I moved to Southfield MI in August 1999 to start my first job right after finishing my PhD.  The position was Senior Lecturer of Physics at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield.  Southfield borders Detroit, you know that city with a reputation for 50$ detached single family homes.  I had never lived outside of the Chicago land area and had a lot of misconceptions about life in America that led to some very humorous anecdotes.

First off I found an apartment about a mile from the university, let’s say within a mile, on Civic Center Drive.  This road is parallel to the “mile” roads, 8 mile, 9 mile, etc and if memory serves me it was a half mile north of 10 mile.  So, it’s my first day of work and I walk outside and stand at the corner.  Why?  Because everyone knows that’s where the buses stop.  If you’re thinking that I should have known better because there was no bus sign then you’ve never lived in a real inner city.  Street signs are there for the pickin’.  They typically become garage and basement wall decorations, occasionally finding their way into a teenager’s bedroom.  So I stand there waiting impatiently.  They should be coming every 15 minutes right.  Finally I see some folks, mostly elderly, congregating on another corner so I walk on down figuring I got the wrong corner.  A small bus eventually comes but as I go to get on it the driver stops me and asks me if I’m going to the hospital.  No, I’m going to work, I say.  She responds this bus only picks up folks going to the hospital.  I inquire about other buses, she laughs “This is Detroit, you ain’t from around here honey, ain’t no buses”.  I walk to work, 1 mile.  Then home 1 mile.  For the next year I’m walking 2 miles a day 5 days a week, in all kinds of weather.  And that’s just the beginning.

My fist lesson, ain’t no buses anywhere around Detroit and the neighboring suburbs.  In between home and work there was one tiny strip mall with a convenient store, maybe attached to a gas station, I don’t remember.  The only food, Doritos, Slim Jims, Tiny Powdered Doughnuts.  Yum.  The suburbs around Detroit were built for driving, major roads are 1 mile apart and indicated by name, 11 mile, 12, mile, very creative.  Between each mile there are subdivisions with winding roads that turn and twist and after a few miles deposit you right where you started, like you just walked through some kind of portal into another dimension, spooky.  I finally found a Target, Barnes And Nobel, and a Farmer Jacks (their chain grocery store), each on a different “mile” road and each about a mile either East or West of my place.  There is no public transportation and the roads are not designed for pedestrian traffic!  That’s another story altogether.  So I eventually map out safe walking routes to all these places, 2.5 to 5 miles is the typical distance I walk to get to any of these places.  If I’m going to BnN that’s a day trip, I pack a backpack and plan to sit in the cafe and eat there.  But I gotta eat something other than Doritos on the evenings and weekends so every 2 to 4 weeks, on a weekend day, I hike to Farmer Jack with a large backpack.  I shop for a few weeks worth of food and hike back home with 20-50 lbs of food on my back.  Along the way I have to walk on the shoulder of a major road that goes over an expressway.  I become a local site, “That Guy That Walks on the Overpass”, you gotta see him.  I had people offering me rides (not a safe option anywhere but especially near Detroit) and once in winter in the middle of a snow storm someone stopped on the overpass to take a picture, you know, of “That Guy That Walks in the Overpass”.  Who does that?  After a year I got a body like an Olympic track and field star.  Skin on muscle and resting rate of 32bpm.  Blood pressure of 100/55.  31 inch waist, smaller than I was in high school.  Cholesterol of about, let me think, 300.  It turns out that the closest place to work to get food was a Wendy’s.  I loved Wendy’s and twice a day almost every day I’d get a triple bacon cheese burger, biggie fries (maybe two) and a biggie chocolate frosty, then Doritos and doughnuts for dinner.

Lesson number two, fit on the outside doesn’t equal fit on the inside, just like in the Lipitor commercials.  Well, I was young and after 3 months on a diet of fish, wild rice and steamed veggies my cholesterol was down to about 210.  It sounds bad but it wasn’t.  There are a lot of nice places in and around Detroit the problem is that they’re spread out so far from each other that you can’t enjoy them without a car.  I started to get into the habit of going to a car rental service that had a Rent a Wreck program on weekends, 10$ a day for three days.  Then I could start to enjoy things.  The second year I lived there I did get a hand me down car from my parents.  To accommodate the extreme distances the speed limits are quite high, the highest I’ve seen anywhere in America.  Adding on a reasonable buffer you could go close to 100mph on the major expressways.

So what was nice about Detroit and the surrounding areas?  A lot actually.  There are some real gems.  For those who like to shop the Somerset Collection in Troy is spectacular, like a small self-contained city, twin cities connected by an indoor overpass.  My wife and I went on the largest shopping spree of our lives there and we don’t even like shopping.  They had a J. Peterman store.  I thought they made that up for Seinfeld but it’s real.  On Woodward Ave in Berkley MI I found the Chinese Academy of Martial Arts.  I am a life long practitioner and student.  It’s a beautiful place offering Tai Chi and External Arts which were a mix of striking, grappling and throwing arts.  I was a student there for about 9 months.  There is a neighboring suburb called Royal Oak which is a little more like a city, with sidewalks with lots of shops and restaurants etc.  It was more walking friendly.

