BY JOHN GALLAGHER

DETROIT FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER


For decades, some Detroiters have dreamed of restoring part of the natural landscape that the French found here in 1701 by opening up, or daylighting, streams that were buried more than a hundred years ago as sewers in the rapidly expanding city.

With parts of Detroit now virtually abandoned, hopes of daylighting one or more of Detroit's historic streams have a shot at becoming reality.

The Kresge Foundation recently donated $450,000 to the University of Detroit Mercy's Detroit Collaborative Design Center to map plans for the daylighting of Bloody Run Creek, the east-side stream where Chief Pontiac's braves defeated the British in 1763.

St. Louis-based developer Richard Baron, a Detroit native, is working with U-D Mercy designers to plan an ambitious 3,000-acre green environment centered on a daylighted Bloody Run. The plan remains far from implementation, but would include urban farms and alternative-energy fields.

Shaun Nethercott, founder and executive director of the environmentally minded Matrix Theatre in Detroit, said last week that daylighting Bloody Run would be one way for Detroit to reestablish a healthy connection with the natural world.

"Being in a green environment reduces anxiety, builds a sense of place, reduces all kinds of symptoms," she said. "We need to be connected to a whole life-giving environment, and this is a real way to do it."

Continued at: http://www.freep.com/article/2011050.../1002/business