If there’s one thing Detroit natives take pride in, it’s their city’s legacy of making stuff. And if there’s another thing, it’s Detroit’s revival after decades of post-industrial decline. Mark Wallace seems equally excited about both.

Three years ago, Wallace founded Detroit Wallace Guitars, a small company that makes professional grade, vintage-style guitars out of reclaimed wood salvaged from dilapidated, historically significant buildings across the Motor City. Most recently, Wallace unveiled a line of guitars made from the remains of Detroit’s Brewster Wheeler Recreation Center, where boxer Joe Lewis once trained and Diana Ross and other members of The Supremes hung out as kids.

“It was one of the first housing projects in the U.S.,” says Wallace of the now-demolished residential buildings at Brewster-Wheeler. The adjacent rec center, which is now being renovated, was filled with old benches made of maple wood that was perfect for the body of a guitar. “Now we’re making guitars from benches that Diana Ross probably sat on,” he says.

The guitars, which start at $2,600, aren’t built for amateur garage bands and beginners. In fact, Wallace says, some of them wind up adorning the walls of local bankers and art collectors. The rest, of course, go to serious musicians.

“I’ve got a guy who’s played with Bruce Springsteen named Stewart Francke,” Wallace says. “He has a ’58 Rickenbacker, a Telecaster. He says he only wants to play on our guitar.”

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In Detroit, there’s no shortage of spare wood lying around. After years of working in real estate and learning woodworking to help rehab his own properties, Wallace had become fairly well-versed in the types of wood that could be found in local buildings. About a decade into his real estate career, he came across a nonprofit that worked with homeless people and taught them how to properly salvage materials from the blighted, often crumbling buildings that have proliferated since Detroit’s decline as a major manufacturing hub. After seeing some of the samples that were coming out of houses and historical buildings, Wallace began to think about how the materials could be repurposed in a meaningful way. For Wallace, himself a guitarist who played in local punk and bluegrass bands, his brainstorming led him to another of Detroit’s great legacies: Music.