Temple Bar holds on as spotlight shines on Little Caesars Arena

It was 1988, and a gritty stretch of Detroit known as the Cass Corridor was still many years away from getting rebranded as part of Midtown and becoming home to the new Little Caesars Arena.

That was the year George Boukas, then in his late 20s, decided to buy the Temple Bar at 2906 Cass Ave., a dive bar that his family previously had owned for decades. The bar stands today as one of the few businesses and properties near the arena that weren't sold to land speculators or real estate entities linked to the Ilitch organization, the developer of the newly opened $863-million sports and entertainment venue.

The bar is a recurring setting in the Comedy Central TV series "Detroiters."

But the Cass Corridor's streets in the late 1980s were rougher than when Boukas' family last owned the Temple Bar in the 1970s. So he set out to befriend the drug dealers and prostitutes hanging out in the neighborhood, offering the bar as a refuge and place where they might start reordering their lives.

"One of the very first things I did when I bought the bar is I befriended pretty much all of the dope boys on the street and pretty much all the hookers," Boukas, now 57, recalled in a recent interview.

"I told the young girls especially, I don't care what they did on the street. I'm not here to judge them, I'm not the police. But if they were ever in trouble, that they needed to come in here, because nobody would mess with them in here.

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"And that created a loyalty and an amazing friendship. I have four that still come through that have left that life behind."

This week, Boukas has been watching the new arena's opening with a mixture of amusement and cautious optimism.

Boukas says he turned down offers several years ago from mysterious businessmen who sought to buy his bar before the area was formally announced in 2013 as the new arena's location. The men wouldn't identify who they represented.

Many nearby property owners accepted such offers and became instant millionaires, their former buildings either boarded up or bulldozed to make way for the Red Wings' and Pistons' new home and the arena's still-to-come commercial and residential district.

A Bloomfield Hills family netted $5 million for a boarded-up party store in the arena's footprint. And the Temple Hotel, a flophouse that let rooms for as long as a month or as short as an hour, listed for $3.7 million and sold for what the owner's accountant described as “like maybe we hit the lottery.”

Boukas said one of the visiting businessmen gave him "a solid offer," but he wasn't ready to sell.

Several now-vacant apartment buildings near Temple Bar also were sold during the frenzy, and their low-income tenants ultimately had to move out. Some of them had been Boukas' patrons. The whole phenomenon contributed to the neighborhood's blight and desolation in the years leading up to arena groundbreaking.

"The unfortunate part about what's happening today is the long-term residents of this community have been displaced in a very horrific fashion," he said.

The Temple Bar was a popular spot in the early 1990s for interracial couples, and later a part of the city's black gay scene. Today it attracts people of all class, race and lifestyle backgrounds.

"We're probably the most diverse bar in the city as far as clientele goes — hipsters, gay people, interracial couples, drag queens," Boukas said. "I tell everybody to just come and be yourself and have a good time."

Tens of thousands of sports and music fans are now converging on the same streets near his bar that Detroit visitors avoided in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Cass Corridor was commonly seen as a dangerous and drug-infested stretch between downtown and Wayne State University.

There was some truth to the old perceptions, Boukas said, but fewer people were aware of the courtesies and respect that existed between many of the Corridor's residents, business owners and street people.

"The Cass Corridor was a hard place," he said. "But no matter what anybody tells you, this was still a loving community."

Boukas said he anticipates picking up new business with the arena next door, even though his bar lacks a sports or entertainment theme. "There is always interest in historic dive bars," he said.

However, that crowd will likely be different from the Temple Bar regulars who stop in during the week or come to its weekend dance parties.

"We deal with Opening Day, and this is basically the type of crowd it's going to be, a lot of new people that have never been here before," he said. "I'm going in with a very open mind. We treat people the same way they treat us."

What does concern him is the new flood of traffic on arena event nights that can make it hard for the bar's longtime patrons to find parking spaces.

Temple Bar customers have traditionally parked on the street or on a vacant lot next to the bar. However, the bar doesn't own this lot, and it was filled to capacity this week during Kid Rock's concerts. There was available parking in the arena district's new nearby surface lots — but for $40. Boukas said he plans to contact the Ilitch organization to discuss possible options for his customers.

