When I was five or six years old, back in the days of the Eisenhower administration, I was taken to the Michigan State Fair for the first time. I was scared of the rides, but remember vividly seeing giant geese, one of whom had laid the biggest egg I had ever seen.
There were also sheep and cattle and a horse show, a litter of piglets, chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs, and of course the immense butter cow and calf, and eating pancakes in a tent with my father and brothers and many other people. I was in ecstasy.
There are thousands of Detroiters who have similar memories. The fair flourished along Woodward Avenue for more than a century, and was the last of the rites of summer before Labor Day, when it closed, and we went back to school. But in 2009, Governor Jennifer Granholm closed the fair, saying the state could no longer afford it.
True, it had cost run up a deficit of $360,000 its last year, and paid attendance was down. But this was at the beginning of the Great Recession, and the state loses more than that on many other programs in its more than $50 billion annual budget.
The legislature promptly passed a bill restoring funding to the fair, but she vetoed it. There were those who said she wanted to give some of the land to her good friend Joel Ferguson, who was the de facto head of a group called Magic Plus LLC, through they had gotten Magic Johnson to lend the use of his name. Granholm, whose birthday ironically is today, did not grow up in Michigan and had no emotional ties to the state or its fair.
Her second term in office ended a year later, and she promptly left the state to become a television commentator after eight years as a mostly ineffective governor who, however, did succeed in killing this Michigan tradition. Later, something billing itself as the new Michigan State Fair started being held in July at the Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi.
But not only does it cost a lot more, there is no easy way for poor urban kids to get there. For the last decade, the fairgrounds have been vacant, property of the state land bank, with its buildings gradually rotting, and minimal upkeep costing the state a million or so a year, far more than it lost in any of the old State Fair’s final years. Somebody probably torched the famous big stove a few years ago, though the fire was ruled accidental, and historians are worried that the same might happen to the old Ulysses Grant house before they can move it.
Finally, last year, the City of Detroit said it wanted to buy most of the land from the state, with sixteen acres going to Joel Ferguson’s Magic Plus. Ferguson, you may remember, is the Michigan State University trustee who appeared to minimize what Larry Nassar had done, and then was the key force in the disaster of selecting John Engler interim president of MSU.
Now, the question is what is to be done with the city’s 142 acres, which may be close to the largest single parcel of land Detroit could offer a major developer. Fortunately, some of the area’s best citizens have formed the State Fairgrounds Development Coalition in an attempt to make sure whatever happens to the site is something in the interest of the public.
We should be happy they are vigilant, and do everything we can to help them succeed in what should be both their and our task.
