Bill McGraw

Special to the Detroit Free Press

In 2007, then-Free Press columnist Bill McGraw drove each of the city’s roughly 2,100 streets. Photographers then fanned out to capture Detroiters and Detroit in a variety of poses. The result was a Free Press report called "Driving Detroit." Across the city's 139 square miles, the team found neighborhoods fighting back against dumped trash, blight and crime. Ten years later, they are still fighting, though the city is much cleaner and some of the blight is gone. Detroit residents appear optimistic, even if the renaissance downtown has failed to reach their streets.

What we found:

♦ Main story: Will the neighborhoods ever rebound?

♦ 10 key Detroit developments since 2007

♦ How and why we did this update

♦ Interactive map

♦ Watch Driving Detroit 2007 videos



Use the vertical slider bar to view then and now photos:

Ten years ago, Janet Guzman was preparing for a very big day for girls in Detroit’s Mexican community — her Quinceañera, also know as the “Sweet 15.” It’s the celebration surrounding a 15th birthday and entry into womanhood.

Part of the Quinceañera tradition includes wearing a formal gown to a reception that features toasts and dancing. When she met Free Press photographer Kathleen Galligan in 2007, Guzman beamed in her dress as she sat in the Fred Mora Portrait Studio on Michigan and Larkins, west of Livernois. Her mother, Irene Guzman, assisted.

“My mom was putting on the necklace to get ready for the photo shoot,” Guzman said, looking at the 10-year-old photo.

In the past decade, Guzman has graduated from Henry Ford Academy in Dearborn, earned a degree in education from the University of Michigan-Dearborn and spent two years working as a missionary, teaching American Indians in North Dakota.

Now 25, she teaches in the home-based program at Starfish Family Services in Inkster, working with children 3 and younger and helping parents better understand early childhood development. She is thinking about pursuing a master’s degree in speech pathology or physical education, but always working with kids.

Eight years ago, the Guzman family left their home in the West Vernor-Central neighborhood of southwest Detroit, moving to Taylor, because they believed the neighborhood was unsafe.

Janet Guzman, though, plans to get married in 2018, and she and her fiancé have decided to live in southwest Detroit.

“Detroit is changing,” she said.

Shrines made of stuffed animals and empty liquor bottles in memory of deceased loved ones are common in Detroit neighborhoods, but the one at Hershey and Penrose stood out in 2007: It was filled with unusually large toy animals in vivid colors wrapped around a utility pole.

The shrine, near 7 Mile and Woodward, commemorates a double homicide that took place in 2002, when Antonio Harrell, 20, and Rodney Johnson, 21, were gunned down after a dispute in a nearby party store.

Police found Harrell, shot seven times, sprawled partially out of the driver’s side door. Johnson was shot once.

Ten years after the shrine appeared in the “Driving Detroit” coverage, the animals are mostly gone, but the memories of Harrell and Johnson live on, thanks to Harrell’s sister, Ebony Harrell, a compact, energetic woman who is dedicated to the neighborhood where she and her brother grew up.

Harrell, 39, organizes a party at the corner each Aug. 25, the anniversary of the killings. This past August, there were bounce houses, animals, a comedian, food, motorized train rides, cartoon characters, a popcorn machine and face-painting.

The gala is for everyone who has lost a loved one, whether from violence or natural causes. In August, about 250 people showed up, then 75 took part in a fish and chicken fry the next day.

“You want to celebrate everybody, not just your loved ones,” Harrell said. “You want to make it where everybody is comfortable celebrating their loved ones because there’s no time limit on grieving.”

Harrell’s family moved into the area in 1989 when the neighborhood had a large Chaldean population and many stores.

“It was wonderful,” she recalled. “It was beautiful when we moved here. We were probably only the third black family in the neighborhood. We were treated wonderful.”

Speaking specifically of Chaldeans, she said: “They were wonderful to me. They still are.”

While there is new housing within sight of Penrose and Hershey, the sense of loss at the corner is overwhelming, and it’s not just because of the memory of victims who were shot and killed there.

Most of the Chaldeans have moved away, and by the time of the shooting in 2002, the Harrell family had left, too. Many of the houses and stores are gone, and some of the sidewalks have vanished, having been overtaken by grass and weeds. The strikingly plump stuffed animals around the utility pole in 2007 came from the State Fair, which, for a century, was located a few blocks away. The fairgrounds closed in 2009.

The wooden utility pole is now circled by empty bottles of Patron tequila and Tito’s vodka. The pole partially burned one night when a mourner placed a candle on the ground and the flames spread to a stuffed bear.

Harrell remembers that young man who accidentally started the fire. He later became a homicide victim, too.

“God rest his soul. He died on Warren,” she said.

