You don’t have to look far from the Detroit Golf Club to see empty fields and crumbling houses. Though the neighborhoods immediately next to the venerable course are as full and splendid as you’ll find in the city.

Visitors to this week’s Rocket Mortgage Classic — the first PGA Tour stop in the history of the city — will see old Detroit, new Detroit, forgotten Detroit, and freshly polished Detroit.

From the lushly mowed park grounds across from the DGC’s entrance to the spiffy new flag poles to the recently poured crosswalks and sidewalks at the intersection of Seven Mile and Pontchartrain, where thousands of folks will traverse during the four-day tournament.

Even as late as Monday afternoon, workers and volunteers and event organizers scurried and hustled around the grounds — and in the immediate outside them — sweeping streets and blowing off sidewalks and planting flowers.

“Everyone has been in a rush,” said Valerie Bradley, who lives a few neighborhoods over and who walks a the roughly three-mile loop around Palmer Park. “It’s been hard not to notice.”

Bradley, who is 52, grew up in nearby Highland Park and worked for the Wayne County Sherriff’s department for most of her career. She is not, by her own description, a serious golf fan.

But as someone who sees this section of the city on foot hundred days a year, she spotted the transformation easily.

“It’s great,” she said, Monday afternoon, stopping to chat while circling her weekly loop. “And tell em’ to bring the pool back.”

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The pool in question used to welcome swimmers in Palmer Park. A splash park was added a few years back. And while Bradley loves the spot for the area kids, she’d like to see a place for adults, too. Even so, she’s not complaining.

Nor was her walking partner, Kim Lowe, who works for the American Red Cross, and who, like Bradley, has watched the city change the past decade.

As for the addition of a PGA Tour tournament?

“For them to have it is great,” said Lowe, a 59-year-old Detroit resident, “anything that will help the city.”

The question she has is what happens once the galleries and touring pros and volunteers move on?

“I would like to see where the money goes,” she said, “because once this leaves … (well), you know.”

So often it’s about the money. Or the promise of money. Or the promise of money that will bring change. Not that the PGA’s mission is to uplift struggling neighborhoods. It is obviously not. But this doesn’t mean the Tour — and the courses it relies upon — can't help bring change.

In fact the DGC’s president, Andy Glassberg, recently told the Free Press that luring the PGA to Detroit wasn’t just about the golf. He thinks his tournament can help the city, based on what happened in Atlanta when the PGA descended upon the East Lake Golf Club.

That club, home to the Tour Championship, helped revitalize a housing-project community by its presence and the resulting outreach.

“That was really the driving force for a lot of people, seeing that,” Glassberg told the Free Press. “What can we do to help this area out? I mean, it’s a beautiful area. I mean, look what (Gilbert has) done downtown. The more we can show people that the city, it’s a good city.”

Bradley and Lowe agree. And the effect is more than physical. It’s psychological.

“You watch the news and the first five stories is who died today,” said Bradley. “That’s really getting to be depressing. You get to the point where you don’t want to watch the news. But, for me, I want to know.”

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Otherwise?

She’d walk out her front door, see a yard lined in yellow police tape, and “wouldn’t even know what happened.”

In other words, she has to watch the news. Has to know what’s going on in her city. Which makes news of a PGA tournament plopping down in the middle of her weekly walk a kind of salve.

It’s a reminder, she said, that “Detroit can be a positive place.”

That all news doesn’t have to be depressing. That outsiders get to see that her home is worthy of such an event.

This matters, she said.

To her and thousands of other residents like her who take walks and work at non-profits and dream of jumping in a pool, of doing the things that residents in cities and communities everywhere dream of doing.

So, yes, the flowers lining the intersection of Seven Mile and Pontchartrain mean something. And eventually could symbolize the planting of a lot more.

As Bradley said of her weekly walks, which were encouraged by her doctor after she retired from the Sheriff's department and let the stress of that work keep her from getting off her couch.

“You've got to get up and start walking,” she said her doctor told her.

And so, she did.

This week, the PGA Tour is walking with her.

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