DETROIT, MI - Years before Jeff Klein co-founded

with Andy Ray on 21

st

Street in Southwest Detroit, he would come to the area and see crowds of people dancing to music and selling hand-made goods and wares.

"It was the original pop-up market and cultural place," Klein said. There was a wrought iron gazebo there, but otherwise, the area where the half-empty Michigan Welcome Center and all-empty Mercado now sit was mostly vacant land.

"It was really this cool space that people would come to every Sunday after church," Klein said.

In 2006, local, state and federal officals cut the ribbon on a $17 million project for the area that included a brand new, 30,000-square-foot Michigan Welcome Center and 13,000-square-foot Mercado building.

Today, DTE Energy and the state of Michigan lease some space in the Welcome Center, but otherwise the building is mostly vacant. The Mercado, a sparkling-new structure, is completely empty. Local officials and those familiar with the project say it fell victim to a combination of complicated financing, a lack of cohesive direction among project leaders, and the beginning of construction in 2008 of the $230 million Gateway project, which connects local highways with the Ambassador Bridge. The Gateway plaza opened to traffic just days ago.

The city and the non-profit Mexicantown Community Development Corporation said they are less than two months away from announcing a new agreement on the buildings at 21st Street and Bagley Avenue, which are costing the city millions of dollars in loan payments.

Klein opened Detroit Farm and Garden in the former Third Precinct police building last April along with the 555 non-profit artist gallery, which had its grand opening earlier this month.

Though Detroit Farm and Garden has become a destination business, Klein said, "We do get foot traffic, we want foot traffic and we need all the foot traffic we can get."

The area is visibly devoid of pedestrians, despite being arguably one of the cleanest and best-kept areas of the city, the crowds of people dancing to music and hosting pop-up retail stands now long gone.

"And I think in some ways the idea was to build this Welcome Center and the Mercado was to give that a more permanent location," Klein said. "But in the amount of time it took to build it, it also killed everything that was happening in those spaces."