The city’s best neighborhoods were struggling in 2007, even Palmer Woods, the exclusive community of winding streets, towering shade trees and VIP residents, from Mitt Romney long ago to Mike Duggan, who moved in from Livonia in 2012 so he could run for mayor of Detroit.

A decade ago, Palmer Woods, with about 300 homes, had about 25 empty dwellings, a disquieting amount for that neighborhood, plus problems with break-ins by squatters and the theft of wire and metals by scrappers. Much of the abandonment problem in the neighborhood was the result of the foreclosure crisis, which left even greater damage on many more modest city neighborhoods.

“We were really hit hard,” said Craig Vanderburg, president of the Palmer Woods Association.

♦ Have questions about Detroit? We've got answers!

In 2007, “Driving Detroit” shined a spotlight on a French Gothic mansion on Balmoral Road in Palmer Woods. We reported the 10,000-square foot home, with 10 bedrooms and one ballroom, had sagging gutters, chipped paint and overgrown bushes. A wide-eyed doll with a disheveled dress lay weirdly across the crumbling front steps, and personal items like canceled checks and birthday cards that belonged to the home’s most recent residents were scattered across the front and back yards, the detritus of a foreclosure.

A 1973 Lincoln with four flat tires sat in the street, and an even bigger eyesore sat next door — an abandoned home once owned by Michigan governor and auto executive George Romney, father of Mitt. The family moved to Oakland County in 1953, when Mitt was 5.

The Romney home changed hands numerous times over the years. By 2007, it had been through foreclosure twice, and was partially roofless, with a large blue tarp flapping in the wind. A large Dumpster sat on the front lawn. That is not a common look for Palmer Woods, and what came next — demolition in 2010 — was even more unusual.

Today, a decade after the “Driving Detroit” report, the French Gothic house on Balmoral has turned around in remarkable fashion after having been purchased by a Canadian lawyer who is extremely bullish on Detroit.

“I think there is a lot of opportunity,” said Abe Rubinfeld, who grew up in Montreal and was living in Toronto before his move to Balmoral.

“This city is unique in Canada and the U.S. It has a completely different spirit to it and it’s very innovative, more than any other city, and it just continues to move forward despite the setbacks.”

Rubinfeld, 65, was familiar with Detroit from numerous visits over the years, and he kept his eye on the city’s real estate. On July 18, 2013, the day Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, Rubinfeld said he decided to buy property here, believing the complicated legal case would have a positive ending.

“That’s the moment I just knew they wouldn’t let it go,” Rubinfeld said, speaking of elected officials.

In 2014, he paid $739,900 for the 95-year-old home, which also has a ballroom, great hall, Pewabic tiling and quarter-sawed oak flooring, famous for its distinctive grain. The home was originally owned by Charles Van Dusen, an executive for the S.S. Kresge dime store chain that spawned Kmart.

The house needed extensive repairs, including on the plastering, the slate roof and dog-stained carpeting. Rubinfeld said renovation will go on “past my lifetime.”

The positive outcome for the Balmoral house matches the upbeat assessment of the neighborhood from Vanderburg, the association president.

He said Palmer Woods has only one empty house these days, and has enjoyed an influx of residents from outside Detroit. Purchase prices on homes, Vanderburg said, are up 50%.

“Things have really turned around,” he said.

Rubinfeld said the Palmer Woods is “very cohesive,” a place where people look after each other and are dedicated to maintaining the area.

“There’s a spirit in the neighborhood,” he said. “It’s not like Bloomfield Hills, I imagine.”

Leaving Toronto means Rubinfeld is turning his back on what many Detroiters have longed considered the Emerald City, a charming, sophisticated, safe urban Disneyland.

“Toronto is a good city,” Rubinfeld said. “But it’s choking on itself because of its success.”

Willie and Norma Johnson live in a normal house in a solid neighborhood near 8 Mile and Greenfield, but their home has a feature that makes their property stand out: a backyard basketball court.

Not just a single basket on a garage, like in most backyards, but two baskets on adjustable poles, Plexiglass backboards, a free-throw lane and a three-point line.

The Johnsons turned their backyard into a basketball court more than 30 years ago and invited young people to come and play. The court might be a bit shorter than regulation, but its authenticity, combined with the Johnson’s hospitality, has made their home famous and the Johnsons known far beyond their corner of Pembroke and Prest.

“It started with my kids and it expanded to the neighborhood kids, and then I just went public,” Willie Johnson said.

“An ‘open court,’ we called it. Anyone could come, as long as they behaved and obeyed my rules. And that was it.”

Said Norma Johnson: “East side, west side, all of them came. The mothers dropped them off, and they brought water, and they’d drop them off at 9, 10 in the morning and come back and get them at 6, 7 in the evening. We were big babysitters.”

