With the staycation turning into the vacation as economic growth resumes this decade, Michigan can expect an influx of explorers to its cities and shorelines. The Pure Michigan state tourism website (in recent years it's topped all states in web traffic) swoons over the natural pleasures of our peninsula: Great Lakes beaches, cherry orchards, marine sanctuaries. Sexy and rapturous as shipwreck-diving preserves and wispy fog wrapping the isolated Crisp Point Lighthouse on Lake Superior can be, dare we say that built-up Metro Detroit offers its own romance factor – where the attractions are man-made. While the region certainly has oak thickets and conifer stands, rivers and refreshing Lake St. Clair, the urban and the suburban are the standouts here.
So what else to do but click on Detroit? The 303-year-old city is the nation's tenth largest and its metro area ranks eighth, according to Pure Michigan. The site also links to Visit Detroit, the travel hub site for the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau. According to Renee Monforton, director of communications for the bureau, in 2008 Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties attracted 15.7 million visitors who spent $4.9 billion, or $313 per person.
The totals include all visitors from outside the tri-county area. Fifty-eight percent came from the Midwest, 19 percent were southerners, seven percent apiece were from northeastern and western states, and nine percent from abroad. Total visitation and spending "doesn't change significantly from year to year," Monforton explains. 2009 figures won't be available for several months, but she estimates a flat to downward trend, mirroring the national decline in corporate travel.
The majority of trips, 84 percent, were for leisure. Business travel composed the remaining 16 percent. While neighboring glam towns like Birmingham, Royal Oak, and Ferndale cater to folks on cha-ching! sprees, Motown still apes the burbs in out-of-towner's minds. Two million visited Detroit proper in 2008, says Monforton.
Habitué… or nay?
It's architecture, museums, music, sports, and art and history that travelers love, all of which sit pretty in downtown Detroit's fan pattern of streets. And we'd be remiss not to mention the gritty-turned-glorious Midtown district, home to Wayne State University and the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), whose 5,000-work display is among the top six in the country.
Improvements in its economy and appeal doubtless mean the region can host tourists and business travelers en masse. Meantime, though, age-old ill winds (still!) blow nationwide from across the blue-green Detroit River. So armed with this info and imagery, what exactly are visitors saying about Metro Detroit?
Glenn Sparico, a Washington, D.C.-based consultant and founder of nonprofit Health Across Borders, stayed at a downtown hotel on a months-long consulting stint last year and, unfortunately, ended up viewing his stay as a validation of the travel advisory narrative.
"I knew there was going to be very little going on in terms of activities within the city," says Sparico. "I knew that there was going to be the high unemployment, the safety concerns outside of a very specific area. I went in with the expectation of that, and largely we stayed to our hotel and the office, over to the Renaissance Center for lunch and dinner, and that was generally about it."
Other than running a 5K race on Belle Isle, Sparico worked in the city Monday through Thursday and spared no time for exploration, which may have been part of the problem. He remembers dirty cabs and dirty money and, most of all, vacancies.
"My first impression of Detroit and the downtown area was how many buildings were abandoned and the lack of, really, any small businesses," he notes. "There was an Indian restaurant near the Hard Rock [Cafe] that had closed due to economic conditions, and those were things you weren't really seeing at all in [Washington] D.C.. D.C. was doing very well, still."
Visitors root for revival
To be sure, Detroit still battles closings and lawlessness, but media reports that trumpet acts like pushing trucks out of left-for-dead buildings are finally digging deeper and getting more constructive. National news and radio stories of late award the badge of courage to new storefronts that fill vacancies and appeal to gadabouts – try creperies and a book boutique, as The New York Times noticed recently.
And Generations X and Y have a forgive-and-forget mindset.
"When we re-branded Detroit [the D brand], this area was of the greatest appeal to 21-to-34 year-olds who felt that we were an edgy, upscale, adult destination for music and gaming," Monforton explains. The D brand has really taken off, she adds. "Art and culture, gaming, music, and sports – those are the [things] that came out of all of our surveying as being the five attributes that brought people to Metro Detroit."
One such fan landed from Brooklyn, New York. Erin Barnes came last November for a reunion with friends and immediately felt at home when she spotted McClure's Pickles (the gourmet pickle and relish maker based in Metro Detroit and Brooklyn) for sale at Pure Detroit, the clothing and craft gift shop with locations in the gilded Guardian Building and other downtown landmarks.
Barnes, 29, founder of environmental micro-philanthropy website ioby.org, cites Detroit's energy and walkability as reasons for naming it her second-favorite city after Brooklyn. And she sure walked the talk during her four-day trip. Her jaunts about town would plot out to a modern art scrawl on an Etch-A-Sketch.
Starting point: Downtown Welcome Center, home of Inside Detroit city tours. "Downtown Detroit has some of the most beautiful architecture I have ever seen," Barnes raves. "It reminds me of New York, like one building will be built in the 1940s, the one right next to it is built in the 1980s, and each has this unique style of architecture. Everything looks so carefully crafted."
If city wanderers have time for nothing else, the Motown Historical Museum, aka Hitsville, USA, is a must-see. "That's a huge treasure! That should be [appreciated] the same way that people visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or the way that people fly out to Hollywood to go see that history."
