things i really liked about detroit, some things i found really strange and a bit uncomfortable, and other things that flat out turned me off...
ill start with the positive... first of all, the street layout down town detroit is really strange... a weird array of circular streets and arteries... but no where is this array geometrically consistent... so what you end up with when you look across the city is a seemingly random smattering of old turn of the century high rises, competing and sometimes complementing one another in the sky line. I found this really interesting visually, especially when compared to the nazi like dedication to the rigid grid one sees in chicago. i can only imagine how amazing and sort of organically beautiful detroit would have looked in its prime when the city was fully populated...
ive been describing it in this way... If you froze chicago's loop at about 1940, didnt build another thing, and took out 30-40% of the buildings you started with, replacing them with open parking lots... that would be downtown detroit.
now... that being said... downtown detroit is a pretty depressing place... it feels pretty deserted... we were there on a friday afternoon right around lunch time, and though there were a lot of people in the bars surrounding the park, when i went for a little stroll away from the park, id imagine i saw only a dozen people not there for baseball. the buses were empty, the monorail was empty, even most of the parking lots seemed empty.
on our cab ride from downtown to the bronx bar, we drove through some areas which i would describe as pretty dire... but what i found myself thinking is "this close to downtown, this must be just the tip of the iceberg" as far as abandoned neighborhoods...
those things being said... we went to the bronx bar and everyone agreed it was pretty much the best bar ever... if that one moved to chicago id most definitely be a regular...
last comment... friday night at tigers stadium after they had swept the double header, tigers fans were relentless, aggressive and in general, total jerks... probably the worst ive endured at an away game... even worse than boston... saturday though they were ok so ill chalk it up to drunkenness and exhaustion
overall, we had a lot of fun in detroit... id go back, but probably only if with a local so i could find the hidden gems im sure exist
"this close to downtown, this must be just the tip of the iceberg" as far as abandoned neighborhoods..." - that was a correct assumption, although, as you pointed out, there are lots of so-called "hidden gems" around (in terms of bars, music, some art, and urban experience)...really good stuff going here and there, you just have to keep looking, even when you live here...
next time you come down, we'll try to get you to hamtramck!!!
if you think downtown feels deserted now, you should've seen it about 15-20 years ago. before new tiger stadium and ford field, before super bowl, before gm moving downtown, before fox theatre re-opened, before hockeytown & chelios place, before new ymca, before westin-book cadillac, before campus martius and compuware building, before three casinos (mgm, greektown & motor city), before new bus terminal...back when cass corridor was synomyous with crack cocaine (prompting eddie murhpy to skip town for beverly hills) and hudson's was still a hulking empty behemoth of a dept store (but henry the hatter endures)...etc...etc...etc...
yeah, by comparison, downtown is booming these days...even has a hard rock cafe (which by the way is far cooler than most hard rock cafes...you might even get your ass kicked there just because it's in the d).
oh...and anybody in detroit actually get to witness this military flyby along the river?
shoot puddles... not sure id have wanted to even visit d town 20 years ago... though id guess the same thing could be said for pretty much every city with a manufacturing presence in the 70's
puddles...i moved to detroit in '94, and you are right, people forget how much has taken place in downtown over the last 15 years even...
things were definitely more deserted, and rougher, back then;
we got to remember that lletdownl is using downtown chicago as reference...it will take us a couple of more years to catch up!!! : )
other thing about detroit...
impossible to buy cigs there... i literally walked around downtown detroit for 20 min before i found a corner convenience store to get some...
cigarettes?...ha, you missed the best feature of detroit: stopping by to say "hi" to canada and hitting duty-free on the way
Wasn't ROBOCOP based on the city of Detroit about 20 years ago?
lletdownl, this is a mom speaking: stop smoking.
aquapura...yes...and keeping it in the movie theme, lletdownl should've remembered that to buy cigarettes in Detroit, you have to go to downtwon alleys and look for semi trucks full of Luck-Strikes!
and remember that Cubans are available accross the river...
we forgot our passports... terrible planning...
liberty bell's kids smoke?
inhaling combustion = cancer
i just got my son his EU passport woot!
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