A few dozen young people might show up on a weekend afternoon. Johnson said he never had a problem, even though gangs and drugs were present at times in the neighborhood.

“I would tell them, 'this is your court. But respect it, and my family,' ” Johnson said.

In 2008, police closed off the streets as then-Mayor Ken Cockrel Jr. made a surprise appearance and the Detroit Pistons showed up to re-dedicate the court after it was refurbished through private fund-raising and the Pistons’ largesse.

Willie Johnson is 73. He grew up in Bastrop, La., and came to Detroit in 1967 at his brother’s invitation after he had served in the Army, including a stint in Vietnam.

“First place he took me, when I got off the plane, was Belle Isle. It was so beautiful. I fell in love with it. It was that simple,” Johnson said.

He worked as a machine setter at Champion Spark Plugs, where he met Norma, who is 70. She grew up in Detroit and graduated from Mumford High School. They have been married 42 years.

Johnson traces his generosity toward young people to a childhood influence.

“When I grew up in Louisiana, we had a guy that was named Mr. Lucky, and he did a lot of things with the children back then. This was in the ‘50s and '60s.

“It’s just something that always stuck with me. It’s something that I knew I was going to do some day. When I bought this here, I said, ‘Hey, I’m putting a court back here.’ ”

LeBraun Hazel, now 29 and living in Atlanta, grew up down the street from the Johnsons, and played on the backyard court for several years. He recalls the Johnson’s big-heartedness and mentoring and says his time in their yard is one of the best experiences of his life.

“The courts were open year-round, he held tournaments every summer and never asked me for a dime,” Hazel said.

“He kept Gatorades and charged less than they were sold in neighborhood stores. The entire neighborhood respects Mr. Johnson. He remembered everybody who came back years later, and I never saw him argue with anyone. His entire family was very kind all the time.”

Hazel recalled Johnson gave young men more than just a safe place to play.

“He kept me out of trouble directly by simply giving me a place I could go to at any time,” Hazel said. “He’d talk to us about life and decision-making and controlled our language.”

Willie Johnson’s health is fragile these days, and he walks with a cane. But he still hosted the usual players this year until the weather turned cold.

“I love it when they come back and they tell me they didn’t have a father,” he said.

“They share this with me, that I was the only father that they knew. And they thank me, and I just love it! That makes me know that was worthwhile.”

The front of the building at West McNichols and Lindsay in northwest Detroit says simply, “Erin D’Angelo. The Salon.”

Inside, under the management of Martin Wheeler, five stylists serve a steady clientele in a space that is dark and laid-back. The soundtrack on a recent day was pop music.

Ten years ago, the building was a mess. It was abandoned and filled with trash. Its façade was breaking apart. Newspapers, meant to hide the interior, peeled off the big front window.

That changed when D’Angelo, the owner, opened the salon in 2011; Wheeler arrived in 2012.

“Business is good,” Wheeler said. “There’s a lot of stuff going on in this area.”

One of the things going on in the area, in the several blocks of McNichols east of the Southfield Freeway, is salons — there are several within sight of Erin D’Angelo, for no apparent reason. The immediate neighborhood of sturdy brick bungalows and colonials is marred by occasional abandoned properties; McNichols is a mixed bag of going concerns and dilapidated structures.

Wheeler said the salon focuses on colors, keratin treatments and promoting healthy hair care.

Wheeler is 38. He grew up in Detroit, graduated from Southfield High School and got interested in hairstyling after a year of college.

“I always knew I had a gift for beauty and hair and things of that nature,” he said.

As Wheeler began working, he became involved with the famous "Hair Wars" shows started in the early 1990s by David Humphries, who goes by the name Hump the Grinder. His shows traveled across the country and specialized in flamboyant stylists fashioning hair into exotic creations like helicopters, musical instruments and airplanes.

“That’s how I established myself as a stylist,” Wheeler said.

Both Wheeler and D’Angelo are entrepreneurs with visions: D’Angelo, said Wheeler, would like to start a chain of salons; Wheeler is doing the groundwork to expand the current salon onto the vacant lot next door. The new space will sell hair and hair care products.

Said Wheeler: “That’s what my vision is now, and that’s what I’m working toward.”

In 2007, the Free Press found Thomas Davis working on his home in the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood of Detroit.

In 2017, Davis is still working on his home.

Davis said he sometimes works 14 hours a day on the home, a 99-year-old Arts and Crafts bungalow, as well as on the homes of neighbors, always using recycled materials. Growing up in Detroit’s Conant Gardens neighborhood in a family of 10 children, he learned about thriftiness from a young age.

“I don’t waste anything,” he said.

Davis, 69, has lived on Chalmers Avenue for nearly 35 years. He and wife, Pamela, raised four children, all of them University of Michigan graduates.

