The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit

Micropolitanism

Farnsworth Street

In the mid 1980s, Paul Weertz, a science teacher at the Catherine Ferguson Academy, bought a number of houses on a single block of Farnsworth Street, on Detroit's depopulated and decaying Eastside. Weertz renovated one house for his family and rented out other houses on the block. He also began to farm vacant land on and around the block, on both property that he owned and property that he appropriated. Over time, other people involved in urban farming have moved to his block on Farnsworth Street, including collectives like the Yes Farm. The block is currently the site of a number of gardens, an orchard, and a population of people who farm around the area—a micropolitan urban enclave. These farms yield alfalfa and hay, fruit and vegetables, honey, eggs and goat's milk, among other products. The alfalfa and hay are used to feed animals at the Catherine Ferguson Academy, where a number of the blocks' residents work, while other farm products are consumed by the farmers and their community.

The development of an urban farming community on Farnsworth Street would be impossible without the availability of unreal estate on and around that street, not only for farming but also for the accommodation of farmers in close proximity. But few, if any, of these farmers are only farmers; Farnsworth Street is a grassroots live-work-play community whose diverse members exchange skills and interests and are thus able to participate in hybridized forms of cross-activism, with guerilla farmers, artists, musicians and bicycle repairers often merging projects and involvements.

Fourth Street

In the 1950s, the construction of the campus of Wayne State University and then Interstate Highway 94 destroyed most of Fourth Street, a long street running north and south on Detroit's Westside. A tiny one-block-long section of the street was preserved, however, isolated just behind Highway 94. In the 1960s, this block became a haven for artists, musicians and activists, many of whom were involved in the Cass Corridor counterculture. The block has remained an intentional urban community that occupies a small but complex structure of public and private spaces.

On Fourth Street, these spaces are tightly enmeshed with one another, so that both “private spaces” like front porches and “public spaces” like vacant lots function as living and dining rooms for the street's residents. Vacant lots on and around the street have thus become spaces for community gardens, fire circle, picnic table, volleyball court, chess games and dog park. The residents of Fourth Street also host an annual street fair that celebrates Detroit culture through the participation of local musicians, local artists and local producers of food and merchandise.

The isolation and fragmentation of Fourth Street are crucial to the community that has developed and evolved on the street; the physical separation of Fourth Street from its urban context has allowed its residents to organize themselves and their environment. The Fourth Street community, then, is able to support values, ideals and practices that diverge from the communities around it.

Trumbullplex

Trumbullplex is an anarchist-oriented collective house and performance and exhibition space. Its original five members purchased a complex of two houses and studio space that had a long history in Detroit's artistic counterculture. The sculptor and painter, Arthur Wenk, member of the activist artists' collective, Common Ground, purchased the complex in the late 1960s, converting what was an armory into an artist studio and occupying a floor of one of the houses. In the late 1970s, the complex was bought and sold several times, the last time to theatre director, Peter Malette. Malette had a stage and sound booth built in the former studio space, which he then used for community theatre productions. Malette, in turn, sold the property to an anarchist group in 1993 for the almost symbolic price of $2,500.

The members of Trumbullplex share in household duties, make all decisions and agendas on the basis of consensus agreement, and practice an impulsive collectivity in which group activities are less enforced than improvised. Trumbullplex also hosts a variety of activities that critically engage with Detroit, with its public space providing a venue for art exhibitions, concerts, film screenings and theatre performances, each funded only by voluntary donations. In addition, Trumbullplex houses the Idle Kids Zine Library, an extensive collection of zines and activist literature that was compiled at the now-closed Idle Kids Books and Records Shop in the Cass Corridor. Members of Trumbullplex cultivate community gardens both on their own property and on adjacent appropriated property; many members are also involved in the Earthworks Urban Farm, the Catherine Ferguson Academy and other urban agriculture ventures, as well as The Hub, a Cass Corridor cycling non-profit.

The contributions that members of Trumbullplex make to the city, both individually and collectively, are enabled and intensified by the physical location of the group on unreal estate—a site whose occupation is not economically constrained and so one that allows the attention and energy of its occupants to be directed outwards, with precise intentionality and heightened effect.

To relinquish the thought that the city is already understood is to open the city to curiosity, scrutiny, description and interpretation. The city becomes enigmatic, uninhabited by received ideas and uncultivated by conventional thought. The urban wilderness—a typical figure for the city of unreal estate—can be investigated from a station. This station is a neighborhood outpost, a toehold on the quotidian of others, a residency for those wishing to learn more about the city.

What can a stranger know? Temporary resident of an urban toehold, a stranger can never know what residents of the neighborhood around that toehold know. The knowledge assimilated while in residence at the toehold, however, is not less than local knowledge as much as different than this knowledge: another apprehension of the city, with its own particular uses and values.