Let’s face it -- one of downtown Detroit’s significant issues is having too many mature trees. Finally some good news on this front! A proposed joint project between Verizon Wireless, renowned for its excellent call center customer service, and the Ilitch organization, honored in this forum numerous times for its pristine track record of altruistic development and historic preservation, is not only going to add a much-needed windowless one-story private building to downtown but also take out 42 of 45 pesky Hawthorn trees in the process. Talk about a win-win.
This Verizon-Ilitch project, a telephone exchange building just north of Comerica Park, could be one of the most exciting projects in this town in recent memory. Detroit is fortunate as most other major league baseball stadiums have hidden cell phone enhancing mechanical functions inside their stadiums but we are to be blessed with this function visually in a new building. At a Public Hearing on Oct. 7, we were the only public present to see images of the proposed 3,000 square foot windowless one-story fortress structure with stunning non-descript beige walls, topped with a lovely green pre-fabricated roof. One phrase comes to mind to describe the structure perfectly – “architectural masterpiece”. As a bonus, a large outdoor generator accompanies the building, you know, the kind that every neighborhood would want to have visible nearby. The beauty of the project is that it protects the plethora of adored surface parking lots that surround the stadium.
I am sure taxpayers did not expect their $100+ million dollars of taxpayer funds that went into the Comerica Park project to be invested in greedy trees. Like all trees, these 20-foot tall Hawthorns have epitomized selfishness during their 15-year existence. They have soaked up ground water for free, stolen precious carbon dioxide from our atmosphere and littered the land below with compostable leaves during the fall and red fruit in the spring. Moreover, these particular trees block the view of one of downtown Detroit’s beautiful asphalt surface parking lots. Given these grievous crimes, these trees do not deserve the opportunity to live out their 400-year life span in peace. Let them be summarily executed with extreme prejudice. Unfortunately, the project proposes to let 3 trees live in their present location for reasons that were not explained.
With projects like these in the pipeline, Detroit is on the brink of being a world-class city. Thank you Verizon and Ilitch family for all you do!
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