The neighborhood’s north-south streets stretch a mile from East Jefferson to the parkland along the Detroit River, and its east-west streets bump up against Grosse Pointe Park. It’s so close to the water that some residents can hear the engines of passing freighters.

The area has been battered for decades by poverty, drugs and white and black flight, and the neighborhood to its north, across Jefferson, is one of the most abandoned areas of Detroit. The homes around the Davis residence reflect the struggle; some show signs of renovation and some are dilapidated or abandoned.

But the long-dormant commercial district at Jefferson and Chalmers has shown signs of life recently with new businesses, including a coffee shop and a record store. The city has installed a new streetscape on Jefferson, with protected bike lanes. And a younger generation is discovering the sturdy, 100-year-old homes in Jefferson-Chalmers, some of them three-story dwellings, and the easy access to downtown, the waterfront and eastern suburbs.

“We’ve got a lot of new people coming into the neighborhood,” Davis said approvingly. “The neighborhood is drastically changing. They’re younger, they’re white, they’re different nationalities.”

As Davis spoke, as if on cue, a young white couple with a big black dog jogged past on nearby Freud Street.

“They’re finding value just like the original people of this neighborhood,” Davis said.

Davis is a lung cancer survivor, and his lungs have a hard time in the Michigan winter, so he and his wife might move to the south in the future. He’ll miss his house on Chalmers.

“Hundreds of people have seen me over the years, constantly trying to fix up, constantly trying to make changes.

“I don’t care where you move, if you take care of your place, eventually people will catch on and eventually start doing the same thing.”

In late 2007, the Rev. Thomas Lumpkin said Sunday mass for the small St. Ignatius community on Detroit’s east side and inmates in the Wayne County Jail, ran a residence for homeless people on Trumbull Avenue and co-managed a soup kitchen.

In late 2017, his schedule looks similar. In fact, he’s doing the same things this year that he was doing a decade ago, and he was doing them for many years before that.

Lumpkin, 78, is a Catholic priest who is well known in Detroit’s social justice community for his decades of activism, antiwar protests, sit-ins and even a 40-day fast in 1972. Detroit has the highest poverty rate among the nation’s 20 largest cities, and few people have Lumpkin’s experience in working with the poorest of the poor.

“He’s what you would call a Pope Francis priest right now,” said retired Detroit Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, 87, perhaps the best-known member of Detroit’s progressive forces and a longtime Lumpkin friend.

“Francis doesn’t want priests worrying about their careers in the church, but to go out to what Francis calls ‘the peripheries,’ to the poor, and the people who are neglected, exploited. That’s where you’ll find Tom.”



A lifelong Detroiter who grew up in a prosperous neighborhood on the northwest side, Lumpkin lives and works in Corktown, which has evolved into one of the city’s hottest neighborhoods, where poor people mix with well-heeled patrons of Michigan Avenue restaurants and bars.

Lumpkin said he doesn’t have a solution to Detroit’s grave socio-economic challenges, but he’s not an automatic critic of Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert, whom Lumpkin’s friends criticize as becoming too powerful for his dominance of the downtown real-estate market.

“You’ve got this huge, geographical unit” — Detroit — “with a dwindling population that’s ever poorer,” Lumpkin said.

“How do you provide basic services? I don’t know how you do it except you bring in nice young, white affluent people who’ve got some money and they bring along the tax base. I don’t know how to solve it. I think it’s unsolvable. So I don’t criticize Dan Gilbert.”

Lumpkin is thin, casual and has a commanding voice. He is an Archdiocese of Detroit priest, but his assignment is unique: He is the local representative of the Catholic Worker Movement, a loosely organized chain of progressive Catholics across the country who often live together and work with poor people and on other social justice projects.

In Detroit, the movement is centered on Day House, a former duplex boarding home that Lumpkin and others opened in 1978 as a refuge for homeless people, one of the first such shelters in the city. Earlier this month, nine women lived in Day House, named after Dorothy Day, the activist and writer who helped found the Catholic Worker Movement.

Lumpkin also co-manages the Manna Meal soup kitchen in the basement of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, near Day House.

On Sundays, he says mass at the jail and for the St. Ignatius Community, a group of about 45 mostly progressive Catholics, mainly from the east-side suburbs. The group formed originally in 1990 as a renegade spiritual faction of St. Ignatius of Antioch parish after Cardinal Edmund Szoka closed St. Ignatius, which was southeast of City Airport, along with dozens of other parishes.

A decade ago, Lumpkin celebrated mass for the St. Ignatius group in a storefront at Conner Avenue and Chelsea, a rare foray for Catholics into the humble setting for hundreds of small congregations across Detroit.

