Here’s a secret about journalism that journalists don’t like to admit: Much of the time, we are sort of stenographers for the institutions of society – we write about people who get mixed up with the cops, the courts and government, or those who crave publicity.
But there are other fascinating people who fall through the cracks – and I think there may be more of them in Metro Detroit than anywhere else. Years ago, I met a man named Bill Dufty who was living quietly in a little blue house in Birmingham. He was both Billie Holiday’s alter ego and the last husband of Gloria Swanson, the famous silent film star. He was also a best-selling author, but almost no one knew he was here, something he liked just fine.
More recently, I met a battered-looking man over lunch at was then an upscale Detroit bistro called Atlas. He looked down and out, and I wanted to offer to buy him lunch.
Then I learned that he not only owned the restored apartment building the restaurant was in – the Addison — he owned essentially all the surrounding three blocks. He wasn’t born rich. Joel Landy grew up in a little tract house in Oak Park, and ran off to Chicago to print counterculture posters. Eventually he came back, holed up in what was then very much the Cass Corridor, and launched a business fixing foreign cars. He started to make a little money.
Landy then started to invest in his neighborhood. He bought a dilapidated 1880s era mansion for less than five thousand dollars and started fixing it up. He restored abandoned buildings and leased them for charter schools. He himself started a Montessori school and a new movie theater in the same building. He told me six years ago, “Where are the smart aware people who should be investing in Detroit? Can’t anyone see what is here?”
They’d eventually see, but it would take a few years. Though Landy may look battered, he is a dreamer not afraid to share his dream. He is a muscular and wily dreamer; he’s had to shoo dozens of petty crooks off his property, and to lay a bunch of razor wire as a deterrent.
He’s made money, millions in smart real estate deals, and helped attract more – more than a billion dollars, by his own estimate. But he also has laid three square miles of miniature train track, got a battery-powered three-seat locomotive, and rides it around his compound. Landy was so ill a couple years ago his bone mass was deteriorating. The doctors said he would die. He stubbornly refused, and eventually a miracle therapy was found. He is part swashbuckling mogul, part cowboy, relic of the 1960s, and part cheerful nine-year-old.
I can’t imagine him anywhere but Detroit.
Detroit is coming back now, little by little. They say the neighborhoods are hopeless, but they said that of the Cass Corridor too. The city needs more Joel Landys, black ones as well as white; more like Amy Peterson, a lawyer for the Detroit Tigers who quit her job after she founded a successful business making jewelry out of crumbling graffiti-laden cement.
Last week, I saw spray-painted on a wall near Eastern Market an old advertising slogan from 1939, “Nothing Stops Detroit.” I would like to tell whoever coined that phrase that they had no idea how true that was. And I have a hunch we ain’t seen nothing yet.
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