Then it was north to Hamtramck – or "Little Poland", as Barnes tags it – for a tour-de-lunch of sauerkraut, dill pickle soup, and a "delicious" tub of lard at Polonia Restaurant, featured last year on Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations show.
Ferndale's downtown strips and Royal Oak's farmers market and organic vegetarian eateries also got their due. "I really like the post-industrial style of Royal Oak and the way that there are little cafés on the train tracks. That's the kind of thing that I think made towns like Charlottesville, Virginia really popular a long time ago."
Barnes feels the region needs to move away from cars and really ride its Rails to Trails efforts. "One of the hugest events in New York last year was the opening of the High Line, which is an old [elevated] rail line that they were just going to demolish, and they turned it into a pedestrian walkway in Chelsea and it's just changed the entire neighborhood in Chelsea. … I think it's pretty cool and it's exciting to see that stuff like that is coming into Detroit too. The Rails to Trails movement is another one of those really cool ways that urban centers in the United States are changing."
Rail history shows at the Grand Trunk Pub (formerly Foran's) – the end of the trail for the Inside Detroit group. Outside of Bavaria, she'd never taken a tour that included a pub stop. "It just seemed like the place was bursting with energy," she says of the Saturday afternoon scene. "There was a group of people who had just been out earlier that day planting trees for a local environmental project and they all had dirt on their pant knees and they were having beers and excited about having done volunteer work. The bartender was amazing and he let us try all the different Michigan beers. It was just like a really, really warm and friendly bar. I don't think that's what people normally think of Detroit but I kind of had a feeling that Detroit was filled with awesome places like that all along."
Molly Martin, a 32-year-old program staffer at the Lumina Foundation in Indianapolis, feels similarly. She was in Detroit for the first time last July to attend a three-day philanthropy conference at Wayne State University.
"You hear people make jokes, that [Detroit] looks like some sort of post-apocalyptic place, like you're in Blade Runner. Of course, I didn't believe that!" she hastens to say. "I remember sitting in the airport that morning getting ready to fly out and putting on Twitter that I was headed to Detroit, and a couple people instantly said, 'I'm so sorry,' but five or six people immediately logged on and said, 'It's a great city, it gets a bad rap.' "
While Detroit seemed less bustling to her than cities of a similar size, she was impressed with the enthusiasm and interest of locals who learned of their visit.
Martin saw plenty of local action during a renewal-themed bus tour organized by the conference. "It was really moving," she relates. "Obviously Detroit has seen some hard times, but the spirit of everyone to recapture not former glory, but a new glory, really inspired me. That was exciting."
The tone at COMPAS, a center for music and art in southwest Detroit, "was phenomenal. There were students doing flamenco dancing, there were students break dancing, who were learning mariachi… Everyone in my group – another person was from Indiana, people were from Seattle, L.A., all over the country – everyone cited that as a highlight, seeing that center."
Just one coulda-shoulda was missing from the bus itinerary – passing through Dearborn without sampling any of its Middle Eastern restaurants. She certainly heard about it later. "What I kept hearing the entire time I was there, when I got back, from people at other conferences was 'Oooh, did you get to Dearborn to eat, because the food is so good!'" Next time.
Encouragingly, Martin also noticed the city's walkability and artistic ambitions.
"I thought that Detroit, between the Ferry Street Inn and Wayne State, and the [Detroit Institute of Arts] is a surprisingly walkable city for being so large and I really liked that," she explains. "It looks like between the art institute and the murals we saw in the neighborhood that it's a very public art-centered city, which I like."
Thoughts, anyone?
So in the sense of Auguste Rodin's The Thinker (that hefty bronze man perched outside the DIA), how do guests think the region can conjure more curb appeal?
Strengthen Wayne State University's presence in community programming and the arts, Martin says. It follows, of course, that its graduates should stay in the area. Meanwhile, Barnes feels the city is doing the right things but needs to really move the message out to the rest of the country, lest recent grads will keep migrating to east and west coast cities. "I think Detroit's just gotta like put down the mark and call them out, bring them over there."
And the reality is that film productions are a metropolitan magnet. "Embrace the movie industry," Sparico advises. "You've got an industry that is looking for locations to film movies at low cost. I know that there were some problems and thoughts on the tax credits and things like that, but if you can pull a vibrant industry into Detroit, especially something that has the glamour of Hollywood, I thought that was a great idea and something that should be pursued."
As Metro Detroit continues to work its screen presence, Barnes leaves with a nice parting shot: "I'll be back next year. Don't worry."
Tanya Muzumdar is Metromode's Assistant Editor. She doesn't
scare easy. She is also a freelance writer. Her previous article was Ghastly Plots In Metro Detroit.All Photographs © Marvin Shaouni PhotographyContact Marvin herePhotos:
Cruising Woodward Ave.
Downtown Detroit
Visitors finding their way through Downtown Detroit
Pure Detroit
Polish Village restaurant is better than Polonia restaurant, hands down!
Grand Trunk Pub - Detroit
Middle Eastern fare
No other than the "D"
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