A neighborhood dies a second death 10 years after Occupy Detroit.
By Margo B and By ANDREW FEDOROV(smartset.com) and featuring Gus Burns | fburns@mlive.com FBurns wrote original aricle at end which brings to full circle this article and update)ALL Contributing writers represented here in thier entirety so this 7 year journey unfolds correctly
It was my old neighborhood. I grew up in Conant Gardens /Grixdale ...collectively lets call it the NorthTown neighborhood.
However in 2015 , after living in NYC during Occupy Wall Street, I return to Detroit. I learn that Grixdale has the rep of being most destroyed eastside neighborhood...Trashed. Burnt... all those wooden brick porched houses- all those 4 squares.(You Tube videos by charlie313bo )
Toast. Were they too big to maintain? I have a theory. The houses were purchased by successive groups of people who were ultimately not interested in being neighbors.
Conant Gardens once Irish , then black. Later in the century more oversea immigrations. Slowly the Grixdale zipcodes are predominately settled by various middle eastern occupants with entrepreneurial spirit or better auto industry jobs...So far so good. Until it was not. Drugs and rival gangs of thugs You can not blame people for moving. Did drugs force people to vacate? In any case they did a study on how to bring NORTHTOWN back
https://taubmancollege.umich.edu/sites/default/files/files/mup/
capstones/NorthTown-2015-Final.pdf
In the end,the insurance polices made it lucrative. The policies that covered the houses were part of the purchase price... Therefore the money was retrievable even if the house was no longer valuable...Of course retrieving money through arson is illegal , but it worked. That is my theory: NOT saying who did it. Not saying anything... letting the podcasters talk. https://anchor.fm/cedgpodcast/episodes/Chaldean-Mafia-True-Crime-Story-em9uoe or scroll down to see more on Grixdale here https://www.downtownpublications.com/single-post/2018/04/24/organized-crime-then-and-now-in-metro-area CLICK ON MAP TO ENLARGE
More on Grixdale here :http://motorcitymuckraker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Screen-Shot-2014-06-05-at-8.04.01-PM.png
Huh?? Maybe there needs to be an explanation on this one. If your church or job formed a corporation and brought up houses and then was able to resell it to you with the mortgage covered-- that would quickly settle an area. That is how they did it in the old country. The money you paid into the corporation was invested so it grew. The investments were made. The investments were raffled off. Its your turn You got a house and there is no loan or interest to worry about...
in this instance shareholders got a property under this system : all you had to do was maintain what you got.
The occupier would not feel tied to the property and could move on easier- let the corporation resell it.
If the corporation could not sell it, they could claim the insurance money.
The image below links to a slideshow
Typical burned out 4 square built in the mid 1920s .
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/eerie-images-of-detroits-most-abandoned-neighborhood/ss-BB1cbqO7?fullscreen=true
How to explain the worst damage? Maybe you do not. Maybe you try to fix it .
The following two stories, 10 years after Occupy
explains how others tried to fix Grixdale. Pay attention.
Its a tale: It will take @42 minutes to read...
BY ANDREW
FEDOROV
03/19/2018 originally written for WWW.THESMARTSET.COM
PHOTO BY Photo
of oil drum moving courtesy of the author Andrew Federov. Other photos are screenshots of Google Maps All
artwork created by Emily
Anderson. BOLDFACED items are updates in 2021and open into a picture (example : addresses of locations in boldface ) courtesy of this blog (2021)
In
late January of 2015, a tree stood wavering on the edge of Detroit’sburnt-out Grixdale neighborhood. A loud, old engine revved. A
100-foot rope tightened. A car strained forward. The tree followed,
snapping and dropping into the overgrown yard of an abandoned house.
A group of bearded men looked on from the front yard of a
fire-ravaged structure across the street. Satisfaction and relief
filled them as the final rays of sunlight scattered into the gray
horizon. They had lost two ropes and a chainsaw in bringing down the
tree, but they comforted themselves with the thought that the
abandoned house and the surrounding telephone lines stood
unharmed.
They
were pretty far from Detroit’s refurbished downtown. Years ago,
this neighborhood had succumbed to the rot brought on by the crack
wars. Inhabitants fled, homes were torched, and the long blocks, once
designed for cars, were left sparsely populated. In 2015, it
remained largely abandoned. Sometimes, there were residual
flare-ups of violence and theft. Some ways down the road, there
remained a crack house. In this quiet, largely forgotten place,
however, adjacent to the vistas of empty lots, under the canopy of
old-growth trees, there was a new community growing. They lived
amongst the neglected red brick houses and chose
to call themselves Fireweed, after the pioneer plant species that
takes over the landscape after a forest fire.
These
men were specimens of that community. They and other Fireweed
residents rejected the traditional sources of basic amenities. For
light, some installed solar panels and some illegally hooked into the
city’s electricity in horrifyingly jury-rigged ways. The rest
scavenged for candles. At night, they stumbled around with
battery-powered headlamps. A few houses ran water, illegally, from
the city system. The rest lugged their water in plastic jugs from
those houses. The only house that was both associated with Fireweed
and fully wired into the grid was that of a chiropractor, Doctor
Bob Pizzimenti, a self-described “recluse” in the community who
claimed to enjoy watching its developments from afar. All but Doctor
Bob’s house were heated with wood stoves.
At
the site of the fallen tree, William Phillips ran up through the new
darkness and began pulling at the massive knot around the trunk.
Chris Albaugh began gathering the tools. Multiple SUVs, bumping up
and down under the influence of their blasting hip-hop, slowed a full
minute longer than usual at the intersection to stare at the
white men running around with axes. Hunter Muckel jumped out of the
little red Toyota and slipped the other end of the rope off of the
car. He walked over to William, grinning. After a few minutes, they
got the rope off the tree. “It’s like a Chinese finger trap,”
Hunter said as the rope slithered off the trunk.
They
could give Charlie Beaver his rope back, though not his chainsaw, and
the whole community would have firewood. The first urban
lumberjacking mission by Fireweed’s engineering committee had
been something of a success. But what kind of success was this? Why
did they choose to live in this way, in this weird, wild land,
between prosperous zones that burned without responders? Why did they
spend their days chopping trees for janky, jury-rigged wood
stoves, rather than buying into electricity and central heating? Why
did they choose to live on the edge of desolation?