The group has since moved to a room in the Samaritan Center off of Conner, south of the Ford Freeway.

Lumpkin lives in Day House.

“Myself, a man, living with nine women,” he said, laughing heartily. “And there’s not even any hint of scandal, as far as I can tell. Nobody complains.”

Lumpkin became a priest in 1964, and served in various parishes for 14 years before he began working with poor people in the Catholic Worker Movement.

“I felt it was my calling, so I stayed,” he said. “Everybody else has left over the years. Nobody has come to take my place.

“I don’t feel I’m doing it as well as I used to. If a couple of young people came in tomorrow and said, ‘we’re here to take over,’ I would take that as a word from God to retire and move on.”

Photos from Driving Detroit 2017:

Photos from Driving Detroit 2007:

Ten years ago, Free Press photographer Amy Leang captured three boys playing basketball in the street outside their home near the former state fairgrounds, at 8 Mile and Woodward. In 2017, the house is gone, having burned in what was believed to be an electrical fire. More residents on the block are gone as the neighborhood turns more vernal. The local school is also gone.

Prince Young Jr. and wife, Evelyn Young, arrived in the neighborhood around West Davison Avenue and Dexter in 1974, and moved to their present house in 1985.

Their home is warm and cozy. Outside, traffic thunders by on Davison, a state highway that turns into a freeway down the street. Some of the nearby streets are blighted, and crime has been an issue for decades. There are fewer people in the neighborhood.

Still, the Youngs are content.

“I like the city,” said Prince Young.

“We love it,” Evelyn Young said. “That’s what keeps us here.” weve never had any trouble. No break-ins. Her four children had no major trouble.

Evelyn Young said her kids had a safe place to play in Zussman Park, across the street. One of their six grandchildren, 17-year-old Jalen, lives with the Youngs, and says he stays focused.

“It’s a tough neighborhood,” Jalen said. “For me it’s nothing but mental preparedness. I’ve been though a lot. I’ve seen a lot. I don’t get into trouble. I’m not a trouble kid. I focus on what I know what I got to do. I know everybody around here.”

“He moves smart,” Prince Young said.

“That means I stay out of trouble,” said Jalen. “I don’t get into foolishness. If I go to the park to play basketball, I play basketball.”

Even at 89 years of age, even on a subfreezing Sunday morning in December, Barbara Niman makes the 40-mile round trip between her home in Northville and her church, St. Mary’s of Redford, in northwest Detroit.

“I do it because St. Mary’s is home,” Niman said. “That is my family. And the church is so beautiful.”

Niman has been a parishioner at St. Mary’s since 1968, when she and her late husband moved to Detroit from Delaware. St. Mary’s school was so crowded then that the five Niman children had to go elsewhere at first.

Today, St. Mary’s, on Grand River near the Southfield Freeway, is hanging on, like many old Catholic churches in Detroit. The Rev. Charles Morris, the current administrator, works part-time, also serving as an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy at Madonna University in Livonia.

Founded in 1843 nearby at Grand River and Greenfield, the parish, the fourth-oldest in the Detroit archdiocese, was one of the biggest in metro Detroit for many years. In the 1950s, St. Mary’s had more than 4,000 families, 2,300 students in the grade school and high school and a combined 10,000 worshippers at several Sunday masses.

White flight and Detroit’s decline robbed the city’s Catholic parishes of many of their members. About 65% of Detroit’s population was Catholic in the 1950s, and by 1967, there were 129 Catholic parishes inside the city limits. In 2017, there are 44.

Today, St. Mary’s has about 200 registered families. A charter school operates in the old high school; the grade school is vacant. Homeless veterans live in the old convent, which once housed 38 nuns. There is one Sunday mass. Fewer than 200 people attended on a recent Sunday, but their spirited prayers and songs reverberated off the dark ceiling timber in the church, a French Romanesque beauty that has long been considered an architectural masterpiece.

Despite the small numbers, Niman and her fellow parishioners remain optimistic about the future.

“We’re celebrating our 175th anniversary next Nov. 4,” Morris said. “The archbishop,” Allen Vigneron, “has already committed to be being here.”

Hector Cassab and his wife, Leticia Cassab, came to Detroit from Ixtepec, Mexico, in 1982, and by 1995 they had opened Hector’s Men’s Wear at the busy corner of West Vernor and Junction in southwest Detroit.

“We worked together,” Hector Cassab said. “And we’re married 53 years.”

A year ago, the Cassabs sold the business to another immigrant, Walter Lemus, 35, who was born in Guatemala. The store is now called Perla’s Clothing and Shoes.

“I’m doing it for one year,” Lemus said. And it’s doing OK, so I’ll do it for another year.”

Lemus sells clothes, shoes, accessories and a wide variety of European perfumes and colognes, which fill the store with exotic aromas.

