Grand River Avenue

October 14, 2017

My day started with a conversation with the Uber driver on my ride to Hart Plaza. Andrew was an African American man in his forties, born and raised in Detroit, who lived on the east side near Belle Isle. He worked in construction, and reported that business had been better lately. He told me about how ten to fifteen years ago, seeing a white person in the city was like spotting a deer, it was so rare. He thought their increased presence in the city was positive. Until recently, there hadn’t been any supermarkets in the city; he had been forced to shop for groceries in the suburbs, where his checks would be examined by the supermarket manager.

Grand River Avenue stretches from Detroit all the way west across the state to Lake Michigan. It keeps its name through Lansing and almost to Grand Rapids. My endpoint would be sooner though, in Novi.

This walk spent the most amount of time in the city compared to the other routes. The first stretch after downtown was flanked by vast empty lots and abandoned industrial buildings. A few mansions followed, in an area that includes the former homes of Cranbrook’s founding families, the Booths and the Scripps.

I had invited other people to join me on this walk, and despite the rain, four people showed up at various points. One of them walked all 25 miles with me, Paul Sewick, the writer of the Detroit Urbanism blog that I had been consulting. Like almost all other white Detroiters, Paul had grown up in the suburbs.

Perhaps because it was a larger group, perhaps because we were of different races, more bypassers asked what we were doing. Mr. Van, an older African American man, said we reminded him of when he was a student and would walk fifty or sixty miles for various causes. Now he worked at a dry cleaner repairing shoes, and insisted that we stop by to meet the owner. His insistence made sense when it turned out that the owner was Korean. Mr. Kim told us about being in business there for thirty years, and would have told us more, but I was concerned about reaching Novi before dark, and so we didn't linger long. Indications of other Korean-owned businesses followed, including a wig shop, and a store called Sunny Menswear.

At Five Points Street, we left Detroit and entered the suburbs: first Redford Township, then Livonia for a blink of an eye before crossing Eight Mile Road into Farmington Hills and then Farmington. Downtown Farmington and beyond felt like older places, with quaint storefronts followed by weathered wooden houses and a cemetery with dates from a century ago. We passed Shiawassee Street, which Paul explained had been another Native American path.

It wouldn’t have been a walk in metro Detroit without a dicey stretch lacking sidewalks. As we crossed back into Farmington Hills, we were forced to navigate our way on grassy edges from one part of Grand River onto another. It turned out to be the transition back to modern-day suburbia, complete with malls crammed with chain stores.

Passing by a car dealer, I realized it was the first one we had seen all day, a contrast to my day walking on Gratiot. Curious about the Toyota and Mazda signage, I asked Paul when he had started seeing foreign cars in Detroit. Sometime in the nineties, was his response.

By the end of the day, the continuous drizzle had made the edges of my denim dress heavy and wet, and I had to pick up its full skirt to step over puddles. We finished in the gloom of an overcast sky at twilight, and posed for photos at a street corner by the name sign of a shopping mall.