•
I’d
been here once before. On the cusp of the previous fall, I’d
hitchhiked out from Ohio. The stories I’d heard lured me back;
stories of train hoppers and men walking across savage America
without any destination in mind. There had been one vagabond veteran
who’d returned from the war without a plan, without a home, who’d
wandered the midwest on foot, sleeping in fields and barns, and
draining the long-forgotten booze stashes of forsaken rust-belt
hotels. When I came back, I found that these characters were just
the superficial ephemera of Fireweed. They’d flittered away as
the cold Detroit winter descended and the easy pleasures of summer
evaporated, but the core that remained was much more committed,
passionate, and confusing.
illustration created by Emily Anderson.
Fireweed
was not ideally set up for winter on Lake Huron.(too close to Canada) Even in the
summer, the smell of burning wood — the smell of coals and
scorched, carbonized earth beneath the bonfires that served as
gathering places — had permeated the neighborhood. In the winter,
whatever house you walked into, your nose and lungs were assailed by
the trapped smoke of the wood stoves. I’d noticed this as soon as I
got there. It was hard to miss.
I’d
gotten off the greyhound not long after New Year’s day, caught a
city bus from downtown to Golden Gate, Fireweed’s main street, and
pretty quickly made my way up to the living room of
169 West Golden Gate, the only building legally owned, at the time, by
Fireweed.
(See Green house below)
4 square style WHITE HOUSE/Occupy House (MURALS) 149
w goldengate details on regrid.com
WAS HOME TO ZACK
(NEXT ARTICLE)
The dark green
house (aka bottle house ) at 169 west golden gate is on regrid.com
Parcel ID 01006360
|
169 W GOLDEN GATE owned by Fireweed in 2015 |
taxes in arrears in 2021
|
|
|
Bottle House description :
There were blankets on the walls and a wood stove took up much of the
space. It was a big steel barrel turned on its side and mounted on
bricks, with a door on the front, a few logs inside, and tubing
running up through a hole in the window, carrying smoke from the room
and into the atmosphere. Sitting there, I reacquainted myself
with three people. They reminded me that there was something other
than outlandish stories which had brought me back: I was thrilled by
the virility of experimental lives.
I’d
stayed with Sara last time. She had widely spaced eyes and wavy brown
hair, and she’d come here after finishing a marketing degree. Her
homestead was Slide House (160 west golden gate)
across the street. A former goat house and bike shop under Dr
Bob) , it was the least conventional looking home on Golden Gate, with
its boxy shape, flat, leaking roof, fully graffitied exterior,
and a twisting, yellow slide, salvaged from a playground, attached to
the front.
Slide
House August 2015 (160
w golden gate)
pay no attention to google addresses shown in maps Using regrid .com to verify
Google Maps Screenshot @2015
Slide
House in 2019 Google maps screenshot
160 w golden gate
Sara
would
light a few candles inside to illuminate brown corduroy couches with
cats lounging on them. In the center of the house was another
wood stove.
I’d
met Shane standing around a fire. He was an impressive figure: tall,
lanky, blond, with a big curly beard and, often, an axe in his hand.
He’d been there, not exactly from the start, but pretty close. I
learned some of Fireweed’s history sitting in that dark, smoky room
with him. There’d
been a few people squatting on the street as early as 2009 and
rumors, as rumors do, had spread. Mars
Noumena bicycled 2,000 miles from California to join what he thought
was a much more developed community. Not long after, when the winter
of 2011 set, Mars invited Occupy Detroit to move from Grand
Circus Park to Fireweed. They took over the white house on the
street,(149 w Golden Gate) which became known as the Occupy
House (later the White House -with occupants again ).
It was used as a neutral space, not permanently occupied by anyone.
The Occupiers built a library, a free store, a dishwashing station, a
kitchen, and a shower area open to the community.
But
it couldn’t last. “It’s very difficult to have a fully livable
home that no one lives in,” Shane said. “With all the demand for
living spaces, it’s very hard to keep that locked up.” By the
time I got there, Occupy House had been occupied for years by Mary,
who kept her gray hair in dreadlocks and ran a shifty business
from her living room. She lived with her daughter, a group of mostly
local young men known as “the block boys,” and a pack of dogs.
Mary and Charlie Beaver, the scruffy, quarrelsome, stubborn, kind,
and idealistic gentleman whose chainsaw had jammed mid-tree,
constituted Fireweed’s older contingent.
Shane
never saw the Occupy era of Fireweed. Not long after those occupiers
moved on, his life changed. His job as a manager in the Hilton I.T.
department was outsourced and he used his severance bonus to go
traveling. Six months into his time bumping around the country,
meeting people and visiting friends, he met Zack,
a Fireweed resident,
at a Philadelphia bus terminal. He spontaneously changed his ticket
to a Detroit-bound one-way. When he got there, he moved into
intentional
house 159 west robinwood
and he’d lived in the same room ever since. At the start, he had a
roommate named Coconut, who ran a weekly writers workshop in what’s
now the toolroom and expected people to go barefoot despite the
abundance of “Detroit diamonds”: the glass shards which
litter the streets.
“There
were drunken brawls, multiple times a day sometimes, out in the
middle of the street, people dragging shotguns and yelling up and
down, like, literally absolutely crazy,” Shane recalled of those
early Goldengate days, “people getting shot, people getting stabbed
constantly, over and over and over again.
(Shane describing the area as the Grixdale Neighborhood
would be more accurate. The whole area not just West or
East Golden Gate was affected by crime.) "
"It was ridiculous. It
amazes me that people like Coconut were alone in their little zen
space not allowing any of it to hit them.” The final stroke for
Coconut was the theft of his bicycle. He left. Shane stayed.
Most
days, Shane went out to chop trees and cut rounds. If ever while
walking around looking for suitable trees he saw anyone, he’d wave
and ask how they were doing. If they offered to help, he’d say
maybe they could carry wood later. He seemed to enjoy the solitude of
his work
Hunter
Muckel, on the other hand, was a recent arrival. When he’d moved
in, in early August, Detroit had been flooding. Of all the people who
lived in the community, he’d taken the least-likely path to end up
here. A few years before, when he’d enrolled at the University
of Indiana, Bloomington, he’d thought he’d be a business
major. Clearly, he wasn’t an anarchist at that point. “I wasn’t
a Republican anymore, but I was a Libertarian. I considered myself a
Libertarian,” he said. “Then Occupy happened. I went down there
and, being the good fiscal conservative that I am, I saw them
handing out Coca-Cola hats and was like ‘you guys are handing out
corporate sponsorship and you’re talking about not liking
corporations!’
