North Cass Community Garden

There's a new hangout up in the Cass Corridor. I go there about two times a day as long as it's sunny. Best air in town. It's called the North Cass Community Garden. It's the source of my bronze tan and blistering hands, and will soon feed me heirloom tomatoes, sweet potatoes, lemon basil, cilantro and multicolored sweet peppers (assuming everything grows). The corner where it sprung up on Willis and 2nd was overgrown with dead trees and shrubbery (watched this flick again last year when I sat on the sidelines for two weeks with my friend oxycotin, nursing a new ACL I smuggled in from a dead body) (wow, that was a tangent. Anyway- go back and start again and jump over this bit) before the goodhearted, active, mostly unemployed bunch of neighbors and green thumbs set to work turning it over to make a haven within Detroit.



I'd like to put a hammock up in the dirt area where the grass is gonna go, beneath the shady tree and call it my "office". Fall asleep at my desk all the time. But that's probly not gonna happen. For now I'll have to settle with driving up to it every day on the Motorized Peugeot and whiffing in the sweetness.



Best part about this community garden is its location. Perfect, on-axis views of the Fisher Building down Second, views of the old victorians south of Tom Boy, the perfectly-manicured Charles and the understated tan brick lofts holding down two of the other corners, views of the nearby downtown skyline, and Goodwell's badass pocket sandwiches just steps away. No suburban-scale buildings, no chain businesses, no homogenous housing developments in sight. No Motor City Casino. No parking garages. Just the bones of the old Cass Corridor, a few dozen mobsters at Mario's, and a lot of healthy growth.

The stuff that goes on around the new spot you couldn't make up.

[You sprinkle ground up fishbones and fish blood and bits of unusable fish on your crops to feed them and make them grow. Luckily, it all comes in clean pellets like fish food. It's kind of gross to think of all that stuff, but it makes sense that you have to bring it full circle to move forward. Feed 'em the scraps and they'll grow something new. And though it may not be the most appetizing diet, it certainly is an interesting one.]

Well if crops in the planter boxes aren't the only things growing here in the community garden and you'll humor me by letting me say that the community is growing itself in the process, then you'll be glad to know that the community has an interesting diet to live on as well. I heard news today from this engineer who has a plot at the garden that a certain BMW was seen Ghostriding the Whip (check out these if you aren't familiar w/ the term: 1 ...better 2 ...best 3) right past the new spot. They started at the Tom Boy ghettomarket and rolled up to Willis. The engineer was unenlightened about Ghostriding the Whip. He explained it to me as, "It was weird, I saw this Beamer drive up to the Tom Boy yesterday and get out of his car with the thing still idling and music blaring and walk down the street next to it." I had to fill him in on the sweet fad. I'm hoping we get to see more. Bad as the habit is, I still wanna see it happen. Just as long as they don't crash into our new iron fence.



So the cliff notes version of this post is: the North Cass Community Garden is here to stay. It's summertime (right? is this a weekday?) and what we all needed was this garden for the sunny days in 2009. It's already been blessed by the gods of Ghostriding Whips and it gets frequented constantly by connoisseurs of fresh city air (very different from fresh air in stale cities AND stale air in fresh cities). For now, this is the new spot in Midtown. And hopefully a good early chapter in the history of the new Motown.





Here's another read about the project.

Larry & the Prototype

Larry & the Prototype
"Brother Nature" Master-Farmhand (Rasta-Farmhand?) "Larry" with the first draft of the Compost Planet

Unemployment

So when you don’t have a job it is important to dream up big, useful ideas. Quickly. Like one idea one day and a very different idea the next. It’s important that each idea is different, independent. Like if they are in different fields, that’s better. And if one might require a few hundred bucks to get rolling, the next should need several million. Always put aside what you were just thinking for a bigger, more useful idea as soon as it comes up. I’m talking about one week throwing around the idea of getting an ice cream truck to turn into a mobile café (think MUD Truck in NYC), and the next week looking into vacant property for sale to start up an urban farm. And then spotting an old house with strong bones and good character and immediately dumping all of the above to get working on how to rehab it and move in this summer. Dinner parties and clinking glasses with leaves falling.

