I am writing a story that has the city of Dearborn, Michigan figuring prominently in one chapter.
Just wondering if anybody could give me some insight about the city.
I have the basics from Google (population/average income/ethnic backgrounds/history, etc.) but need some informed opinions from anyone who has been there/lives there or is at least familiar with the city:
Is the city more of a suburban type of lifestyle, or is it more urban or small town?
Is the city run down in many areas, or would you consider it mostly a nice place to live?
What would be the main drag/cool place to hang out or spend time on a weekend?
What would be the worst area of town?
Any classy, fancy hotels or restaurants or shopping areas that I could name drop in the story?
Any other tidbits of info would be welcome.
Again, I have no plans of visiting and just need this info to add some authenticity - so any reader who might know the city would think I was at least familiar enough with the place to drop some specific info.
Total suburban area, one of the area’s Fairlane Town Center biggest malls is there and some streets are generically strip malled like everywhere else. I suppose it’s worth noting that if you decide to use the mall as a place folks might go, I’ve never heard it referred to by it’s proper name but just as Fairlane Mall.
They have made quite the effort to maintain a bit of a downtown section, lots of shopping and restaurants and parks, with bits of historical preservation scattered here and there. There’s so much Ford this and Ford that everywhere that I sometimes think the city goes to great lengths to prove themselves as something other than Fordtown, if that makes any sense.
Some run down neighborhoods, a lot of blue-collar, lower-middle class neighborhoods. Local reputation is mostly neutral, I’d guess. You don’t have the wide-spread sneering at that happens to the neighboring city of Inkster or all the baggage that goes with saying the word “Detroit” but I’ve never known anyone super eager to move there, either.
Have you looked into the history of the city, particularly regarding racism? I’ve forgotten a lot of it, but from listening to my parents and their friends talk about it growing up, there was a lot of crap going on. Orville L. Hubbard seems to be the king of the crappiness. OTOH, he seems to have been fairly excellent at wheelin and dealin and making good use of all the Ford tax money to provide a lot of services to his constituents, for whatever that’s worth.
Greenfield village and Henry Ford Museum are great places to go, but probably more as tourist attractions and not someplace you hang out on weekends when you live there. There’s a pretty excellent city library there, with a fantastic fountain in front of it, but the future of that particular landmark looks dim.
The racist history looks pretty odd now when you drive through whole neighborhoods with more Arabic signs on stores and restaurants than English ones. Yay for lots of great middle-eastern food nearby!
It may focus on tourists in many ways, but most people who live in the area seem to have gone to one or both of those at some point. There’s also quite a brisk business in using Greenfield Village’s Martha and Mary Chapel for local weddings - one of my sisters got married there and I think they had to book at least a year in advance. So no, the locals don’t hang out there on a regular basis, but it does host special events and most folks are familiar with it.
Henry Ford the First was a notorious anti-Semitic, which also works into the local racism legacy. When I was in high school (over 30 years ago now) there was a time when they temporarily halted inter-school sports games between Southfield (heavily Jewish) and Dearborn (heavily Arab) because the competition and aggression had moved from normal competitiveness to kids putting each other in the hospital.
But yeah, Dearborn is a fantastic place to get Middle Eastern food in south east Michigan.
South east Michigan also has a fairly large contingent of Christian Arabs, although I doubt think they’re concentrated in Dearborn.
Regarding Fairlane Mall (actually, usually referred to as simply “Fairlane”), it has developed a reputation as a hangout for punks/gangstas and is largely avoided by many folks after dark. When it was built it was a jewel; I wouldn’t go there now myself.
Michigan Avenue is the main drag. Throw in a reference to Dearborn Music (which I heard may be closing, I hope not) for realism.
Dearborn Sausage is another treasure. Also Westborn Market. (do the Google)
References to West and East Dearborn are commonly made. The Mid-Eastern population dominates in East Dearborn; most of the business sport Arabic lettering on their signs. West is more mainstream suburbia.
mmm
Dropping the name Fairlane for the local mall will be great, and especially liked hearing about Dearborn Music as my story has a musical subplot that would make this a perfect reference!