“They
said ‘Hey! Stop yelling at us from the sidewalk and come over here
and talk.’ We started talking, and I realized that the Occupy
movement really did align with my fiscal conservatism.
illustration created by Emily Anderson.
“From
then on I was like, you know what? I’m going to start showing up
here every day. My first thought was this really egotistical thought.
Because I liked the conservative part of the Occupy movement. I
wanted to influence Occupy Bloomington in a way that wasn’t
radical. I didn’t want them to be radical. I wanted them to be
fiscally conservative.”
It
didn’t quite work out that way. “The Occupy movement opened my
eyes to this totally other way of living,” he told me, his eyes
alive with remembered passion. “I started seeking out new ways to
look at the world. I stopped smoking pot for Occupy, man. I was
serious about that. I didn’t feel the need for it. I was tripping
the whole time. I was tripping on Occupy. I learned about intentional
communities there. It was incredible. To some extent, I always knew
that we were fighting a failing battle and that we were going to get
shut down eventually, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to show as
many people in the limited amount of time that we had what my eyes
had been opened to.”
He
began to come down from his trip when general assemblies began
to crumble into a few people giving routine speeches. He split off to
join the “getting shit done committee.” Its members did what they
thought could help without necessarily talking about it. He began
to reassert his family’s blue-collar roots and rediscovered a
consciousness in action. Rather than the airy sense of accomplishment
provided by expounding theory, he demanded thoughtfulness in every
act and about the hard facts involved in fulfilling needs.
He
graduated with loans weighing on him. He wanted to play music, to
visit Armenia and Palestine. He thirsted for adventure, but his
father’s invocation of financial responsibility hung over him. A
debt, he thought, was a claim on his freedom: it would allow others
to enlist his time until he had rid himself of it. So he scrounged up
work in Detroit. “I rode in with my motorcycle the day before
I had to start my AmeriCorps job.” But Hunter missed the high of
Occupy. He missed that sense of discovery and the sense that what he
was doing mattered. He started asking around about intentional
communities in Detroit. When he found Fireweed, he started spending
most of his free time there. Then he moved in.
•
Eventually,
I asked where I could sleep. Sara pointed me to Intentional
House(159 w robinwood ) , behind Slide House (160 w golden gate ) ONLY one street over on
Robinwood.
It was stewarded by a strange man who went by Irie. He didn’t live
there anymore, though. He lived in the Universe
Building, a massive warehouse with heat, running water, and
electricity a few blocks away, which Fireweed sometimes used as a
meeting space. He’d
picked up his name while living with Rastafarians in Kalamazoo.
Before
this part of Detroit had been abandoned, Intentional House must have
been a split two-family home. Irie had decorated it with his
collection of quaint and offbeat antique furniture. It looked like
part of a ’50s nuclear test suburb. The one operable wood stove sat
in a room on the first floor with very high ceilings and an
entrance shielded by blankets to trap the heat. Whatever you did,
though, whatever you tried, in winter, Intentional House was at least
chilly. But you turn numb to the cold.
I
had two housemates: Chris Albaugh and William Phillips. We slept in
the little room with the high ceiling and the stove. Chris slept on a
cot to the side of the stove, William on a couch, in the coldest part
of the room, against the back wall, and I in the middle in a pile
of blankets. In the dark of the room, we talked while lying
down. I told them about myself, though there wasn’t much to tell.
They told me about themselves, and there was plenty.
Chris
had told himself that he wouldn’t be an adult until he could grow
his own food. When Occupy Eugene happened, he dropped out of a lot of
his classes at the University of Oregon, stopped paying rent on his
house, and moved to the encampment. He went on to visit other Occupy
encampments and walked with Walkupy, a traveling cross-country
encampment, for two weeks. Occupy left him disillusioned with the
idea of protest and revolution in a classical sense. Now, he
wanted to work toward revolution one step at a time, acting on a
personal level. He wanted to build an alternative society so when the
old one collapses, people will have somewhere to turn. He’d moved
to Fireweed on Christmas Eve, about a week before I got there, with
hopes of working on an urban farm.
He
was an intellectual, a dreamer. He’d spout off Walden quotes and
makes small talk about anarchist theorists. “My food security is a
radical method to liberate myself from my current paradigm,” he
said, “but, to an outsider, I’m just growing food, I’m feeding
people. Farming is kinda
radical but it’s not really that crazy. Maybe it’s in a slightly
radical environment, but still, I’m just growing food.”
William
looked like Doctor Watson would look after a couple months living in
the woods. You could still hear his North Carolina accent. He’d
joined the Navy on the heels of 9/11. “They lie to you all through
the recruiting process,” he said, so he got out as soon as he
could. In 2009, he got involved with Iraq Veterans Against the War.
He began thinking and decided that “government is one of the root
causes of war and one of the best ways to fight it isn’t so much to
fight it but to drop out of it and quit feeding it.” The previous
May, he’d found Fireweed on a Libertarian website and had come out
to Detroit.
In
his life, he tried to avoid assumptions. Sometimes this took a toll
on his capacity for optimism. He found the hippie aspects of the
community off putting and unproductive. “Will expects there to be
social norms, to some extent,” Hunter told me later, “he expects
you to not be fucking nuts, which sometimes doesn’t happen around
here.” He tried to not let this stop him from helping. With a shy
smile, he told me, “I never really tried to spearhead a project,
but if they need help with something, they know where to find me.”
Then he chuckled.
The
fire went out sometime in the night. In the morning, we woke up
freezing
The
next night, we had trouble getting the fire started again. Once we
did, Chris defrosted his feet in the stove. We had some pasta with
canned tomato sauce and got into our sleeping arrangements. That
night, in the dark, we told jokes.
“Why
isn’t there a hunting season on hippies?”
“You
ever try to clean one of those things?”
“How
do you know if a hippie slept on your couch?”
“He’s
still there.”
“What’s
the difference between a girls’ track team and a band of pygmies?”
“One
is a group of cunning runts.”
The
next morning it was still fucking cold.
