Hey, Daily Detroit readers. This week, Walking Man James Robertson got a car. It was a new Ford Taurus – but there’s a lot more to the discussion … not to mention other happenings in the D. If you have an article you think should be featured, send it in on our submission form, Twitter @TheDailyDetroit or on Facebook. Whatever works for you.
We think this would be a deserved designation – “Baker’s Keyboard Lounge seeks official landmark status” – Detroit News
“It may be the first nightclub that has always operated as a nightclub and continues to do so,” to gain historic status in Detroit, said Janese Chapman, planner for the city’s Historic Designation Advisory Board.
City officials have started the process to have the 81-year-old nightclub declared a historic district. In Detroit, even a single place is designated a “district.” The city has officially recognized other landmarks that pay homage to Detroit’s musical heritage — Motown Records, Orchestra Hall and Midtown’s Garden Theater are a few examples. But it’s rare a working nightclub has a shot at the designation, city officials said.
Baker’s the jazz club was born in May, 1934, when a local female pianist was booked at the club on Livernois, just south of Eight Mile. It was the first live gig for Baker’s. The music has never stopped. The legends who’ve played there are too many to list. A sample: Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Sarah Vaughn, Dave Brubeck and George Benson.
Did Detroit struggle because we held so dearly to the auto industry? The headline is definitely over-dramatic, but industry diversification is important to the region’s economic future. That said, the rest of the post reeks of typical flyover journalist simplification, flippantly calling Detroit’s struggles “easy to solve.” Detroit Is Dying Because GM Stuck Around, New York City Booms Because Nabisco Did Not – Forbes
What about cities like Flint and Detroit? They’re not crumbling monuments to the past because the Big Three automakers aren’t doing well, or because the Big Three are not creating enough factory jobs; rather both cities struggle precisely because the Big Three are doing well enough that they still create jobs in Michigan at all. Counterintuitive as this may seem, the sad fact that local and national politicians have propped up GM and Chrysler in order to “save jobs” explains why Michigan’s once important cities are doing so poorly, all the while driving away their best and brightest. As I write in my upcoming book, Popular Economics, to create lots of quality jobs we must constantly be destroying the work of the past.
To understand why, we need only return to New York. Nabisco once again used to have factories in New York, and used to create manufacturing jobs in Manhattan, but those jobs have long since gone elsewhere. Thank goodness. Does anyone want to imagine how much poorer and how much less vibrant New York’s economy would be if it were still a manufacturing hub? If Nabisco’s factories hadn’t been replaced by Google and other futuristic companies? The answer is obvious.
Just the same, the riddle to Detroit’s struggles is similarly easy to solve. This formerly advanced city is still clinging to work that America’s richest cities years ago waved goodbye to. Cities like New York thrive precisely because they don’t live in the past, while Detroit continues to implode precisely because it does.
Did you know that mass transit in Detroit used to carry 57 million passenger trips a year? “How metro Detroit transit went from best to worst” – Detroit Free Press
At the turn of the 20th Century, southeast Michigan had the largest and one of the best mass transit systems in the country. Today, we have one of the worst.
So what on Earth happened to our public transit system that would force a man to walk 21 miles to work each day?
“You’d expect a conspiracy theory from the Big Three or something, but it was never as simple as just one thing,” said Tobi Voigt, chief curatorial officer for the Detroit Historical Society. “But it’s a much more complicated story than that.”
It looks like the plan to get our roads fixed is running off-road. Our own flash poll showed a supermajority against the sales tax proposal. 4th Group Forms To Oppose Michigan Sales Tax Boost For Roads – CBS Local
Citizens Against Middle Class Tax Increases is the fourth group formed to oppose Proposal 1.
The Legislature placed the plan on the ballot to raise the sales tax from 6 percent to 7 percent and remove the sales tax on fuel. It would generate $1.2 billion more per year for roads.
New group leader John Yob says it’s “wrong to ask … middle-class families to foot the bill.”
Craft brewing is up 16% in Michigan: Stroh’s death knell rang in Bell’s Brewery and era of craft beer – Crain’s Detroit Business
Stroh Brewery Co. announced 30 years ago it would raze its 1 million-square-foot brewery, bottling and warehouse buildings on Gratiot Avenue at I-75. The late Peter Stroh, chairman of the iconic Detroit beer company, said no amount of investment could save the brewery in the face of a declining beer audience — which dropped from 31 million barrels to 24 million barrels annually.
That year, 1985, marked the beginning of the end of Stroh and a culture shift for Michigan beer drinkers as a small-time home brewer took his craft legal.
Larry Bell founded Kalamazoo-based Bell’s Brewery Inc. the same year Stroh’s was razed and today is one of the largest local beer producers — expected to produce 410,000 barrels of craft beer in 2015.
Michigan craft beer accounted for only 6 percent of beer sold in the state in 2013, but it is growing at a clip that’s forced the industry to mature, has attracted financiers and is ripe for expansion and consolidation.