Are the fairgrounds on 8 Mile? Maybe it was 10 Mile. I went to a guitar show there once. Drove right to it on the way in. Locked my keys in the truck (Ford Ranger) and some guy that worked at Ford stopped to help me. He had keys for (IIRC) 7 different Ford vehicles with him and the 3-4th key opened my truck right up! Then within a couple blocks of leaving I was lost in one of the most depressing urban hellscapes I’ve personally been in.
When I was a kid I would spend a couple weeks every summer with my aunt and uncle in Ann Arbor and all my cousins listened to CKLW which was a fairly progressive AM rock and roll station at the time. It was sort of a Detroit station (but was actually in Canada, maybe?) and a lot of street names from the commercials burned into my brain, especially 8 and 10 Mile. Is there a Telegraph Road there too?
No no no. You must not have heard of Ann Arbor.
As I said “…or the schools…”
I used to DJ a bar on 8 Mile just off of 75 (I think it was the Hazel Park side, but I always say Detroit).
No real story, just thought I’d share.
Plenty of times. I grew up in the Toledo area and lived in Michigan for the biggest chunk of my adult life. While I never lived in the Detroit area I’ve been all over it.
Was that local law? That wasn’t state law when I left about a decade ago. Full nude without alcohol or topless (but no pasties) with alcohol service was state law for decades.
There’s some genuine cause for hope in the five years since Detroit’s bankruptcy. My sister is an architecture professor working in France but her undergrad degree was from the University of Detroit. She’d worked for a couple of American universities’ overseas programs while working on her PhD in Paris. A couple of years ago, because of those ties, she was back in the Detroit area as part of an interdisciplinary urban planning/architecture program. She sees some real progress and hope, even though there’s big issues for the city to address yet.
A look from Forbes earlier in the year.
I was in Detroit a few months ago and drove a lot on 8 Mile. It’s dreary small businesses right up to the curb on one side and lots of green lawn with buildings set way back on the other.
You can take it all the way east to the lake. The contrast is ten times as great there. Going north through the last few blocks of Detroit is driving through a wasteland. Then the road enters Grosse Point and it’s exactly like Dorothy entering Oz. From a gray shattered urban landscape the world turns green, with lawns and gorgeous homes everywhere.
Detroit proper is full of these contrasts. Woodward Ave., the main north-south road, is eight lanes wide and has remnants of its former glory all the way up to 8 Mile. But nobody drives on it that far north. It was me and a bus for a couple of miles, the emptiest arterial street I’ve even driven on. Outer Drive is a major residential east-west road just south of 8 Mile. The paving was so potholed and broken that it was almost undriveable.
Here’s a tip. Try to do your driving on the M10, which radiates northwest out of downtown. Every other freeway was a clogged hellhole. You could drive the M10 at 60+ mph all the way until it ends at 12 Mile.
yes, the fairgrounds are at 8 Mile & Woodward, though the State Fair hasn’t actually been held for years. and I remember going to that guitar show one year.
yes, unfortunately the blocks immediately surrounding the fairgrounds are among the city’s most desolate.
Yes, it’s more or less the western border of Detroit, next to Redford Twp. Telegraph Rd. runs from Toledo OH all the way up to Pontiac. The highway itself (US-24) goes further than those two endpoints, but with different names.
Local language tip: Locals call M10 “The Lodge” almost universally.
heh, this is how I can tell when the traffic channel on Sirius is using a sub/temporary announcer. they’ll use other areas’ regionalisms like calling I-94 “the 94” (like how they say “the 405” in California.) here, we usually just use the number for interstates (e.g. “take 75 to 696 west”) and the names for the urban freeways (the Lodge, the Davison, the Southfield.)
though some old-timers will still use the old names of the freeways from before the interstate system (e.g. I-75 to I-96 would be "take the Chrysler south to the Fisher, then go west on the Jeffries.)
Yes. My husband is from Canton MI.
Yeah, that’s why I sold the 16 and Groesbeck house, and bought a house in Plymouth, instead. I never imagined I could live in Wayne County, because “Wayne County == Detroit,” but I find that there’s nothing I miss about Macomb at all, other than the familiarity and Cloverleaf pizza.
As a bonus, I only have to bitch about the commute if there’s more than a teaspoon of rain, causing Hines Dr. to close, forcing me onto the freeway.
I crossed it on Woodward Avenue on the way to/from the GMC bus factory in Pontiac to inspect a fleet of buses my employer was buying.
Born in Detroit, lived in Detroit for a year. I worked in a tool & die shop on 8 mile. I used to take it occasionally to go to other jobs. As far as the divide between Oakland county and Detroit, it is diminishing in importance. Brooks Patterson might be the last conservative to be county executive. Detroit’s decline is really about de industrialization of manufacturing. Detroit’s population peaked in 1956, long before a lot of folks want to admit. I worked in a Chrysler plant on the east side, and when that closed up, taking 6800 jobs out the neighborhood, the whole area collapsed. Most businesses closed, the only survivors were a bar and a party store with a lottery terminal. This was repeated over many years, all over the city. A lot of things in Detroit made life less pleasant. One was that there was no zoning in the early part of the 20th century. Large, dirty, noisy factories were next door to residential neighborhoods. Some factories expanded over the years to have public streets run right thru industrial complexes. And a lot of the housing was built on small lots, with no driveways. The houses, almost all wooden, sometimes burned, one taking a few neighbors with it.
Out of time, I’ll catch up later.
Lived at Five Mile and Grand Riverfor two years in high school. So yeah drove it. Think we called it Stateline though.