A
few nights went by like this. William began to develop an intense
cough and Chris found a completely frozen lemon.
photo by ANDREW FEDOROV
We got lucky, not
long after that, when Hunter offered us the opportunity to move into
Bottle House.
The
presiding spirit of the Bottle House
was Cookie, a sprite-like local who decorated the house with
astounding art which revealed itself if a lucky eye caught it in the
right flash of sunlight. At one point, Hunter had moved in too.
Bottle
House (169 w golden gate)
was the only building on West
Golden
Gate
that could rival Slide House (160 w golden
gate
)
in its inspiring visual oddity. It
was known for its friendly orange-and-green paint job and the many
colored bottles encased in cob that served as stained glass windows are
still there (169 W Golden Gate )
Its shelves held Edward Lear’s collected nonsense, assorted
classics, a Thomas Edison biography, practical engineering
books, and a collection of Zane Grey’s novels in matching red
hardbacks with titles like Wilderness
Trek, Western
Union, 30,000
on the Hoof,
and Majesty
Rancho.
That
winter, Cookie left Hunter alone in the house. “She comes and goes,
especially in the wintertime,” he said; “She has a million places
to stay that are much warmer.” Not to say that the Bottle House
wasn’t relatively warm. Hunter’s dad had brought him plenty of
wood, which he kept in the basement, and the stove distributed heat
well. “I feel the need, as a new person,” Hunter said later, “to
welcome other new people.” One morning, he unlocked the door and
left for work. Chris and I piled a wheelbarrow with blankets,
pillows, Chris’s cot, my backpack, and some food. It took a few
trips through the snow to get everything from house to house. I
stuffed my coat pockets full of tea bags.
That
night, no smoke rose from the roof of Intentional House.(159 w
robinwood)
Chris
and I enjoyed the warmth of Bottle
House ( 169 w golden
gate)
and William spent the night at the Universe building. At dusk,
Intentional House (159 w robinwood) was broken into, rummaged through, and robbed.
Chris and I noticed the next day that the back door had been kicked
in. Without venturing a look inside, filled with fear that whatever
had entered hadn’t left, we walked over to the Universe Building to
tell Irie.
“I’ve
dreamed so long and now I’m being crushed by my dreams,” Chris
moped as we walked. Up ’til then, I’d thought that idealism might
have kept people going in this climate, under these conditions. The
stakes and the risks hadn’t seemed so stark. You might get cold and
you might be hungry, and maybe you’d even get sick, but you’d
probably be alright by the time summer came around. That night,
however, as far as we knew, Chris might have lost his laptop, his
bike, and much besides. In that moment, at least, he’d lost his
sense of security. Idealism had to be part of what brought him
here, but it couldn’t be what kept him and the rest of the
community, which routinely suffered these sorts of setbacks, from
leaving.
When
we told Irie about the break-in, he told us that his phone had been
buzzing with texts the previous night and early in the morning from
someone who’d said he’d wanted to stay at Fireweed. He figured
that the texts had to come from the person who’d broken into
Intentional House. He wanted to report it to the police, until he
remembered that, for reasons he wouldn’t make clear, he couldn’t
make a police report. William, Chris, and I refused to make the
report. It probably wouldn’t have made a huge difference. People at
Fireweed estimate that, on average, it takes the police about five
hours to respond.
Irie
took on the role of detective, trying to reason his way through the
crime on the way to its scene. William, naturally enough, joined in
as his Watson. I trailed along. The house was a manic mess. There
were two pairs of footprints outside, the furniture and any unsecured
objects were scattered, drawers hung halfway out of every wardrobe.
Chris’s laptop, Irie’s chainsaw, and a bicycle were gone. Irie
stalked about, trying to figure out what happened and who could have
done it. He went through each room tossing out theories with abandon.
At one point he accused William, though he himself could act as
William’s alibi. So William gathered his clothes and welding mask
and moved to Bottle House (169 w golden gate).
Irie
called the person who’d texted him and found himself on receiving
end of a two-hour diatribe. The man on the other end of the line
traced his descent from Atlanteans and explained that he was a
reincarnation of William Wallace and Nikola Tesla. Irie
intermittently interjected “uh-huh” while shaking his head
in disapproval and maintaining a dazed, confused, and eerie smile.
Mars and Shane figured the culprits were probably crackheads from
down the street. Irie remained irate and, ultimately, unsatisfied.
One learned to live with mysteries and loss.
•
According
to legend, the first squatter at Fireweed was Hippie Mike. It’s
likely there are no other Hippie Mikes in the multiverse and, almost
certainly, there is no other place where Hippie Mike could be Hippie
Mike. Mike is unmistakable. He seems like the sort of person
that could only exist through a single chain of events. His
birth, however, was a regular one. It took place in Waterford, about
40 miles from Golden Gate street. When he turned 18, his mom kicked him out
and he discovered the country, hitchhiking. In that time, he worked
as a short-order cook in four different Waffle Houses across America.
His favorite was in Arizona and, in quiet moments, he dreamed of
returning to the beautiful, arid state.
About
seven years before I got there, a girl brought Mike to a drum circle
at Doctor Bob’s. He took a wander around the neighborhood and
decided that he’d found his spot. Where others saw risk and decay,
Mike saw free housing. In the wake of his monumental vision, a
community was born.
Mike
was the first person to show up to the weekly community meeting and
potluck at the Universe Building. His monk-pattern balding scalp was
bobbing and his scraggly beard spread out to conform with his smile.
He talked, with his characteristic mumble-slurring, about his
favorite subject, “cannabis caregivers and patient providers.”
His dream was to become a certified “cannabis caregiver” and to
grow his own weed, but this was foiled by his constant lack of
capital. Eventually, the rest of the community arrived and the
meeting started.
Fireweed
theoretically functions on a consensus structure, similar to Occupy,
in which the community discusses an issue or a proposal until all or
nearly all of the members come to an agreement on it. In actual
practice, people announce and explain their intentions and projects
at the weekly meetings and in regular conversation and whoever
supports them consents to help.
Mars
led the meeting, as usual, though he no longer lived at Fireweed. He
ran a pedicab company in downtown Detroit and he’d moved to be
closer to his work. He’d started shopping at Whole Foods but still
carried a large knife on his belt. Sara took notes, as usual, and
William was unusually empowered to speak by taking stock,
keeping track of the order in which people wished to contribute.