These are some of the things I’ve been looking into in the past week. I say some because there are many others. Like the compost ball. Which is now called the “Compost Planet”. The prototype I built is pretty sweet. It looks like a small planet, or a school chemistry project. I’ll post pics of it shortly. Right now I’m working out how to get a patent on the idea so that nobody steals it. That’s the plan today, so that tomorrow I will be ready to work on a city-wide vacant-home relocation proposal and a development package for an agricultural corridor in an old factory district.

Compost Ball- in the works

Compost Ball- in the works
Originally uploaded by Brodsky Beat

Coming soon- the compost ball! Roll it over to pick up a pile of leaves. Roll it over and scoop out healthy dirt. Roll it behind the garage when the neighbors come by. Roll your kid around in it. Comes w/ a flap to shovel dirt inside and get some out. Look for it at the Eastern Market this summer.

Elizabeth Street Coffee Table

Its strange to imagine a city being torn down around you. We usually think of buildings as so fixed, cities so permanent. But when you spend an extended amount of time in Detroit, you're bound to see at least one large element of the urban landscape recede. The first demolished building I witnessed was a parking structure on Elizabeth St (my pic above). Certainly not a signature building, this concrete frame structure was essentially a big white block, with rectilinear openings that had been filled-in with glass panels in a steel frame. A vintage painted metal sign that simply read PARKING in vertical lettering hung off the NW corner, carefully removed one day and carried off on a flatbed truck. My friend Tadd noticed that this was the well-known Detroit case of tearing down a parking structure for surface parking. Hmmm. Makes sense.


Here's a pic of the boxy building at night: pic
And some during the day: pic

In any case, I designed a coffee table dedicated to this structure for DisturbedSleep, a furniture design collective featuring handmade pieces designed by young Southeast Michigan designers. It will be fabricated this summer by Doormouse here in Detroit and then exhibited at ReView gallery on Willis in Midtown, Detroit this August. Some quick images are below.

Dimensions: 42" x 20" x 20". Materials: powder-coated sheetmetal and branded leather. Felt optional instead of leather. Aqui esta.








Close-up of shelf:



Copyright 2009 DisturbedSleep

Harvesting Floorboards

This is where I walked in to work on Wednesday. Up on the third floor of this old apartment building on Garfield St, just off Woodward, right across from MOCAD. The only flooring left on the top floor was along the original corridor linking the old apartments. Everything around it had been cut away. You could see down over the old rooms on the second floor below like you were looking at a floor plan: the demising walls, framed-out doorways, closets, bathrooms. It was like you had just walked into a cut-away model of a hundred-year-old building. This is how architects work and imagine constantly, thinking of buildings in the abstract- views from above, drawings and models with sectional cut-aways to reveal relationships that won't exist in the final building. But here it was. Seeing down on a floor of residences like abstractions of themselves. And abandoned buildings already give an abstracted view of reality: every object you find when you visit one seems to be frozen in time- more significant, more of an object than it ever was when people occupied the place. A note on a scrap of paper is no longer just about the brief message it originally intended - its now been layered with all kinds of other significance- the years that have passed since that kind of paper was used, the careful technique of old handwriting, the old font types, the places/objects/commodities it mentions that have faded from existence. All these things and more surround the elements you find in an abandoned building and make the whole experience of walking through one like going to a museum. In this case, a crew of workers had carved out volumes of space so that you could see the work of the architect frozen in time as well. Some job site.




The building was being built and un-built at the same time- the crew I was with was pulling out the old floorboards to plane down, re-mill, and re-install in another space, while carpenters were setting and sheathing new floor joists for the new apartments. These will be some of the residences available in the $35 million 'Sugar Hill' project. Read about that here: http://www.modeldmedia.com/developmentnews/sugarhill18209