EXCLUSIVE REPORT: Detroit's Urban Pioneers

When the Center for Michigan holds Community Conversations in Detroit, we almost always attract young professionals who are zigging when others zag by moving back downtown, launching businesses in the shadow of General Motors’ teetering RenCen, and generally shaking their heads at the “unoriginal” flocks of their former Michigan peers who’ve left for the hip lifestyles of Chicago or the East or West coasts.

This week, in our next in a series of Success Stories originating out of the Community Conversations, writer Jon Zemke introduces you to some of those moving back into Detroit.

By Jon Zemke

DETROIT — Ask Scott Lowell what the Beethoven Apartments were like when he bought them two years ago, and his description seems to list more reasons to tear them down than build them back up.

The 28-unit apartment building in Detroit’s Cass Corridor wasn’t just poorly maintained but poorly built, he points out. The foundation was crumbling, the exterior brick falling apart. The original builders used reclaimed wood from old barns for some of the structure’s beams.

The building originally caught Lowell’s attention when a mugger assaulted one of his patrons at the Bronx Bar and ran down the block to the “cracktel,” the drug-plagued flop house the Beethoven had become. It’s pretty easy to see why Lowell calls it the worst apartment building he has ever tried to rehab.

The 42-year-old father and Detroit resident sees all of that and the big picture beyond it. That’s why he and his wife, both Wayne State University graduates, started buying buildings in this little bit of bohemia next to their alma mater a decade ago. Today, they own several apartment buildings and businesses, including the Traffic Jam & Snug restaurant and the old Cliff Bells speakeasy-turned-jazz bar.

“We see the potential of this neighborhood, which is booming,” Lowell says. “We’ve seen what has happened in the last 10 years. We think we’re ahead of the curve on this.”

Lowell is one of a growing number of entrepreneurs who are staking their claim in the Motor City’s inner city. They’re the type of people commonly referred to as urban pioneers in the suburbs and out state, but don’t call them that. They see themselves as urbanists who see opportunity where others are too afraid to look.

Lowell is sinking more than $1 million into the Beethoven and about to sink even more into the even bigger burned-out shell of the nearby Forest Arms Apartments.

The Beethoven has enough environmentally friendly features to make any Ann Arborite green with envy.

Solar panels on the roof play a major part in the building’s radiant-heat system. There is enough insulation in the walls and roof to make the building comfortable to work in when there are sub-zero temperatures outside. Lowell and his crew reused the original floors, doors, moldings and other materials whenever possible, helping preserve the building’s character and keeping them out of a landfill.

It will all add up to an impressive renovation when it opens this spring, and another notch in Lowell’s restoration belt.

“I like fixing them up and taking care of them,” Lowell says.

Paris of the Midwest

Lowell is not alone in identifying and seizing urban opportunity. Torya Blanchard couldn’t see opening her new business any place other than downtown Detroit, even if downtown is not the place people expected to see it.

The 30-year-old opened Good Girls Go To Paris Crepes in a tiny storefront on a side street just off Woodward Avenue. The 46-square-foot space used to be a hot dog stand and is now crammed between Oslo sushi restaurant and the downtown YMCA. Just enough space to launch Blanchard’s burgeoning empire.

Today, that quirky business is expanding to two more locations, one in Midtown by the Detroit Institute of Arts and a second in Grosse Pointe. But in Blanchard’s eyes, none of it would have been possible had she not started in downtown Detroit.

“I think it got noticed a lot quicker in Detroit,” Blanchard says. “Out in the suburbs, I am one of a lot of shops and restaurants, but here I stand out.”

Diamond in the rough

Detroit has a lot of famous neighborhoods filled with grand old historic houses with famous names attached to them. That’s not quite Eric Critiser’s neighborhood.

The 32-year-old car salesman lives near Belle Isle in Islandview Village. Most Detroiters don’t know where that is until they are told it’s a few blocks west of Indian Village. Critiser makes his home on Field Street in one of the few original ribbon farm houses left standing.

It”s a one-house historic district (literally) that stands next to a virgin city lot with an original French pear tree in the yard. Moses Field built it in 1859 before becoming a Michigan congressmen and co-founding the Greenback Party. Critiser was living in the newest house on the block (1909) across the street when the Moses Field house became available in 2007.

It had been a few decades since it was last updated. Rooms were cluttered; they smelled of cat urine because the old owner had a soft spot for feral felines. To Critiser, jumping at it made perfect sense.

“It is an ideal opportunity to hold something that has been around so long and keep it around for future generations,” he says.

The historic preservationist emptied, cleaned, scraped and painted the whole place. Underneath it all, he found ornate marble fireplaces, original Benjamin Franklin stoves and cherub faces carved into walls, peaking out from the most obscure places. Today he has a treasure that would rival anything on This Old House.

“How often do you get a chance to take the worst house on the block, spiff it up and make it the best house on the block?” Critiser says.