Niagara-on-the-Lake to Detroit to South Bend

I left Niagara-on-the-Lake around eight-thirty in the morning.  Learning that the Falls now has a $20 parking fee, and having seen them many times, I decided to pass on this nearby wonder in favor of sites unseen which would renew the automotive theme of my journey.  So to Detroit!  I took a path on the freeway through sunny Ontario to Windsor, Canada, stopping for lunch at the clean and efficient ONRoute highway rest stop, featuring WiFi and fresh sandwiches.  Mine was turkey on multigrain bread.   

The freeway ends in Windsor, and you begin to see some badly decaying infrastructure.  I made for the Ambassador Bridge, which is in the news lately. The lines for entry to the US are long, and the construction has the appearance of never ending. The present bridge is privately owned and is a gold mine for its monopolistic owners (maybe biopoly because there's also a tunnel). The Canadians want to  pay for a new bridge to compete and have struck a deal with Michigan's new governor. But the owners of the Ambassador Bridge are fighting like Wolverines to protect their interests, at least according to the radio reports I hear. What I can attest to is that the roads around both parts of the bridge are in terrible shape.

After crossing the bridge, I made for the Detroit Institute of the Arts, about one mile west of downtown on Detroit's main street, Woodward Avenue, on the Wayne State campus, on a museum complex. Detroit's museum complex is certainly bigger than Flint's, but Flint's is better cared for.  There's no way around it:  there's a lot of decay in the center of Detroit, even among its cultural gems.  The roads are pocked; the traffic signals are spotty and often don't have left turn signals on the most busy of roads.  Tough housing abuts fine buildings, and I did not get a sense of health from the city.  

The Institute of Art itself is pictured below with its Rodin in the front.  

Construction is everywhere around the museum, and parking is spotty.  One cannot use the front entrance, and the back entrance is not well maintained.  There were a lot of people at the museum, and there was a lot to see.  The collection itself is a fine one, befitting of a great city.  But it is obvious they are renting out space to make money.  In fact the best space was occupied by some sort of fashion shoot.  The information desk people were helpful and showed evidence of an active guild of volunteers.  They were so happy a recent tax increase passed to support the museum, which they said was doing bake sales to make money.  

The shining stars of the museum are its "Detroit Industry Murals" done by Diego Rivera in 1932-33 at the behest of Edsel Ford, which depict a complicated vision of the River Rouge complex.  I've included some shots below.  It really is a dense and grand work, like nothing I've seen before.

Some more ordinary pieces are shown below.

 

I then drove down Woodward Avenue straight to downtown.  Took a long time to turn left without the aid of a traffic light, but I made it.  Drove through some rough housing projects, then came straight upon the brand new stadium of the Detroit Tigers:  Comercia Park.  It's beautiful and close to the new football stadium, Ford Field.  Driving on, I came to the Renaissance Center, then made for the exits, taking I-75 south, a route I had never taken before.

This is some road. It soon hugs Lake Erie on its way to Toledo, and it is the road of big modern factories, especially auto assembly plants. I certainly saw a Mazda-Ford behemoth, Auto Alliance International, re-opened in 1987, as well as a giant Chrysler factory, Toledo Supplier Park, opened in 2007 to make the Jeep Wrangler. Approaching Toledo, I saw the remains of the old Jeep factory, which opened before WWI and only recently closed. I stopped for gas just ahead of I-80 at a BP station. There was a steady stream of working men coming in loading up on twelve-packs of Michelob Lite and some hefty 24 oz. beer cans.  The business was efficient and friendly enough.  I stopped next door at the McDonald's, which had to be the saddest McDonald's I've ever been in. The workers were young, glum, wearing their own free-style non-standard "uniforms", had a heavy dose of tattoos and did not look to be in the best of health.  The interior had the charm of a 1985 McDonald's with cracked cushy vinyl seats.  Everything was moving slowly, and my confidence in the health standards was waning.  I made for the exit before ordering and moved onto I-80.  Ohio's crisp, clean, and modern rest stops brought culinary respite at the Burger King, where a Whopper with sweet potato fries made for dinner.  I drove through the early evening, past the again active, large RV factories and warehouses of Elkhart, Indiana, and made my way back to home in South Bend.

Port Huron to Niagara-on-the-Lake

I departed Tuesday morning for a rainy drive over the Blue Waters bridge into Ontario. It rained most of the time, and the three and one half hour drive to Niagara-on-the-Lake was uneventful. There is not as much signage on Canadian expressways, and they don't put their gas stations and hotels just off the interstate.  That gives you some more pastoral views. I arrived at my hotel in Queenston, Ontario, around eleven thirty. My quarters at the South Landing Inn and its 1970s vintage appliances are shown below.