Hunter and Chris were as loud and talkative as usual. There were
others who talked. I kept quiet, mostly. Charlie Beaver was high,
instead of plastered, and unusually placid. The
only flare-up was the revelation that Doctor Bob owned Slide
House(160
w golden gate)
and
was considering turning it back into a goat house.
Sara snapped “how many of you have actually raised goats before?” About a quarter of the hands went up.
2021 UPDATE
Dr
Bob no longer owns Slide House. He owned 12 properties, CREATING HIS OWN MINI NEIGHBORHOOD
The golden gate/ robinwood situated properties ARE almost back to back and mostly connected. One could walk next door to borrow a cup of sugar.
Current Dr Bob holdings in Grixdale 2021 are 11 ... not counting the business Pyschedelic Healing Shack (formerly the
Innate Healing Arts Center)
https://www.metrotimes.com/table-and-bar/archives/2007/05/30/wellness-on-woodward
---slide
house at 160 w golden
gate
has lost its slide but
is even cuter now (but Dr
.Bob
sold it )
The
people who lived in it and ran it as a bike store at least managed to
be kind to the next generation –" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/GoldengateRestorationProject/videos/427577157265356 the kids
. See video here:https://youtu.be/VdIewb5afnY
The
following were
Fireweed Squats. Dr. Bob was quite generous and let the fire weeders both pre and post Occupy,
live rent free in
about half of his landbank properties:
167
w
robinwood
Burned
Out
/
159
w
robinwood
Burned
Out
Intentional
house
151
w
robinwood
empty
175
w
robinwood
empty /
181
w robinwood
Burned
Out
150
w golden
gate
Burned
Out
176
w golden
gate
decent shape
168
w
golden
gate
empty lot
/184
w golden
gate
empty lot
200
w golden
gate
empty lot
160 w golden gate (Slide house)
18700 Woodward is psychedelic healing shack
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/michigan/psychedelic-healing-shack-mi/
Fireweed in Action
Afterward,
there was a smaller meeting about how they ran the meetings. This
might sound like the birth of redundant bureaucracy in this fledgling
society, but it brought out something important. Fireweed was
disproportionately male, white, and nonlocal, in a city that is 83
percent African American and, like most cities, has a basically 50-50
gender distribution and a majority local population. So why were the
members of this community different? I suppose it’s to be expected
that an unusual project will attract people from far away. But why
white and male? And, if the members of the community didn’t
reflect the people around them, how could they benefit Detroit, or
even the Golden Gate cluster or larger Grixdale community, as well as themselves?
At
the end of the night, Sara threw out a single soggy White Castle bun,
the remains of Mike’s dumpster-dived contribution to the potluck.
“Hey! Dig that up out of there!” Mike shouted. “I’m a
freegan. I live on that stuff!” The only thing he got consistently
mad about was waste. One time he took a few vegetables out of
Fireweed’s garden and traded them for a beer. When Shane found out,
he sought out Mike, who promptly offered him some. Shane simply
nodded, took the bottle, and turned it upside down.
Winter 2014-2015
Hunter
and Chris didn’t stick around for the drama of Mike’s buns. After
the meeting about meetings, they walked over to an abandoned,
remarkably well-preserved house on Robinwood. It had clung to
all its carpeting, and, instead of the holes left by scavengers
yanking out wiring to sell as scrap copper that decorated many of the
walls in the neighborhood, it had Dora the Explorer stickers and
other remnants of a happy family life. The man who’d started
squatting here not long ago, Moe, had a couple things in common with
this house. He’d seen and lived through the turmoil and changes
that rocked Detroit. His family had lived here for generations. That
winter, unlike the rest of us, he didn’t have an out. Hunter had
supportive parents, Chris had a mother in a warmer climate and
periodically thought out
trying to find money for a bus ticket out there, and William was
thinking about leaving later in the year. Hell, I was going to be
gone at the end of the month. Moe didn’t have an easy exit.
Except for a brief interlude in the military, Detroit was what
he knew and had always known. This place, its challenges, and the
hustle that it took to survive weren’t new to him.
Fireweed
surprised him, though. He’d started stopping by Bottle House after
finishing a temp gig distributing flyers around the city. He’d play
a game of chess with Chris, and most of the time he’d win. One day,
Hunter gave him a lift to the store without asking for anything
in return. “Why’re you doing this?” Moe asked. “If I buy
a pack of cigarettes, I’ll give you a couple cigarettes and
we’ll be good.” “If
you want to give me a cigarette, I’ll take a cigarette,” Hunter
said, “but you don’t have to give me a cigarette.”
“I
don’t get it,” Moe said.
Image by Emily Anderson
“That
comes from living here, man,” Hunter reasoned later on. “That
comes from living in a city where you take, take, take, and there’s
scarcity so bad that you need to take, take, take.” Maybe it wasn’t
his place to say it, but it’s a conclusion that’s hard to miss.
The difference between us and Moe, between people who, at one
point, at least, had a choice about whether they were going to live
here or not and those who didn’t, came out in the way we looked at
the world. But these weren’t insuperable barriers, and the longer
the residents were around each other and the more time they
spent here, the more muddled their views became. Moe was, for the
moment, willing to try Fireweed’s paradigm. Someone had stumbled on
four steel barrels. They’d contained chemicals of some sort at some
point, but, with a little work, they would serve beautifully as wood
stoves. Moe was down to put in a little work if it meant he could be
a little warmer.
The
stove that was to be installed in his house had a new design. It
stood upright rather than horizontal, giving it a flat cooking
surface on top. Shane, after years of living through Detroit winters,
in a cautious, conservative mode, objected to such experimentation
because the alternative to success was allowing a house to freeze, or
burn. Moe was willing to try it. We rolled the four salvaged
barrels down the middle of the snowy streets, kicking them to keep
them going, sometimes leaning in to give them a steering push. In
Charlie Beaver’s backyard, we filled them with wood and paper and
lit fires. At first, the inflamed chemicals rose in a cornucopia of
color towards the sky, then, pure black smoke began to spew out in a
steady geyser until the barrels had been burned clean. Hunter
operated Charlie’s angle grinder to cut holes for the chimneys and
doors. One barrel went to Moe, one to another house in the community,
one was used as material for stove doors, and one was a spare stove.
