Bike Ride out E. Canfield

What follows is the first of (hopefully) many "Bike Ride" posts. Detroit is a bike-friendly town. It wasn't necessarily designed to be bike-friendly, but losing 50% of its population in half a century and maintaining an extensive, out-of-date network of paved roads provides my road bike and I with a lot of room. Last Sunday morning (7/23), I headed out to the Eastside along Canfield with my camera. E. Canfield is home to at least 25 churches (I lost count). The occupancy rate of these churches appears to be much higher than the occupancy rate of any other type of building you'll find along the road. In fact, it appeared that every church I passed was holding a Sunday morning service. The following photographs feature a variety of churches (storefronts, cathedrals, etc.) as well as a number of other things that caught my eye on this bike ride...



St. Josephat is one of the last remaining buildings from the Hastings Street era.



A city park at Canfield and Russell offers an interesting view of downtown.



St. Albertus church.



You can worship, but you better not try to learn. The St. Albertus school is abandoned.



The polka dot bus.



F.I.J.? Catchy...









Canfield takes a hiatus for an abandoned building.



An electronically gated house of worship.



Bike tires!






Arts and Crafts style of architecture.









Industry interrupts Canfield again. For now, it's an operating factory.



The unfinished R&B murals of the abandoned Canfield Market.



There's lots of parking on Canfield, but sometimes you want to get a really sweet lawn spot.



Lush urban prairie.



Open doors welcome you to this C.O.G.I.C. at St. Aubin and Canfield.



I'm sad I have to miss this...


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Cities & Memory

In Maurilia, the traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old post cards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of a bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits: admitting that the magnificence and prosperity of the metropolis Maurilia, when compared to the old, provincial Maurilia, cannot compensate for a certain lost grace, which, however, can be appreciated only now in the old post cards, whereas before, when that provincial Maurilia was before one's eyes, one saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today, if Maurilia had remained unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was.

Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices' accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.

- Italo Calvino


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