The Cassabs, who live in Oakland County, worked together in their hometown in southern Mexico, running a store that specialized in fabrics. In Detroit, they raised three children who have gone on to professional careers as adults.

“I was very happy in this store,” Leticia Cassab said, explaining that all customers, no matter their ethic group or race, “showed respect to my husband and me."

She added: “I’m working with my husband. And the people are very nice. I’m very happy in America. Everyone, no matter their nationality or race, showed respect to my husband and me.”

Sheila Lafreniere is a retired first-grade Detroit teacher who lives with husband, Gilbert Lafreniere, in a brick bungalow on Warwick Street with ornaments and a Russian olive tree on the front lawn.

Ten years ago, Sheila Lafreniere was spotted doing that most routine of chores: letting her cat in the house. In 2017, that cat, Kissy, is a sweet memory, having been replaced by Vader, as in “invader.” Vader is a stray who showed up one October. The Lafrenieres took it in. “We were afraid what tricks they might play on a cat on Halloween,” Sheila said.

The Lafrenieres moved into the home, near Evergreen and Plymouth, 43 years ago, after they married, when tall Dutch elms on most lawns converged above the middle of Warwick and made the street resemble the nave of a cathedral. Gilbert recalled the sensation of looking down the street and feeling like you were in a tunnel.

While the big trees are long gone, the immediate neighborhood today is filled with homes that are modest and well-maintained. The Lafrenieres are one of the last remaining white families.

“We really love it here,” Sheila said. “We get along with all of our neighbors. We sit on each other’s porches. They keep up their houses really nice. We have each other’s phone numbers.”

Few areas in Detroit outside of rapidly developing downtown and Midtown have changed as much in the past decade as the Zone.

Located in an old industrial and residential area north of the Ford Freeway and east of Mt. Elliott Avenue, the Zone’s official name is the I-94 Industrial Project. It sat mostly dormant for more than 10 years; its weeds, grasses and trees flourishing as it became the final resting place for such castoffs as pleasure boats, televisions, tires, building materials and torched cars.

Today, though, after years of frustration for city planners, the area looks like the suburban-style industrial park that officials envisioned 20 years ago.

Over the past three years the Zone has been cleared, and a sprawling auto parts factory is rising next to a new warehouse-like facility that contains more than 500,000 square feet of space.

We focused on the Zone in 2007 because at 185 acres – about 140 football fields -- it was probably the wildest and biggest example of the way nature was re-asserting itself in Detroit as buildings and homes disappeared.

In that era, much of the Zone was filled with decomposing mounds of garbage and illegally dumped debris; some of the mounds had sat for so long they had become covered in verdant vegetation. Camilo Jose Vergara, a New York-based sociologist and photographer who has become internationally famous for documenting the decay of American inner cities, once called Detroit’s reforestation a “veil of vegetation creeping over the city.”

The Zone also was filled with foxtail grass, red oaks, London plane trees, silver maples, Little Siberian elms, Catalpas, Norway maples, American elms, lamb quarters, Queen Anne’s Lace, and Kochia, a multi-branches stem that can grow to 8 feet.

There were wild dogs, red-tailed hawks and the spooky sound of rushing water coming out of old sewer grates from when the Zone was a typical working class neighborhood along such streets as Winfield, Carrie, Concord and Sherwood.

The name “the Zone” emerged from Detroit artistic and literary circles after the area was named a Renaissance Zone, in which businesses could receive tax breaks for building in certain designated areas. Scott Hocking, a local artist with an international reputation, said another reason for the name was its similarity to the wild landscape in “The Zone” of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, “Stalker.”

Hocking has been documenting the Zone through photography and other methods since 2000. In 2014 he used an industrial-strength weed-whacker to carve crop circles in the Zone for an art show. One day, he said, he saw a couple having sex atop a mound.

In his 2012 book, “Detroit City is the Place to Be,” Mark Binelli wrote about how the Dutch-born photographer and Detroit resident Corine Vermeulen took him to the Zone. “Here, for a dozen or more blocks, absolutely everything was gone,” Binelli wrote. “From up here, it was difficult to believe we were minutes from the downtown of a major American city.”

The city conceived of the industrial park in the 1990s, when Dennis Archer was mayor. Officials envisioned a suburban-style collection of manufacturing facilities on the site.



The most notable success until recently was a 300,000-square-foot logistics facility off of Huber Avenue in a corner of the Zone. It was built in 2004 by Crown Enterprises, a real estate firm owned by businessman Matty Moroun.

In 2016, Crown Enterprises finished a second facility of more than 500,000 square feet just north of Miller Road, and in April, Flex-N-Gate, a Ford Motor Co. supplier, broke ground on a $95-million factory south of Huber that is rising rapidly. It initially will create 400 jobs.