There I met my friends Jean Anne, husband of my colleague from Notre Dame Rich Strebinger, Jean Anne's sister Agnes, and Prof. Lewis Nicolson, now 90, and Jean Anne's Ph.D. advisor at Notre Dame in the 1980s.  Jean Anne and Agnes have been coming to the Shaw Festival for many years, as their father was a Shaw scholar.  Prof. Nicolson is a grand man, moving a little slowly these days, who is a linguist for many years in our English department.  His refined taste does not extend to Shaw, but he tolerates this so that he may attend the nearby Shakespeare Festival later with Jean Anne and Agnes. After a quick lunch, we took in the 2:00 PM offering of Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler."  It was the best of the four plays I saw here.  We sat close to the projected stage, and the actors were wonderful, along with the sets and music.  I ran into a colleague from Ohio State, Prof. Bob Brodkey and his wife Carolyn, who I discovered was a Shaw enthusiast.  For dinner we were joined by a retired Notre Dame faculty member from anthropology, Prof. Ken Moore, who lives in the area now. I had not known Ken, but we had many mutual friends.  Ken had a lot of stories of his many literary friends who he had known over the years.  At eight, we attended Shaw's "The Millionairess".  I had not seen it, and would rate it as a "B" effort.  It was written in the 1930s and focused on money.  We all turned in around eleven.

On Wednesday morning, we all had breakfast in the Inn, and then drove to town for a bit of shopping and lunch.  The 2:00 PM show was another Shaw offering, "Misalliance" which was about how people choose to marry and problems with families.  It was a typical Shaw farce and very funny.   After the play we all took a look at the robust Niagara River and the nearby Fort Niagara.   The Fort and then Jean Anne, Prof. Nicolson, and Agnes are pictured below.

After a fine Italian dinner, we took in Inge's "Come Back Little Sheba."  It had a full load of family troubles mixed in with Jim Beam whiskey.  It was well acted as well.

I write the following morning (Thursday) from the breakfast room's WiFi, waiting for Jean Anne, Agnes, and Prof. Nicolson to join me.  They will move on to Stratford's Shakespeare Festival today, and I will make my way back to Michigan to renew my Chevrolet Heritage tour.

Flint to Port Huron

Slept in until 8 this morning at the swank-enough Hampton Inn.  The breakfast room was big and bold, and the oatmeal hot and thick.  Hampton Inns have nice artwork featuring local flavors. The staff is friendly too.  Around 10, I headed for the Flint Museum campus. I think I was one of about ten people there. And it is a campus well worth visiting.  OK, I didn't stop in the auditorium, which, as seen below will be featuring Sinbad, Shrek, Rick Springfield, and Rock of Ages.

The key to Flint having a museum campus is "endowment." This is GM's birthplace, and its founding fathers supported the arts and sciences. The history muesum is the Alfred P. Sloan (of the Sloan Foundation) Musuem, and it is good, quirky, unique, and even a little edgy.  They were running a musical version a movie depicting of the signing (singing?) of the Declaration of Independence with Paul Lynde-like actors portraying Ben Franklin, et al.  All this was in the middle of the wackiest doll collection I'd ever seen.  Some featured below.

What would a Flint history musuem be without a special muscle car exhibit?  Sloan did not disappoint.  Below are a souped up Nova SS as well as an AMC offering of George Romney's vision of muscle cars for everyone.

And like Lansing, Flint likes big wheel lumber-hauling devices, such as seen below.

Flint got its start much as South Bend, in the carriage-making business.  Here is an advanced carriage for fighting fires.

Flint's Red days are fully and sympathetically explored.  Here is a headline from some pre WWI rabble-rousing.

Flint was (and to a certain extent, is) home to big, big plants for Chevrolet, Buick, and others.

The "Sit Down Strike" of 1937 is fully explored and depicted.

Apparantly the UAW women's guild played an instrumental role in bringing the fuss to an end by smashing windows in front of the national guard who were pointing machine guns at them.  Not sure of all the dynamics, but it was dramatic and remembered.

Everyone had a UAW picnic after the strike was over.

Gov. George Romney was doing some business below in trying to quell some 1960's race riots.

All in all, you get a strong sense from this museum that Flint really was consequential in many ways throughout the late industrial revolution. They were at the center of a lot of big happenings, from the forming of the modern factory, to a huge war effort, to post-war booming, and late 20th century decay. Driving around town later, you see lot of grit, and a lot of activity. It is by no means dead. My Volt's gasoline engine was made in Flint. There is a Chevy truck assembly plant here going full tilt. There's a lot of tattooed citizens on the street, many of them looking ornery. The place has some spunk.

And it has a world class art museum, the Flint Institute of Arts.  It's funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, a major international philanthropy.  CSM was the Mayor of Flint, and one of the original partners in GM. He put together a wonderful museum that I found myself in for four hours. I think there were about five people there!

I started with a fine lunch, chicken wrap, fresh plum, jalapeno chips, and Orange Crush, seen below.

