JC Reindl

Detroit Free Press

Is Detroit the "new Berlin?"

The German founder of a world-famous techno-music nightclub in Berlin says he sees parallels between the two cities and wants to acquire an abandoned Fisher Body plant a mile from Detroit's New Center.

Berlin resident Dimitri Hegemann, 60, has been searching for a potential spot to open a Detroit version of his renowned Berlin club, Tresor,which was inspired by Detroit techno music and also is the name of his record label.

So far, his top pick for location is the Fisher Body Plant No. 21, an old six-story factory along Piquette at 6051 Hastings St., near the interchange of I-94 and I-75. Owned by the City of Detroit, the Albert Kahn-designed building reportedly dates to 1919, produced its last GM part in 1984 and has been vacant since the 1990s and hit hard by metal scrappers and graffiti taggers.

In a phone interview Tuesday night, Hegemann said he intends to visit Detroit in early November and present city officials with his plans, which could involve putting artist space and a restaurant in the building as well as the nightclub.

The Fisher Body plant is commonly grouped among Detroit's largest and most iconic 20th-Century ruins — along with the Packard Plant and Michigan Central Station. But as with those historic structures, rehabbing the Fisher site for modern-day use would be a massively expensive undertaking that would take years to finish.

Hegemann has yet to decide whether to buy the building or lease it from the city, and has had talks with some city officials, including Detroit City Councilwoman Raquel Castañeda-López, who made a visit to Hegemann's Berlin club this summer and said she believes he is serious about his Detroit intentions.

Ed Siegel, a Detroit developer who is assisting Hegemann, said Tuesday that the cost of rehabbing the old Fisher Body plant to fulfill the German's full vision could be at least $70 million. The project also would likely require brownfield and historic tax credits.

The German's enthusiasm for the plant was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

If the nightclub owner does acquire the Fisher Body site, he would become just the latest foreigner to snap up one of Detroit's famous abandoned industrial buildings.

Last year, Peru-based developer Fernando Palazuelo won the Packard Plant site at the Wayne County foreclosure auction for $405,000. He is now in the initial stages of a lengthy mixed-use redevelopment project with uncertain odds of success. The Packard Plant even has its own connection to techno, being the site of numerous rave parties in the 1990s.

"There is a lot of international interest in Detroit as sort of being the poster child for post-industrial cities," Castañeda-López said.

A longtime enthusiast of Detroit techno, Hegemann has made multiple visits to the city and met in May with local design and development experts, including Abe Kadushin of Ann Arbor-based Kadushin Associates and Ernest Zachary of Detroit-based Zachary & Associates.

"They have this formula that worked in Berlin, and he felt that Detroit is very much like Berlin in terms of its rawness and its aggressiveness to go in new directions," Zachary said.

During that visit, Hegemann and a small group from Berlin attended a conference at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit on the "Detroit-Berlin Connection." The event coincided with Detroit's Movement electronic music festival, a techno extravaganza.

The minimalist electronic sound of Detroit techno was shaped in the 1980s by artists such as Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Eddie Fowlkes. Although it had little commercial impact in the U.S., the genre was embraced in the 1990s by European dance-music creators, who came to romanticize Detroit as a kind of musical holy ground.

Berlin in particular became a hotbed for Detroit's early techno musicians, with artists such as Jeff Mills and Underground Resistance forming deep alliances with the German city's clubs and record labels.

"Detroit techno is everywhere. It came at the right moment in Berlin," Hegemann said. "I want to pay back what Detroit has given us."

Following Germany's 1989 reunification, Berlin — particularly the former communist-controlled eastern part — became known for inexpensive real estate and plentiful industrial and commercial spaces. That mix proved attractive to artists and young people, giving the city a hip and edgy vibe.

"Berlin in 1990, 1991, after the fall of the wall, Detroit is a little bit like that now," said Walter Wasacz of Hamtramck, a music journalist who helped organize the May conference. "There are some elements of what Berlin did that we can apply."

Yet even the most enthusiastic proponents of a "Berlin-Detroit connection" acknowledge that the city of Detroit, even after it emerges from Chapter 9 bankruptcy, faces a much different set of economic and quality-of-life challenges than the German capital.

"It's nice to focus on the similarities, but there are so many differences," Siegel said. "We don't have the jet-set crowd that's coming in on the weekends."

Hegeman hopes to meet with Quicken Loans founder and Detroit developer Dan Gilbert when he returns next month.

"I would tell him why Berlin is so hip," he said.

Contact JC Reindl: 313-222-6631 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @JCReindl. Pop Music Writer Brian McCollum contributed to this report.

Who is Dimitri Hegemann?

■ Longtime fan of Detroit techno music.

■ Founded the famous Tresor techno club in Berlin.

■ Tresor opened in 1991 in the basement vault of a former East Berlin department store.

■ Club reopened in 2007 in a renovated electrical power plant.

■ He briefly owned a Detroit nightclub in 1994, but bowed out amid asbestos issues.