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.