We
rolled Moe’s barrel over to his place and shoved it up the stairs
to the room in which he planned to sleep. To prop it above the
carpeting, we carried over cinder blocks out of a burnt-out house
down the street. I dropped mine a couple times. I’d never carried
something that heavy that far before. We had to chisel out a hole in
the brick wall of that room to run the chimney tubing out. It would
need a bit of insulation around the tubing. Heat was a negotiation.
After more than a bit of work, it was ready. When Hunter and Chris
walked over that day, after the meetings, they ran the tubing through
the wall, and with Moe they built a fire. When the stove worked,
Moe’s house was warm. When William and I got there a couple hours
later, we threw off our coats. It was almost worryingly warm, but it
worked.
By
this time, the residents of Bottle House, Hunter, Chris, William, and
I, had begun to think of ourselves as an engineering committee. Our
meetings were in nearly constant session. Each day, it would start at
just about ten a.m. over eggs and coffee. By then, Hunter would
have been up for hours, since sunrise. Chris would pop up from
his cot mumbling about some idea he’d had in the night. William
would drowsily rise from his pile of sheets near the hanging blanket
that insulated and isolated the main room of the house. We’d spend
the nights talking under the one electric bulb which was hooked up by
a discrete, overhead wire to a car battery in the attic charged by
the solar panels.
People
who don’t have much electricity tend to talk more. They talk about
how to fix stoves, how to heat water, how to pivot solar panels.
They dream about bike-powered electricity and using magnetic
fields around electrical transformers to get power. Sometimes, they
joke about converting the methane in the city sewer systems to
electricity and buying plots of land on which to farm and in
which to bury secret storage-container homes. Oddly enough,
for people who hardly had enough electricity to consistently
power a lightbulb, much of our talk, when not about these
outlandish engineering projects, was about half-remembered T.V.
shows.
We
talked a lot, but we only got things done sometimes. Next to Shane’s
shining example of individual industriousness, our achievements — a
couple stoves here and there — were nearly nonexistent. Sara was
worried that Shane was overworking himself. Chris idly suggested that
if he asked for help, or even told people where he was working, he’d
get help. Sara suggested he take some initiative. Hunter agreed.
After some deliberation, we decided that the next day, with the help
of Charlie Beaver’s chainsaw and Hunter’s car, we would pull down
a tree.
•
The
morning after the tree fell was a Sunday. It was a peculiarly warm
day. Rather than the seemingly permanent frost and snow, the
residents woke to the sound of rain; instead of balancing on ice,
they sunk into fresh mud. In the greenhouse next to Slide House it
was even warmer than outdoors. It was the first time in a long time
that anyone could be more than a couple feet from a stove wearing a
t-shirt and jeans. The Ohio boys hosted a work day that day in
the greenhouse. They, Nathan and Josh, had joined Fireweed a little
before Hunter had. He saw something of himself in them when he
arrived. In the dynamism of this community, he saw not a blank slate,
but the raw materials needed to build a society that he could
understand, a society for which he could feel responsible: a better
society. He saw a wealth of material and a lack of preconceptions.
The boys saw that too, but their path to Fireweed was radically
different.
Nathan
was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, a town most famous for producing
NASCAR drivers and Johnny Depp’s wish to flee. His parents were
poor, transient, southern Baptist fanatics. “Being openly gay
was not in the cards at all,” he explained. Nonetheless, in an act
of near-futile bravery, he came out in the seventh grade while in a
psychiatric hospital for what his mother said was depression. His
family quickly decided that he should be sent to straight camp. Their
local church gathered the money to send him away within two days. He
spent his days either in solitary confinement or having olive
oil poured on him in a chapel. Most of the time he closed his eyes.
He signed the papers and became a statistic: “a recovered
homosexual.” When I met them, he and Josh had been together for
eight years.
“You’re
tied to this grid and when it goes down you’re gonna be screwed,”
Nathan declared in the greenhouse, his Adam’s apple bobbing in the
wake of the vibrations of his nasal voice and his eyes glaring with
fighting intensity and a hint of fear. Josh offered the smooth and
genuinely friendly smile of someone with a broadcasting degree. Two
years before, they’d quit their opulent lifestyle in Cincinnati,
broke off communications with the majority of their friends, sold
most of their possessions, and bought two cheap acres of land next to
“a cop-infested highway” in Ohio. They moved into a converted
storage container, something akin to the house in Tron, and started
farming.
They’d
heard about Detroit’s fallow land and decided to expand their
farming operation. When they first got here, they moved into the
Bottle House. Not long after, they moved a ways away to an abandoned
mansion on Chandler street, near the headquarters of 7432
Brush St. aka Michigan Urban Farms.
“I sang on the weekends,” Josh said with a pained squint to his
eyes, “At the same time as I was advertising for my first show in
Detroit, someone broke in and stole all of our music stuff.” I
asked if they’d ever got it back. Nathan laughed a little. He used
to drag race and had a fondness for risk and trouble.
Now
they were living on Robinwood and were part of the community again.
On this day, the community came together, just like in the summer. We
dug a trench along the bottom of the greenhouse, which the boys would
go on to fill with water. When we were done, William and I walked
over to Doctor Bob’s cafe with the Ohio Boys. They were helping
Doctor Bob out over there, and he let them feed us some soup. When we
finished up, William and I walked over to the site of the felled
tree, where Hunter and Chris were bringing axes down into rounds of
wood.
Image by Emily Anderson.
“Burning
wood is not a sustainable solution,” Hunter said between swings.
There weren’t enough axes now, so he and Chris traded off, as
William and I ran back and forth depositing armfuls of wood in a
light blue trailer, fabricated by Hunter’s dad, attached to
Hunter’s car. “With the number of people we have, we can burn
wood and be fine, but you can’t have everyone everywhere do it. It
wouldn’t work.”
When
the wood was piled high on
the trailer, Hunter slowly and carefully backed the car down the
one-way street and, just as slowly, drove back to Goldengate. We left
it in stacks in front of Slide House. There was enough for everyone
to stay warm for a long while.