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A short walk from the Masonic Temple, the Temple Bar is surrounded on all sides by vacant buildings, most of them owned or controlled by the Ilitch organization. It is one of two food or drinking establishments next to the arena that aren't brand new. (The other, Harry's Detroit Bar, 2482 Clifford St., opened in the early 1990s.)

While other neighborhood bars closed as the area's apartment buildings and boarding houses emptied out, Boukas' bar stayed open. He adjusted by adding more events, such as the dance parties with different DJs and music genres.

Temple Bar was started in 1927 by Boukas' Greek immigrant father, Gust Boukas, and was just a quarter of its current size, with other spaces in the building filled by an ice-cream parlor, candy store and barber shop. The building still features its original curved mahogany paneling and handrails along the bar.

It survived Detroit's 1967 riot while some nearby businesses were vandalized. Boukas was 7 at the time.

"I remember being in this bar and I got a chair and I stood up on the chair so I could look out the window just to watch the tanks go down Cass," he said.

"And the weird thing was that there was a party going on in the bar and it was all people — it was black people, white people — it was a mixture of people having a good time, and their escape from the outside world back then was a neighborhood bar."

Boukas' mother, Christina, sold the bar in 1974. Boukas became committed to buying the property back from a subsequent owner after making a visit one day in 1987. He was dismayed to find the bar unwelcoming, with none of the warm atmosphere that once prevailed. A list of names of people banned from the bar was posted by the front door.

"When I walked in, the bar was really filthy ... Nobody in the neighborhood could drink here except the friends of the manager," he said. "It really hurt my heart when I saw and heard the things I did. That wasn't what I remembered."

Boukas' mother initially was opposed to him buying the bar. "She said it took them all of their lives to get out of the Corridor," he recalled.

Yet once the place was officially his, she came to enjoy serving the customers and reconnecting with her old neighborhood friends.

The Temple Bar opened at 9 a.m. in those days for the crowd that was just getting off the overnight shift.

"A lot of the cabbies, this was their 11 o'clock, 10 o'clock at night because they worked opposite schedules," Boukas said.

The neighborhood became a bit rougher as the 1990s dawned. Crime stories continued to overshadow the Cass Corridor's earlier prominence as an artists' community. Temple Bar customers at times had to be buzzed in at the front door.

"The old respectable dope boys were getting arrested or getting killed, and only the strong survive," Boukas said. "So the ones that were out on the streets were much more aggressive."

Still, a large number of the bar's patrons during the 1990s hailed from nearby apartment buildings and boarding houses. The area's homeless population took off once those buildings emptied out, according to Boukas, who is a past chairman of the Cass Corridor Neighborhood Development Corp.

"At one point we had the highest concentration of homeless people in the state here in the Cass Corridor," he said.

Some of those empty buildings are now slated for future redevelopment as part of the arena district.

In 2010, a businessman entered Temple Bar and told Boukas that he represented confidential clients who wanted to buy the property. The man, however, wouldn't reveal his clients or explain their motives.

The man made an offer that included relocating Temple Bar to the former Agave Restaurant building at 4265 Woodward, which is now Hopcat Detroit.

Boukas said he thought it was a good deal. But the week Boukas was to sign the paperwork, another man visited the bar and informed him that the first man had died. This second man then "made me a ridiculously bad offer" for the property and Boukas said he told him to leave.

Later, the widow of the first man told Boukas that she suspected possible foul play in her husband's death.

A third man eventually appeared with yet another sale proposal. Boukas said this was "a solid offer." But he wasn't ready to sell, particularly as it wasn't yet known whether the Detroit Pistons would join the Red Wings at the arena and make his bar's location even more valuable. The Pistons ultimately announced last November that they would indeed leave Auburn Hills and return to Detroit.

Asked this week whether he would ever sell Temple Bar in the future, Boukas said he's not thoroughly opposed to the idea.

"Everything has a price," he said, expanding on his answer.

"I don't want to not enjoy coming to work. I enjoy meeting my customers, I enjoy waiting on them and hearing them laugh and tell goofy stories, he said. "Today I met two gentlemen who were coming to Kid Rock. The guy goes 'My grandma lived on Cass and Alexandrine and we used to come down in the '60s and the last time I was in here was in the early '90s.' And he said, 'just wanted to make sure you were OK.' And I'm going, 'Yeah, we're OK.'"

"So it's cool that people recognize that this was a neighborhood."

Contact JC Reindl: 313-222-6631 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @JCReindl.