Glad to hear the city is a fairly decent place to live - your usual Midwest town/city. The Michigan Avenue reference will be great as well, as one of the characters is from Chicago and can use this reference as an ironic comparison to the famed Michigan Avenue in Chicago.
This should be a good start in filling in a few gaps to the story to make it seem like I know at least a bit about the place!
Thanks again all! I don’t know how this story/novel will turn out, but it helps to have some local color thrown in when mentioning other locales in a story.
People from the Dearborn region have no idea how spoiled they are when it comes to Middle Eastern food. I was sure when I moved east, worked in New York City and Philadelphia, that I could just go to a Lebanese restaurant and expect the same level of quality and authenticity. Not so. Every time I have gone to a Middle Eastern restaurant out here, I have been disappointed. Hell, they often don’t even have garlic sauce!
You may already know this, but it’s actually the same (more or less) road. US 12 runs from downtown Detroit, through Dearborn, through Chicago, and ends at the Pacific Ocean in Washington.
mmm
One of the things Dearbornites like to do is turn their garage into a de facto courtyard. Hookah, sitting around, grilling, the works. This has led to arguments and anger, accusations of bigotry and the like. This is in the neighborhoods, of course, not out off Michigan Ave near the CBD.
Fairlane’s reputation’s gone downhill but there’s still a revolving restaurant on top of their hotel w/ mediocre food and a great view. For amazing food and a meh view, you go to Al Ameer and eat yourself sick on fresh Middle Eastern food.
The Wayne Assembly plant is just a few miles West down Michigan Ave, that’s where smaller Fords are made like the Focus. They run all three shifts and last I looked still had segregated parking lots (American cars park closer, foreign cars much further from the plant).
Michigan Ave has plenty of car dealerships, btw; you could get on Google Street View and ‘drive’ for miles and miles of them heading West. East on Michigan Ave takes you into Detroit proper, into Corktown (after County Cork, Ireland) where the Tigers used to play on the corner at Trumbull.
Southeast Michigan’s music scene is legendary, you should have no trouble mining it for gems for your story! Heck, Iggy Pop played suburban Detroit high schools in the 70’s, shirtless and all.
Dearborn proper actually has the Dearborn Stamping and Assembly plant, where the F150 is made. It’s on the Rouge river, and right next to the (still running) Severstahl steel mill - originally it was all one complex.
Dearborn has some of the worst air pollution in Michigan. There’s a lot of heavy industry in the area, and the city consistently fails to meet the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for particulate air pollution. It’s making people sick.
33-year Dearborn resident checking in, hope I’m not too late to A your Qs.
Is the city more of a suburban type of lifestyle, or is it more urban or small town? Old suburbs, which gives it somewhat of an “urban suburban” feel to me. The houses are old and close together. “Suburbs” to me these days are subdivisions with big lots. Dearborn doesn’t have this.
Is the city run down in many areas, or would you consider it mostly a nice place to live? Nice place to live. Little postage stamp yards, fenced lots, fast-acting police and fire. The east side, which is the older part of town and where most of the immigrant population has flocked to for the past century (Italian and Polish initially, now Middle Eastern) can be a little rougher.
What would be the main drag/cool place to hang out or spend time on a weekend? As others have mentioned, Michigan Avenue connects both of the city’s downtowns. The east downtown is more Middle Eastern restaurants and cultural stuff, the west downtown is more bars and nightclubs. There’s also Warren Avenue, which has become known as the Mediterranean Mile- phenomenal Arabic bakeries, markets, restaurants, hookah lounges, etc.
What would be the worst area of town? The South End. It’s industrial, polluted, close to Detroit. It’s also got the cheapest housing, and as such, most of the people “fresh off the boat” move there. Most of the businesses signage is in all Arabic, and you can hear calls to prayer over mosque loudspeakers.
