Thirty-three Years Later

I had to go to Los Angeles, and rather than fly through Toronto, I chose to get a flight from Detroit. Owing to the way the flights left and arrived, I was able to visit the Detroit Institute of Arts for the first time in thirty-three years, as well as go to mass at my old parish church in Highland Park.

My wife is a fan of Frida Kahlo, and since moving to Ontario from London, England, a year ago, has been planning to see the Diego Rivera murals at the Institute of Arts. To my suprise, the suits of armour were still in the front hall overlooking Woodward. To walk around the institute with my daughters after such a length of time offered a connection of my present to my past. I liked the way the Institute was both different and the same as I remembered. Nice.

My old church [[St Benedict's), in contrast, is almost completely unchanged, except there is no-one there, and the mass had gospel elements that, while not to my taste, certainly showed an energy of faith from both the performers as well as from members of the congregation that can only be envied. Going back and looking at the church where I had spent so much time in attendance as an altar boy or in the congregation brought out how it had influenced my taste in architecture and church furnishings. It really is a splendid structure and it is a shame it is so little-used nowadays [[two masses a week, I think).

Dropping by this forum and the ruins of Detroit web-site had prepared me for the worst as far as the old houses went. John R is in a sorry state, and there is the shell of an old apartment building just past Six Mile [[McNichols) on John R that I found fairly shocking. The rest was to be expected—a mix of inhabited homes, clearly looked-after, with a scattering of empty lots and abandoned houses that seem beyond reclamation at this stage. It's a shame the neighbourhood has gone into such precipitous decline; but it came into existence to serve the Ford plant and other industries which are gone nowadays.There's not so much reason for a dense population there.

However, the fact that St Benedict's still looks impressive, and the well attended church in the old Slovene Hall on John R [[plus the survival of a little church between Montana and Worcester on John R after all these years) got me to thinking that maybe any plan for saving neighbourhoods should really be based on church congregations more than anything else. That was a key factor in creating Harlem.

There's no real point to these remarks, though. I just thought the forum might be interested in a 'Rip Van Winkle'-eye-view of one little part of Detroit today.