•
A
few days later, the engineering committee invited the community over
to Bottle House for pasta with homemade alfredo sauce. Chris and I
had walked past the city border the night before to a supermarket in
one of the suburbs to buy the fancy cheese for the sauce. Brian, who
was then living in Slide House, came over first and strummed his
guitar and spoke of the sorrows of a jailbird nomad with a pregnant
girlfriend. Brian brought his dog, Jaeger, who he’d had since
puphood. Jaeger looked like the Hound of the Baskervilles, a big
black dog with massive jowls, but had the personality of a friendly,
drunken socialite. He’d followed Brian through the crowded
streets of New Orleans’s French Quarter and countless
cities through years of rambling, without a leash. Once, Jaeger
bit a cop who’d threatened Brian,
and Brian wrapped himself around Jaeger. In his South
Carolina-Colorado accent, Brian had begged, “don’t shoot my
dog.” He still slept wrapped around Jaeger.
Chris
cut off the bottom of a Faygo bottle to make a bowl. He joked that
the other half could be used for a gravity bong. Hippie Mike
soon wandered in. Sara and Shane eventually joined us. They
crowded into the small room. Most found decent seating. Hippie Mike
sprawled out on the floor next to the stove, his legs splayed in
either direction. The conversation soon turned to the questions
that had been on my mind since I’d got here. Why were they here?
Why did they stay?
“I
hitchhiked around the country for years because I didn’t want to
put into their system,” Brian said. “That was the smallest
carbon footprint I could think of.” He wondered if an urban farming
project and a set base was really the solution. He wondered whether
they would achieve anything substantial here. “We need to wake
up one day and see a collapsed system,” he said. Sara
admonished him for his pessimism. Brian explained that he was worried
about the society his child would be born into. He wanted to
show his kid a different way of life. He wanted her life to be
devoted to living, rather than to mindless, grinding labor for
somebody else’s cause.
“I
get it,” Chris said. “I get the pessimism. I understand my
reality but I know if I stare too long into that darkness I
won’t survive. I don’t give a shit what the truth is, but I
believe what helps me get out of bed in the morning. I can only
live with the hope that things will get better.” He was just
ramping up. “Just because they tell you that you have to go to
college and then get a job and work 30 years and then find a
wife and a white picket fence and then retire doesn’t mean
that that’s what you have to do. You have the freedom to live the
life that you really want to live, even if the system’s
opposed to it.”
“We
need to go out there and do it, and we need to get people to come
with us. That’s what’s important,” Sara said.
“You
can’t isolate,” Chris said, nodding. “You have to live in both
worlds at the same time. If you isolate yourself, you can’t
connect to the base you’re trying to educate. There’s a spectrum
of non-cooperation, right? There’s extreme noncooperation to the
point of like, you know, violence against the system. Whether
it’s mutually beneficial or whatever, we choose to cooperate
with the system by not shooting people, right? So there is a balance.
There has to be a balance. You have to change the system from
beside the system. Not within it and not outside of it, but
beside it. You’re creating the life, the reality, the community,
and the resources that you feel you need. That’s the only
change you can make, right? You can’t change the world, but you can
change yourself, you can change the people around you. Well, they can
change themselves, but you can lead them.” Chris liked to make
speeches; sometimes they were worth listening to. “It’s not
about the end solution,” he went on, heading toward a conclusion.
“It’s not about what form of government we’re going to
have. It’s about communities of people creating social
structures that are healthy, sustainable, positive, and beneficial to
them and their localized environment.”
Suddenly,
a sound shook the hanging blankets. The door opened with the force of
a windy winter night. A blanket lifted, and Tommy Spaghetti
entered the room. His smile was framed by white stubble, a black
mustache, dark gray sideburns, and playful black eyebrows. His hoodie,
splattered with many-colored paints, sat atop a blue bandana. The
American flag was stretched across the back of his black jacket
and his sleeves proclaimed in big blue letters, “USA.” The
tidiest parts about him were his plain brown corduroy trousers.
Tommy
used to sit on the roof of 169 w golden
gate
(Bottle
House) , playing his saxophone as a chorus of dogs howled at
the moon. When a developer
bought Bottle House from the city a while back and tried to extract
rent from the squatters, Tommy gave up the money he’d been saving
for a trip to China and bought it from him. But he didn’t
pretend to have any real ownership over the place. He had only
two requests
for the residents: “First, protect the grapes.” He had three
grapevines in front of the house. That was his number one
priority. “Second, clean the house.” That night, his conversation
was peppered with ’50s slang and the words “bro,” “man,”
and “dude.” He talked of playing benefits in Ann Arbor and
encouraged Hunter to come busk. Talk became superfluous when the
instruments came out. Brian had his guitar at the ready, Hunter
snatched up his left-handed mandolin, and Tommy grabbed drumsticks
and positioned himself over the steel barrel stove. They played
Tommy originals, featuring Hunter’s mandolin solos, Tommy’s
beautiful whistling, and an ever-impressive mouth trumpet. Chris and
I stomped along. The music, the joy, and the overwhelming sense
of community seemed like they might be the ultimate answer to
that essential question that nags at you in the coldest moments: “Why
the fuck am I doing this?” Almost everyone sat down. William hopped
about, looking like Donald Duck, trying to get out of his
raggedy weathered jeans, leaving on only his grey waffle-patterned
long johns and undershirt. His face was red behind his bushy beard as
he lay down in his pile of blankets.
Image by Emily
Anderson.
In
the coming months , summer 2015 Bottle
House (169 w golden gate)
would burn down leaving only Hunter’s charred mandolin,
Chris and William would move away, the Ohio Boys would split, and
Brian’s baby daughter would be born. Despite their plans and
their principles, despite the cold that seemed a constant, none
of them knew what the future would bring. They were focusing on the
present. Their situation demanded it. But they’d chosen that
situation. Their mission statement read, “Fireweed
Universe-City is a grassroots movement to realize a sustainable,
eco-friendly community of Universal Consciousness.” At first
glance, that “consciousness” bit might seem like mystical
hippy bullshit, but it can and should be read on a much more
practical, quotidian level. The people who ended up here had started
life as standard-issue Americans. At some essential pivot point,
they’d each seen that the fire at the center of our civilization, a
constant presence, evenly and surreptitiously distributed throughout
our homes through some sort of figurative and literal central
heating, unseen and unknown, was something that
demanded consciousness. They saw that the people leading lives
as part of entrenched civilization had lost control and given up
responsibility without knowing it. The flame had consumed them
without them feeling it.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/occupy-detroit-on-the-move_n_1133548
For
a lot of the people here, their moment of epiphany had been Occupy (2011-2012).