Any classy, fancy hotels or restaurants or shopping areas that I could name drop in the story? A good fancy hotel would be The Dearborn Inn. Built by Henry Ford for people flying into his Dearborn Airport (first airport hotel in the country). It also has a number of cool bars, ranging from extremely fancy to fancy. The Ten Eyck Tavern (in the Dearborn Inn) is a fancy place to get a drink and dinner.
That would be the industrial South End. The majority of Dearborn has fine air.
Far as I know the revolving restaurant has been closed for about a decade. The new owners (the Adoba, was previously a Hyatt-Regency) may re-open it (or may have already…not sure).
That’s the South End too. Just fyi.
Not closing. They just relocated from their previous location to a newer one about a mile west, one that didn’t have paid parking.
Yes, crappy human being, great mayor. He turned Dearborn into a great city because he knew how to spend Ford’s tax money effectively. Back in the day, residents didn’t even have to shovel their sidewalks when it snowed; city employees did it all. He also bought a massive chunk of land about 45 minutes north in Milford and named it Camp Dearborn; Hubbard called it the People’s Country Club. It’s still there and a nice place to camp. As the tax money from Ford dried up, Dearborn’s cut back on many of the public services, and has thus lost much of its broad appeal to residents and potential residents. I could give more info on Dearborn’s history and background on Orville Hubbard if you need it.
In regard to the Arabic polulation: Yes, it’s city with the largest percentage of Arabs outside the Middle East, but contrary to many notions in Metro Detroit (and beyond), it’s only about 30% Arab. There can be a lot of tension between the Middle Eastern population, and “old timers.” People saying Dearborn “has changed” and “has gone downhill” and “isn’t how it used to be.” Those are (often, not always) codes for “Arabs have taken over and ruined the city.” This divide is often put in terms of east vs west. (East Dearborn being the Arabs, West Dearborn being the non-Arabs.)
Ford Motor Company is woven into the city’s fabric. You can’t throw a rock without hitting either Ford land, someone who works at Ford, or a Ford retiree. This is truly the town Henry Ford built. His fingerprints are everywhere.
Happy, the last time I ate at the revolvo-restaurant was Valentine’s Day 2004, so…yeah, it could certainly have been closed for nearly a decade. From the quality of the food it could have already been closed but it still spun so someone was paying the bills.
DMark, the various Ford Buildings have nicknames the locals use; people who work at Ford Headquarters say they work in the Glass House; those in Research and Development say they work in ‘Bump and Squeak’.
Along w/ the calls to prayer, you can hear the Greenfield Village train whistle if you’re anywhere near Tireman; this to me is an example of something I hope you can tell about Dearborn - it’s known for a wide range of things that are all important influences on the city and local area. W/o either Henry Ford or Iraqi immigrants or the returning veterans of WWII or white flight Dearborn wouldn’t have the character it has. In 45 minutes you can go from lunch at a restaurant where every staffer is Middle Eastern through a 300+ year-old American city to an early dinner on the shores of a river where the British launched an offense in the War of 1812.
TLDR; there’s no single, all-encompassing label for Dearborn.
Thanks all!
So my chapter(s) in Dearborn have sprung to life, thanks to these tips.
Just want to verify that The Henry would be a good hotel to stay in, with a few nice suites.
Also - as this is about music in these chapters, they have booked the Guido Theater (which looks to be quite nice) and later, in a bizarre coincidence, somewhat is asked to meet them at the Venue (theater) but misunderstands and winds up going to the bar, The Venue, which is a Gay Bar in Dearborn.
Just wanted to verify the Guido theater is good and that the Venue is still sort of an upscale Gay bar that is still in business.
Otherwise, these tips will be great and thanks again, one and all!
I’d say The Venue’s merely gay/straight/friendly rather than a dedicated gay bar, though there’s still hookup there. This is what I’m told by a friend who lives in Detroit and is gay and is in his mid 40’s. He says he wouldn’t go out of his way if he wasn’t already on that side of town but that people more into dancing and ‘being seen’ might.
Guido is nice for sit-down type concerts. You’re not going to see The Killers or Kid Rock perform there. More like Rick Springfield and Motown Revues and classical.