A revived Detroit packs a punch, as first-time visitor discovers

Columnist David Allen vacations in the Motor City, has a great time and finds the downtown's resurgence inspiring.

Detroit might not immediately come to mind as a vacation destination.

But I wanted to go to Detroit to see a baseball game, as part of my multiyear project to visit every MLB ballpark. Beyond that, I didn’t know what to expect from Detroit, but I booked three hotel nights earlier this month and hoped for the best.

The best was what Detroit gave me.

I wondered if I’d find some hollowed-out wreck, but the opposite was true. Downtown is bustling. The vacancy rate seems low. New buildings are going up, including along the Detroit River waterfront.

It looked as if half of downtown’s historic buildings had been spiffed up and reoccupied, and that at least half the rest were under renovation. It was startling.

In 1950 Detroit was the fourth-largest city in the U.S. with 1.8 million people. After decades of deindustrialization, race problems and White flight that dropped the population below 700,000, Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013.

That apparently galvanized everyone to turn the city around.

More than 24,000 abandoned houses were demolished. Others were sold for $1 plus back taxes. Public and private dollars flowed. The co-founder of Quicken Loans invested $5 billion into downtown, converting historic buildings into homes and offices.

It seems to have worked. As The Atlantic reported the other day, crime is down significantly, with homicides at their lowest level since 1966, and Detroit’s population grew last year for the first time since 1957.

That’s a far cry from the 1978 novel I was reading, Elmore Leonard’s “The Switch,” which is set in Detroit. Here’s how Leonard saw the city: “It was a strange deserted big-city downtown with everybody staying out in their suburbs.”

That no longer seems to be the case.

I enjoyed the public spaces like Campus Martius Park, where office workers and others congregated at cafe tables near a big fountain and a whimsical patch of sand with beach chairs.

In a wide median are four freestanding swings, front porch-style. I plopped into one with my book one afternoon.

Comerica Park, the Detroit Tigers’ home, is friendly and modern, but with displays paying homage to each decade of the team. The Tigers lost the night I saw them despite a late rally. Ah well. It was Ballpark No. 17 (out of 30) for me.

I rode the monorail in a loop around downtown and also took the streetcar to get to multiple destinations, including the Detroit Institute of Arts. The grand museum’s atrium is adorned with murals by Diego Rivera finished in 1933.

Across from the museum was more art at the Detroit Main Library. The west entrance has a 16-by-42-foot mosaic mural, titled “River of Knowledge,” by Millard Sheets, the Pomona-born artist whose work is all over Southern California. I felt right at home.

I made a pilgrimage to Third Man Records, the record shop and pressing plant owned by musician Jack White, and spent a couple of hours wandering around John King Books, the maze-like, four-story used bookstore housed in a former hat factory.

The Riverwalk is a pleasant promenade along the waterfront. Returning from there to downtown, my route took me past a Gothic Revival church from 1849.

According to a historical marker, Mariners’ Church was immortalized in the 1976 Gordon Lightfoot ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” “where the church bell chimed ’til it rang 29 times,” once for each man lost.

Naturally I sought out good places for grub.

I had an excellent scratch-made breakfast at Dime Store. At Steve’s Soul Food, an excellent lunch of catfish, collard greens, yams and cornbread, plus a bottle of water, ran me about $12. Hearing that a chili dog in Detroit is essential, I had one at Lafayette Coney Island, in business since 1923, and didn’t regret it.

At Buddy’s, which touts itself as the originator of Detroit-style pizza, one of its square pizzas with crispy edges hit the spot.

A fellow customer spotted my St. Louis Cardinals shirt, told me he was visiting from that city and we had a great conversation. (Hello, Mark Floyd.)

I had been in St. Louis a few days earlier. That’s my home airport when I visit my Illinois parents and brother. St. Louis is an underrated city, with a lot of great amenities and institutions, but its downtown is in the worst shape I can recall.

A walk one morning showed pockets of life but also entire blocks of boarded-up buildings and a derelict parking structure. It was discouraging.

After returning to Southern California from Detroit, I met up in Pasadena for coffee with former colleague Frank Girardot, a Detroit native who goes back twice a year.

“It’s a lot different than when I grew up there,” Girardot reflected. In the 1970s, he said, large swaths of the city were essentially off-limits. In the 1980s, a Girardot family reunion was marred when 150 people left Mass to find their cars had been broken into.

“That would never happen now,” Girardot said. “It’s in the midst of a huge renaissance.”

I told Girardot how Detroit’s turnaround had gotten me thinking. Investment, political will, philanthropy and buy-in from residents can apparently bring a city back from the brink. It’s inspiring. Perhaps no city should be given up for lost.

San Bernardino in particular comes to mind in the Inland Empire. If everyone could get their act together — admittedly a big ask — San Bernardino could certainly mount a comeback. So could St. Louis.

I’m rooting for both of them.

David Allen tries to stay optimistic Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on X.