The movement challenged them to rethink everything. So they kept the
fight going even as the movement faded away and the terms of
engagement changed, because in some sense they couldn’t go
on without it. (The following link shows pictures of January 2015 from the effort aka the GoldenGate Restoration Project) Grixdale is the neighborhood ; Golden Gate Street is running through the heart of it.)
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.878405075515893&type=3
Bottle House is in the bottom left corner once link is accessed
There were still pockets of Occupy scattered
across the country. On a hitchhiking trip the following summer,
I popped by to see the remnants of Chris’s home camp in Eugene,
Oregon, and, during the Democratic primary in 2016, I heard
memories and songs of the movement shared at the Bernie marches
in New York which ended in Zuccotti Park. But the rest of the country
had moved on. When Trump and his cabal of one-percenters took power,
the networks of class-based resistance had faded. Fireweed was
an attempt to find a sustainable way to keep them going. Part of
that project was forming a community based on shared ideals. They
refused to idolize the amorphous ideals of a society that was polite,
civilized, comfortable, and numb. In discomfort, they discovered
a virtue. This left a void and inspired a search for grounding in
their approach to the most basic things. They had to know how
everything around them worked. After all their searching, they
found that the most basic elements are people, the most
basic technologies their relations to each other, and the most
important grounding an understanding of those around them.
“When
people ask what this place is,” Hunter had told me the first time
I’d visited, “whether it’s a commune or something, I tell
them it’s a community.” It was a community which could
foster the new fragile fire of this beautiful, crazy, radical space,
and keep it going by building stoves, installing solar power,
working harder, expanding knowledge, planting gardens, and
felling trees. It didn’t matter that the country could fall apart
around them at any time: They were in the process of saving its
essence. Maybe to fight the fight was to lose it, but they felt that
the fight, the sustained conscious effort, the experience of truly
living, was in itself worth it. So, why does a tree fall in
Detroit? It might be said that it falls to light a new flame. On
that night in January 2015, in between songs, Hunter leaned back,
gave a drowsy smile, and said, “the hardest part about the
zombie apocalypse would be pretending I’m not happy.” He was
dreaming of a moment when everybody realized that they had to fight
for the life they wanted.
Bottle
House sang itself to sleep.
•
The
morning after the reckoning in Bottle House, engineering committee
did not meet. Hunter was at work and Chris and Will were still
asleep. Fresh sunlight filtered through the bottles in the walls
and lent kaleidoscopic tints to the rising breath of the sleeping
men. The fire had died, leaving only a few embers, and a chill
set in. Not the brief slaps of frigid wind that might assault
you as you walk from one warm building to another. This felt
permanent. This was at the
marrow and seemed to offer the singular option of a stoic
embrace. The final embers smoldered. The stove demanded wood.
Denouement
By
summer 2015 the Bottle
house was gone.
There is a Google map time point that shows White house(formerly the Occupy House) next to Bottle house in 2015 with the wood that was cut winter 2014-2015...
The White House *formerly Occupy House at 149 Golden Gate) figures in the next and final story of Grixdale, Fireweed and the houses around Golden Gate street) see image below bottom left
10 years after Occupy
the following event signaled the end of an era The following 1 minute read comes from https://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/2018/09/man_killed_on_bike_in_detroit.html
Man
killed biking from Belle Isle took road less traveled
Updated:
Jan. 29, 2019, 11:15 p.m. | Published: Sep. 16, 2018, 1:00 p.m.
By Gus
Burns | fburns@mlive.com
Zachary
M. Zduniak ,aka Zack is a 28-year-old man
killed while riding bike on Belle Isle in
Detroit. After he died,
drums beat for him at night near Seven Mile Road in Detroit. Friends sat in a
circle smacking the skins of bongos and congas while drinking beer,
passing food, smiling, laughing, crying and sharing memories of Zack
Zduniak, a 28-year-old anarchist artist with unruly ginger hair. The one-time
suburbanite who attended Catholic private schools relished in his
daily bike rides to Belle Isle's unofficially named Hipster Beach on
the Detroit River.
For 56 days in a
row, friends say he pedaled the 28-mile round-trip trek to visit the
hidden beach on Belle Isle. He kept count of those trips, and had
been so many times, some friends took to calling him "the
unofficial lifeguard of Hipster Beach."
But after his 57th
consecutive trip, while riding back across the MacArthur
Bridge that connects the island park to mainland Detroit about 9 p.m.
Aug. 26, he was struck head-on by a car. Zduniak died hours
later, peacefully and surrounded by family, according to his mother. His death left
behind a long list of friends and loved ones shocked by how
fleeting his vibrant life was.
Zachary
Zduniak Facebook photo
Zduniak, since
about 2011, lived on 149 west Golden Gate (White House and for a while Occupy House) https://app.regrid.com/us#p=/us/mi/wayne/detroit/190425 in a community known as Fireweed
Universe City,
where artists and squatters have gathered for years with a focus on
sustainable living, anchored by the Psychedelic
Healing Shack,
which contains a chiropractor's office and a vegetarian cafe.
He didn't keep a
regular job, he didn't often have a healthy bank account and he
didn't pursue the traditional career milestones aspired to by
many young Americans.
It was most
important to Zduniak to be happy now, today, friends and
family said. And that's why he visited the beach so regularly. Weeks before his
death, Zduniak made an addition to his tattoo collection. Newly inked
words on his left bicep read, "A lust for life keeps us alive."
Zduniak liked to be
airborne, often launching himself from that makeshift rope swing
along the secret beach at Belle Isle with friends. While others
his age hunted for jobs or climbed corporate ladders, he reveled in
the cool Detroit River water, emerging with his long
hair clinging to his face and covering his eyes. "I'm at the
biggest party of my life," is a quote Zduniak's mother Julie
Jurban, of Clinton Township, placed in her son's
obituary. That's how she likes to imagine her son now, partying in the
afterlife.
Zduniak is one of
two people killed while riding a bicycle in Wayne County this year,
according to preliminary data from the state police Traffic Crash
Reporting System. There have been a total of 225 crashes involving
vehicles and bikes that resulted in another 167 injuries. The 32-year-old man
from Inkster who struck Zduniak was driving a 2007 Dodge Caliber. The
crash investigation is ongoing as state police investigators await
test results to determine whether the driver was sober at the time of
the collision.
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