But by far the best place was Baker’s Keyboard Lounge.  This place is right on 8 mile road on the Detroit side.  It boasts of being the oldest Jazz club in America.  I have a few stories about this place.  On my first trip there I parked in the neighborhood, a few blocks away from the place, towards 7 mile.  It didn’t look too safe, row houses with bars on the windows and doors.  Some had the doors propped open, in the middle of winter, with lines of men standing around waiting to go in (at night).  You can use your imagination, I don’t think they were soup kitchens.  So I parked and walked to Baker’s.  They were having an open mic, and me without my guitar.  The food was excellent, southern home cooking.  For about 7$ at that time you could get three large deep-fried pork chops with 5 sides; sweet potato, collard greens, red beans and rice, etc.  They had a lot to choose from.  I listened to great music and met several musicians, exchanged contact info etc.  It was about 2am when I said I got to go.  One of my new friends asked if was parked in the lot, I wasn’t.  When I told them where I parked they proceeded to tell me my car might be gone or stripped.  They could have been pulling my leg but I don’t think so, they seemed genuinely concerned.  I got an escort to my car, big scary looking dude.  The car was there and everything was fine.  I went back several times and always used the lot.  On one trip to Baker’s it turns out that the entire woodwind and horn section of the Detroit Symphony was there for an open mic.  I got to hear an hour long version of C Jam Blues and every member of DS took a solo.  I can say it was great but the rhythm section was not enjoying it.  They got worked to the bone and never got any.  There were a few other great places, Cisco’s Blues Bar and Bird of Paradise in Ann Arbor.  I have a great story about Cisco’s but I’ll save that for another blog.  Last but not least there’s Windsor Canada.  Many folks working in the Detroit Metro area would cross the bridge and do lunch in Canada, I did a few time with people from LTU.

Another point is that people are very friendly in the Detroit suburbs.  I’m not used to strangers striking up a conversation.  I’m not saying I grew up in tough bad ass neighborhood but there was an edge to things, weirdos on the Clark St Bus (everyone on the North side knows about the freak show), street gangs, schizoids talking to walls, etc.  You typically didn’t walk up to a stranger and make small talk and officer friendly taught us never talk to strangers or get in a stranger’s car.  In my first week living in Southfield I was walking down CCD in the evening and came up to a middle-aged couple, 50 something in my opinion.  As we approached each other I noticed them looking at me, trying to make eye contact and smiling.  Am I in Pleasantville, I thought to myself.  The man looked at me and said “Hello, isn’t it a beautiful night outside?”  I looked around to see if there was someone behind me that he might be talking to.  I said “Do you know me?  I could be a mugger or something.”  He and his wife laughed and laughed and like the bus lady he said, “Son, you’re obviously not from around here, people are friendly here and talk to each other.  Have a nice evening.”  I guess I’m not very friendly, but I started softening up over the next few months.  My apartment was nice and the management very responsive.  I’m used to landlords cheating me out of things and having to fight to get new appliances, heat in the winter, faucets in the bathrooms etc.  Here if I put in work request things were fixed within an hour.  I could live with that.

All in all I have many fond memories of living there but I’m not into putting 200 miles a day on my car just to get to a couple of places.  What I had in MI I could walk to or get to by train in a big city.  There were a few other negatives about living near Detroit.  Drivers do not expect to see pedestrians, they NEVER look both ways when turning or yield right of way to pedestrians.  On one occasion I was lightly clipped by a car making a turn while I was running.  Every morning the news was shocking.  Five city blocks on fire in Detroit, 3rd month of no garbage pick up in Highland Park and Mayor’s office is a P.O. Box, Detroit declared a national emergency Clinton/Bush to send federal aid, Former police chief house raided and child porn ring unearthed.  These things happen everywhere but they seemed to happen 3 or 4 at a time, every day near Detroit.  A friend there once joked, “well, you’ve seen RoboCop, right?  That’s Detroit.”  The cost of living is very cheap and on a teacher’s salary I felt like I could have a good quality of life but at the end of the day I didn’t like everything being spread out, I don’t like cars and don’t really want to own one.  People there would drive to the end of the driveway to get their mail.  Too much.

One final anecdote to sum things up.  While I lived there my wife was doing a post doc in Ottawa Canada.  Every other weekend and on long vacations I would go up there.  I usually took a shuttle to the Detroit Metro airport (used to look like a slum but is very nice after the renovation).  On one such occasion my shuttle was late due to a major accident on an expressway.  I kept calling the company for status updates.  Eventually a man came to my door, apologizing profusely.  He picked up my bags and asked “When will David Bergman be here is he coming out?  Do you work for him?  I’m so excited to meet him and very sorry I’m late…”  He proceeded to tell me about the accident and how he drove up the expressway shoulder and through a fence to get here for David Bergman.  As we walked out of my front door and turned to the street I saw a van with about 6 people standing around with cameras.  Some flashed prematurely while others lowered their cameras and shouted “Where is he.  Where is David Bergman”.  I was freaking out a bit but I stood there and said “I’m David Bergman”.  They were quite deflated.  The man turned to me and said “You’re not the pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, are you a relative?”.  Nope, sorry to disappoint you.  That was my 15 minutes of accidental fame.

Last but not least, Ted Nugent is King there.  If you ever go there you’ll know precisely what I mean.

copyright 2014 David R Bergman