Without any doubt, Hamtramck is “in” these days. The ethnic mix is fascinating, and it has become an avant-garde — and still affordable — place to live for struggling artists, musicians and others who want to be seen as cool, and have now been priced out of Ferndale.
But Highland Park still lacks cachet. Today, it resembles a nightmare vision of a city some years after the nuclear holocaust we all feared back in the early Cold War days.
Once-thriving businesses on Woodward Avenue are long boarded up and crumbling. Highland Park is mainly in the news for house fires. The city’s magnificent library has been closed for years, with thousands of books rotting inside.
The population, once more than 50,000, is barely one-fifth of that today. One of the many books about Detroit’s decline and fall referred to Highland Park as “Detroit’s Detroit.”
In other words, the troubled Motor City looked good by comparison. When politicians suggested annexing it to the Motor City, Detroit said no.
But one quixotic knight thinks Highland Park may be the next place to be. I had lunch yesterday with A.J. O’Neil, the founder of Detroit Bold, whose corporate slogan is “Awesome Style Coffee for Hardworking Humans.” His coffee, 75,000 pounds of it so far this year, is bagged and sorted in Highland Park, a place which needs jobs worse than any place I know.
We ate at Red Hots Coney Island, which has been there for 97 years; there’s a Coca-Cola ad over the lunch counter featuring Babe Ruth. Some experts think these may be the best Coney dogs in Metro Detroit. A.J., who was born in Highland Park fifty-six years ago, is convinced the city is coming back. “Below the radar, some young artists are starting to move in.” he told me.
A.J. is himself a story. He was a roofer for twenty years, before he took one fall too many, lost a kidney and almost an arm, and was ordered by the doctors to stay on the ground.
For five years he ran “A.J.’s Café,” in now fashionable Ferndale, a place that was a dump with attitude, and which became briefly famous a decade ago for hosting the world’s longest Danny Boy singing marathon, an effort that inspired a book.
Eventually, he closed the café, five years to the day after it opened, because it cost too much to run. But it did allow him to invent Detroit Bold coffee, which he began selling in Detroit’s Eastern Market. Now, the major retailers are starting to carry it.
“Whether you design it, fix it, build it, grow it, or clean it up, be bold, my friends … Detroit Bold,” his business cards say. Highland Park needs boldness, and TLC. When I step outside the Coney, I see an immense, long-closed factory that ought to be a shrine to the industrial age. This was where Henry Ford built millions of Model T’s a century ago, putting the nation and the world on wheels. You could probably buy it for a song.
The old administration building where Ford himself worked sits on Woodward Avenue, a beautiful Albert Kahn structure with Pewabic tiles at the top. Four years ago something called the Woodward Avenue Action Association bought it and announced plans to make it a museum.
But nothing ever happened. But nothing ever does, till it does. Nobody ever thought Detroit would be trendy again, or Hamtramck a draw for Bangladeshis.
Highland Park just might have another act in its drama, still.