Jed Howbert, one of Mayor Mike Duggan’s top development aides, said the city decided to clear the site of debris and wild vegetation so it presented better for potential suitors. Officials also assembled a team of development experts that understood how to market the site and make deals.

Added to those efforts came a turnaround in the economy.

“The rebound of the industry meant that people were putting money into new capital projects,” Howbert said.

As in virtually all development projects in Detroit, Flex-N-Gate received financial incentives: the company qualified for a tax-free designation, which was expected to save it more than $1 million a year for 10 years, and in 2016 it received a $3.5-million grant from the state to help it open the plant.

Michael Samhat, president of Crown Enterprises, praised city hall for its help and said the growing I-94 Industrial Project will help Detroit in areas beyond flourishing downtown and Midtown, which is a touchy issue for many city residents who fail to see how the resurgence downtown is helping their communities.

“This is another phase of what we need – hiring out of the neighborhoods,” he said.

Despite its transformation, the Zone seems certain to remain a fixture in the art world.

Said Hocking, the artist: “My plan is to stop documenting the Zone by 2020, making it a roughly 20-year photo project.”

At La Gloria Bakery on Bagley, the second generation took the reins in 2012, and the third generation is waiting in the wings.

The bakery, in Mexicantown just west of I-96 near the Ambassador Bridge, was purchased about 35 years ago by Ruben Gonzalez, who is 72 and now living in retirement in his native Mexico.

His daughter, Juanita Gonzalez-Franco, 43, took over five years ago. Her son, Alex Franco, 21, helps run the store and has dreams for the future.

“I would like to stay there for 40 or 50 years,” said Alex, 21.

“I’m content how we are right now. I like the business. I like how my grandpa created something from nothing to make a little something.”

Located in a two-story building with a rose-colored facade, La Gloria is named after the daughter of a previous owner. It’s cramped inside, filled with glass-covered cabinets that contain dozens of sweets, including canastas de fresa (strawberry tarts); churros de leche quemada (caramel sticks); galletas de amor (love-hearted cookies); tamales, and colorfully decorated sugar skulls for Day of the Dead festivities Oct. 31-Nov. 2.

Customers pick up trays and wander around, picking out the sweets, and paying at the counter.

On a recent morning, Gonzales-Franco was running the store, filling large orders and waiting on customers, all of whom she knew. She grew up working in the bakery. Her husband, Francisco Franco, also works in the store, as does another son, Anthony, 24. There are two bakers who are unrelated, and who come to work at 3 a.m. The store is open from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m.

“We all work together,” Gonzalez-Franco said, smiling. “I want to kill my husband at the end of the day.”

Customers come from as far away as Ohio and southern Michigan, but Gonzalez-Franco says business is “slower than before,” adding, “nobody comes out anymore.”

She and son Alex talk about expanding. There are no tables now, but they talk about putting in a café so that patrons could eat on the spot.

Alex is trying to develop a market for the Day of the Dead skulls — made of pure sugar — throughout the year.

“That’s my little business right there,” he said. “I’d like to start shipping them out.”

Victor Borowski lives in an old utility building on the banks of the Rouge River amid a heavy industrial neighborhood in southwest Detroit.

In 2007, Borowski could look to the west out his window and see a neighborhood of hundreds of potential customers for his jack-of-all-trades handyman services. A three-story apartment building sat across the street.

Borowski’s situation has changed radically in 10 years. He still lives in a building on the Rouge, but the adjacent neighborhood has virtually disappeared.

The houses have been demolished as part of the controversial project by Marathon Petroleum Corporation to expand the 250-acre footprint of its Detroit refinery, whose twisting, towering pipes and piercing lights and have become a landmark on southwest Detroit’s skyline. The plant’s emissions have become the grounds of a proposed class-action suit by neighbors elsewhere who continue to live around the plant.

Marathon purchased and demolished 315 structures, though about 30 property owners elected to stay. The company is in the process of turning the empty land into a multi-acre green space that will include woods, prairie and wetlands within sight of the refinery, where such products as gasoline, asphalt, fuel-grade coke and chemical-grade propylene are produced.

Borowski, 57, lives in an apartment inside a two-story red brick industrial building that once belonged to Detroit Edison, the forerunner of DTE Energy.

From his roof, Borowski can see trains, barges, tugs, plumes of white smoke, huge storage tanks, the Fort Street bridge and I-75 as it rises above the Rouge, carrying trucks that noisily shift their gears as they climb the grade. There is an off-putting smell in the air.

Borowski now looks across the once-dense neighborhood and see grass and trees, and has to travel to Downriver suburbs when his old customers call.