Then to the museum. I couldn't photograph the many visiting exhibits. One simply outstanding one was on American abstract expressionism. Featured were Pollack, Rothko, De Kooning, et al. And they played a fascinating 55 minute DVD from 1991's PBS "American Masters". I'm not sold on the art form at all, but I was sold on the seriousness of the artists.

They also had a fine exhibit mainly of Dutch masters of the early modern era. Rembrandt, and others were featured.  I felt like I was back in Holland, as I recogonized many of the street scenes. Could not photo these either, which were on loan from Louisville's Speed Museum.

The Asian pottery was shootable; some is seen below.

I liked the following rooms from the permanent collection.  Several photos follow.

I then tried to see the planetarium, but the last show had shown, so I drove to the Fisher Body Plant on South Saginaw Street, where the building once stood which housed the Sit-Down Strike, remembered below.

A nearby Chevy dealer took my photo with my Flint-forged engine.  The dealership has been in Flint since 1928, and is about 1/4 mile from the Sit-Down-Strike site. 

Here is the famous "Vehicle City" archway, actually one of a series of archways, in downtown Flint on Saginaw Street.

Had an afternoon crepe at the Flint crepery.  Don't let crepes fool you.  These streets are otherwise mean!

The crepe was followed by a one hour trek to Port Huron, MI, on the Canadian border.  I checked into the Marriott Fairfield Inn---ok, but not nearly as nice as the Flint Hampton Inn.  Port Huron's roads are under serious construction, and GPS is a guidance at best in such a situation.  I took down some directions to eats on the coast. The Quay Brewpub was tepidly ok.  My Parmesian whitefish was acceptable, but not spectacular. 

After dinner, I drove down by the river.  Saw a large freighter really moving rapidly down the river, but I was too far away to get a good photo.  The lighthouse boat below was going nowhere, so I shot it, along with the Blue Waters Bridge in the background.

Nearby is a stationary lighthouse.  I hear they are always picturesque.

into Michigan

I began my trek towards the Shaw Festival this morning, departing South Bend around 10 AM.  I decided to give my Chevrolet a tour of its homeland: industrial Michigan.  So onto the Indiana Toll Road to the oddly desolate crossroads of I-69 and I-80/90, and the first of many left turns, this one towards Lansing. I arrived in desolate downtown Lansing, home of Malcolm X, around noon. Had lunch at the George Washington Tavern, just across from this marker.

The lunch, salmon on a bed of eggs Florentine, was pretty good.  Then, I drove down the street to the large and largely deserted Michigan Historical Society and Library, pictured below.

Sunday was free day--free parking and free admission. And the museum was large and interesting.  OK, it needed a little polish since it seemed frozen in its 1989 opening state. Budgets have likely been tight.  But it was a full service, not too edgy, but not too revisionist museum.  Started with the glaciers and ended with Gerald Ford. And there was lots there to make one realize how iconic Michigan is within US History. I hadn't thought about it much, but Michigan entered the Union only in 1837--about 20 years after Illinois and Indiana.  It turns out there just weren't that many people there, relative to Indiana/Illinois, which had a lot of Ohio River settlers earlier. Anyway Michigan got settled later, and it was a different crowd.  No home-grown slaves, no rebels, just a bunch of Yankee abolitionists.  And they got fired up during the Civil War and before it, being a hot bed of the Underground Railroad.  They also built a lot of stuff, like the contraption pictured below.

They also mined a LOT of stuff, copper and iron or mainly, and built the infrastructure to get it to market.  Michigan was home to the "Detroit Jewel" stoves, much like what was in Grandma Powers' house.  An early version is pictured below.

They also had a lot of forestry, and a carriage-making industry, which evolved into the automobile industry. There was a whole lot on the labor union movement.  The museum claimed the UAW was founded South Bend, but I couldn't verify that on Wikipedia.  There was an extended set of displays of the Chevrolet Sit Down Strike in 1937, which was pretty lively. Featured was one of the leader's bloody clothing, among other things.

After the strike was over, Michigan got down to the business of thinking about strategies to defend its populace from nuclear menace.  A heat protection tactic is displayed below.

The Motown music exhibit was pretty good.  I was pleasantly surprised to see the Supremes covering the Beatles; see below.

Also featured was Lil' Stevie Wonder's (born Stevland Hardaway Judkins in Saginaw, MI) Chickering Grand Piano from his childhood home.  Ted Nugent got a lot of time, as did the Temptations, and others.  I then took a short jaunt to the state capitol building, pictured below.

Just across the street is a state government building dedicated to a Ramblin' Michigander with a son in today's news.

No sign of life here either, so I hit the pavement for Chevrolet Heaven, Flint, Michigan. Flint's old-timey hotels are likely past their prime, so I secured lodging in the "award-winning" and reliable Hampton Inn on the edge of town. Fine quarters and no complaints. I took nourishment next door at the Redwood Brew Pub, pictured below, along with my filet dinner plate. The staff gave me some fine recommendations for touring Flint and the "thumb" country of Michigan for tomorrow.