DETROIT – When I first saw Joel Landy eight years ago, I thought he might be homeless. He was sitting with a filmmaker I met for lunch in a renovated, upscale Detroit bistro.
His nicotine-stained hands shook. He was wearing a dirty black T-shirt and hadn’t shaved for a while. He told me he had stomach problems, and could only eat pudding. But when the lunch was over, and I asked for the bill, he rasped “there isn’t any bill.”
“These people owe me free food for a lifetime because of the break I give them on the rent.” Startled, I asked “You own the restaurant?” No, Landy said. “I own the building. Actually, I own the block. Actually, these three square blocks.”
That was all true. Joel Landy, who grew up in the solidly middle-class Detroit suburb Oak Park, owned all that and more.
“He believed in Detroit when nobody else did,” said Bob Baldori, an attorney and close friend. “He transformed the old Cass Corridor into the upscale Midtown it is today.” said Baldori.
“Joel started it all – and now he is gone. I am devastated,” he said. Early on Sunday morning, Aug. 2, Landy, who had battled ulcerative colitis and a host of other medical problems for years, died at a too-young 68 while having a routine procedure in a hospital.
Yet what a life he had: “He was a true visionary in love with Detroit’s Midtown when it was the Midwest’s shame,” said Daya Waldman, a Detroit artist and psychotherapist. “He was an amazingly complex man, visionary and curmudgeon,” she added.
That he was – and an eccentric’s eccentric. He collected Victorian-era model trains from the 1830s and 40s, and ancient cars. He knocked holes in the old buildings he owned; laid track himself; and sat on a larger model train and rode through his buildings.
His home, a 1880s mansion he restored by hand, had polished floors littered with empty cat food tins he or his girlfriend at the time put out for Detroit’s many feral cats, who wandered in and out.
But Joel Landy was also a fierce, self-taught businessman, who dropped out of high school, opened a shop in Chicago printing counterculture posters, and then returned to Detroit, fell out with his parents and moved to what was then called the Cass Corridor, a land of abandoned buildings, drug-addicted hookers and winos.
He began fixing foreign cars. When he began making money, he bought a dilapidated Gilded Age mansion—for $4,600. He bought other properties, fixed them up, and resold them.
He learned how to get tax abatements and tax credits. He could do construction, general contracting and finance. He was also a shrewd negotiator who for a time ran a Montessori school and started a thriving movie theater in its basement.
“Why am I here by myself? Where are all the thriving aware people?” Landy asked me in 2012. Then, those people arrived.
Detroit’s old Cass Corridor caught on — in large part because of what he had done. Suddenly, young professional people from the suburbs began flocking in. People and bankers scoffed when he wanted to renovate the Addison, a rundown apartment building on Woodward. Soon, there was a long waiting list to get in.
For years, the collapsing stone hulk of the castle-like 1890’s James Scott mansion awaited demolition, till Landy bought it, invested $6 million, and turned it into a magnificent 26-unit apartment building. “$40 to $50 million,” was Baldori’s rough estimate of how much money Landy had invested in the city.
The developer may have gotten satisfaction out of that, but not a lot of enjoyment. Daya Waldman and her husband, artist Ed Meese got to know Joel Landy a decade ago, when he leased nearly the entire fourth floor of one of his school buildings to Ed for a studio.
They became close friends. “We watched him work day and night in his truck. Cleaning, fixing, never sleeping, forever restless…
“He was running on and away from his excruciating pain,” she said, although he almost never talked about that pain.
Eight years ago I went to see him in his home. Some rooms were beautifully renovated, with marble countertops and polished floors. Others had large holes in the ceiling, with birds flying in and out. “It’s all a work in progress,” he said. “So are we.”
Not everybody loved him; one woman said he was a poor landlord who refused to make repairs on a home he rented her in a suburb; he pointed out he rented it to her “as is.”
Some poorer city residents grumbled about this guy from the suburbs who was gentrifying their neighborhoods. But for many others, he was the pioneer who kicked off Detroit’s renaissance before anybody, even most Detroiters, thought Detroit was cool.
Settling his estate may be a nightmare. He told me once he planned to leave everything to his “Joel Landy Foundation,” though he never quite got around to setting it up. He had many friends but no family, other than for a sometimes estranged girlfriend.
Except, that is, for hundreds of people who live and work in buildings that wouldn’t be there if an aging hippie named Joel Landy hadn’t done something everyone said would be impossible to do.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
