“The only thing I used to know about downtown Detroit was Tigers games,” says Davenport, 30, who moved from tiny Williamston, near Lansing, about six weeks ago to take a job as office manager in the Broderick Tower, an elegant 34-story tower on Woodward Avenue that is being converted into luxury apartments. “My friends in California told me I was stupid to move here, I’m going to get killed. Frankly, I thought it was going to be scarier. There’s a lot to do — bars, restaurants, concerts, games, the Eastern Market. It’s a lot of young people, people moving in from the suburbs. A lot of people want to walk to work.”

As she speaks, she’s standing in the Broderick’s duplex penthouse apartment that looks down onto the diamond where the Tigers and Yankees are doing battle. From the other side of the apartment you can see the muscular clump of downtown skyscrapers, the silver ribbon of the Detroit River behind it and, off in the distance, Windsor and the vastness of Ontario.

Davenport is now living a few blocks away, and she’ll move into a 17th-floor apartment in the Broderick Tower when renovations are complete later this fall. Which raises a question: How are you going to keep them down in Williamston after they’ve lived in an apartment with a view like this? Answer: You’re not.

“Once I got here to downtown and felt the energy,” Davenport says, “I knew I made the right decision in coming here.”

If Davenport had a powerful pair of binoculars, or maybe a telescope, she would be able to pick out an older gent in an usher’s uniform working the third-base side of the upper deck way down there in the ballpark. His name is Dick Dettloff. A Detroit native, still spry at 85, Dettloff had a tryout as an infielder with the Tigers in 1944, but World War II came between him and his dream and he became a Marine instead of a shortstop. After the war, he worked for 43 years as a body engineer at General Motors.