“The worst part was, I’m a handyman,” Borowski said. “And that used to be my livelihood. All those houses. There were a lot of elderly people and they would call you at 5 a.m. and say, ‘my toilet.’ And I’d go fix this woman’s toilet at 5 in the morning and she’d have breakfast waiting. It was kind of paradise for me.”

The sign advertising Village Estates was hopeful: It advertised new housing for an older neighborhood in northwest Detroit.

The plan was for 120 town houses, ranch-style condominiums and single-family homes — a new neighborhood on West McNichols, east of the Southfield Freeway. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick joined Herb Strather, a well-known Detroit developer, and the Rev. Wendell Anthony, pastor of Fellowship Chapel and longtime president of the Detroit branch of the NAACP, on June 5, 2007.

Village Estates was to be located just south of Anthony’s church, on a lot bordered by West Outer Drive, McNichols, Oakfield and Biltmore.

Village Estates, though, failed to receive adequate financing, according to Strather, and nothing was built on the site, which is wild and green in summer.

Ten years later, there’s another plan: Strather said they hope to break ground by spring on a project for senior-citizen rental housing. In the coming years, the developers hope to add assisted living and skilled nursing facilities, so people can grow old and not have to keep moving as their needs increase.

It’s noon on Thursday. A dozen tables are groaning with groceries in the basement of Mt. Vernon Missionary Baptist Church on Burt Road in the Brightmoor neighborhood of Detroit. Dozens of people sign in and fill their bags and boxes.

Shirley Nolen is multitasking, directing several volunteers, greeting the clientele, hugging, and making sure everyone follows the rules.

“OK, baby,” Nolen says affably to one woman, “I love you dearly but get that box off the table.”

Nolen, 70, runs the Feeding Ministry at Mt. Vernon, which is located in one of Detroit’s neediest neighborhoods.

The food, everything from candy canes to fresh vegetables to frozen chicken, came that day from Forgotten Harvest, the Oak Park-based nonprofit that rescues surplus, prepared and perishable food and donates it to emergency providers.

On Wednesdays, an 18-wheeler also shows up in the Mt. Vernon parking lot and distributes groceries.

In November, Mt. Vernon handed out food to 2,120 people on those two days a week.

“We’re doing a lot of people out here in Brightmoor,” Nolen said. “I don’t ask for I.D. I just ask you to sign in.”

Nolen, a retired State of Michigan social worker, started volunteering at Mt. Vernon in 1987, when the Feeding Ministry was started by her uncle, Sam Jackson, an assistant pastor at the church. After Jackson died, Nolen took over the ministry in 2003.

Why does she give so much time to helping to feed others?

“I love it,” she said. “I’m a people person. So that’s what makes me have the joy of giving back to others.”

The need has increased over three decades, Nolen said, partially driven by more homelessness in Brightmoor.

Lachatta Butler, a 52-year-old Detroiter, was collecting food for the four people she feeds — her son, herself and two grandchildren. She has been coming every Thursday for a year.

“It’s so helpful,” she said. “I don’t know how we would make it through the month sometimes.”

A basketball hoop stood a decade ago as a lonely sentinel on Manistique between East Jefferson and Kercheval, a far east-side neighborhood next to Grosse Pointe Park that was hurting more than many areas in the city after decades of decline. Officials held a ground-breaking for a housing project nearby, but 10 years later, no housing project was built, the neighborhood remains one of the most devastated in Detroit, but the hoop still stands.

An abandoned basketball rim sits in an area being prepared for new housing development on Manistique Street between Jefferson Avenue and Kercheval Street on October 19, 2007.

September 2017: A basketball hoop stands in a vacant lot on Manistique Street between Jefferson Avenue and Kercheval.

The photo on the left shows the Carlton “loftominiums” at John R and Edmund Place in Brush Park, behind the dilapidated Henry Glover House in the foreground. The Carlton, known as the Carlton Plaza Hotel in the Roaring '20s, was a well-known hotel for African Americans, who were denied accommodations in many other Detroit hotels. The Carlton was renovated in 2005. The 19th-Century Glover house had already been abandoned for more than a dozen years by 2007, but the home was sold in September by the City of Detroit to a developer for $315,000. He plans a multi-tenant residence.

In 2007, the hulk of a former hardware store sat vacant and exposed at Buchanan and 24th streets on the west side, near I-96. You could hear the sound of running water coming from a leaking pipe in the basement, which was cluttered with dumped debris. Today, the store is gone and a vacant lot remains. Buchanan, which runs north of Michigan Avenue, was once a crowded commercial and residential street, but the sense of emptiness along its route is overwhelming in 2017.

A man carried a mattress in front of a discount mattress store on Van Dyke Avenue in Detroit. Today, the building sits vacant.