Stumbling on things in Detroit

I was biking around this morning through some typically rough-looking areas of Detroit and randomly came across this amazing looking building, Dabl's African Bead Gallery, on Grand River just southeast of Grand Boulevard. The whole thing was elaborately painted and decorated with mirrors, stones, and mosaics; also the entire sidewalk around the place was inscribed with art and African names... then I went down the dead-end street it was on and there was a vacant lot filled with scrap metal and rusted tractors and such twisted into art, with the inscription "IRON TEACHING ROCK HOW TO RUST" spelled out in colored stones... then I looked across the lot and saw on the far side an abandoned building decorated all over in the same style as the first. Here's an image from www.freep.com, with the artist:

Update 9/18: another picture from an article in the latest Metro Times:


Yesterday I was randomly biking around and I came across the strangest little neighborhood I've ever seen... it was just this one little dead-end street, only half a block, stuck between I-94, the Lodge Freeway, Henry Ford Hospital, and some Wayne State buildings. The street was a mass of filled potholes, like the proverbial sock that was mended till none of the original material remained... a narrow street with old houses and apartment buildings crowded close on each side, and again there were bits of art in random places, also a little stage in a yard. When I got home I found that the street was known as a bohemian enclave and they hosted the 4th Street Fair every summer.

It seems like there's this notion of taking advantage of the gradual abandonment of the city to turn it into a giant canvas for artists to fill... I like the idea of a city where works of art vastly outnumber inhabitants, filling all the empty places between the pockets of habitation; it would be pretty wondrous. But if it got too cool then people might want to come back... in which case we'd have to take up arms :-(