As Detroit Anticipates the Grand Opening of the Book Tower, Let's Remember a Beautiful Concert When the Tower Was Officially Closed to the Public
Frank Nemecek Was and Always Will Be a Futurist.
Tuesday, March 21st, 2023 at 8:56 AM
East English Village
Detroit, Michigan
First, I saw a billboard from the freeway. I didn’t know that people could rent apartments in the Book Tower and Building. That sounded fresh.
Today, I found out that it’s totally a new option. The Book properties have been under renovation for the last seven years, a total refresh that cost 300 million dollars. Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock company bought the Book properties for 30 million in 2015. The building had no tenants from 2009. I now see why the Westin Book-Cadillac has announced a total refresh of their hotel. This refresh includes the upcoming debut of a new restaurant, Sullivan's Steakhouse. Washington Boulevard is going up a quantum level.
I want you to know, Dan Gilbert, that you already got your 330 million dollars’ worth. The memory of a single evening covers that investment.
Now if only the Statler Hotel remained to join in the fun. The David Whitney Building already houses the Aloft Hotel. For now. During my last visit to the property, I noticed a team of signage pros putting David Whitney Hotel banners on the windows of the Nicole Tamer Gallery. And I noticed that Tamer had nothing on the walls in the event room with all the beautiful views upon Woodward. I see that the Autograph Collection has plans to take the hotel operation up a notch, adding rooms and even a restaurant. We have to look for other signs that the district has hit an updraft.
So it looks as if the Aloft is out soon. That’s too bad. I often wait for the D2A2 bus in the lobby, use the guest computer to write articles and enjoy a free coffee. Occasionally, I make a sandwich from the spread after the social lions have gone to their next meeting. Yes, clearly the hotel requires a rebrand.
Just to think that when the Super Bowl XL came to town, the city polished up its image by demolishing derelict properties. Frank Nemecek went to the barricades for the Hotel Tuller, which fell during that touch-up. Nemecek filmed Checking In: The Story of the Book - Cadillac Hotel. The film documented all the well-meaning people who fought for the Book-Cadillac. Nemecek could tell the story of downtown Detroit hotels demolished and gone better than I, as evidenced by this article on “Why the Book - Cadillac Matters”. My friend predicted the future.
Didn’t anyone envision that someone like Dan Gilbert was going to show up in the future, looking for old buildings of character? By the way, Nemecek writes great science fiction. Enjoy reading the Roswell Chronicles.
The web offers all kinds of information about the Book properties, especially the official Book Tower Detroit Website that reports that all twenty-nine caryatid survived the renovation in style. During the 1970s, priests residing across the street at St. Aloysius Catholic Church used to refer to them as the Brides of the 12 Apostles. The best resource on old Detroit buildings can be found at Historic Detroit. Check out the article on the Book properties.
I’ve been in the Book Building, thanks to an artist and highly skilled culture hacker named Jeff Bourgeau. I met Bourgeau one day while I was exploring the art district in downtown Pontiac Michigan, once the home of Habitat Galleries. It was a great day for urban exploration. The same day, I met April Wagner of Epiphany Glass, working at a glory hole in a workshop she set up with her partner. She was listening to a NPR interview with Donald Hall, who was mourning the passage of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. Thankfully, the pair invited me in to watch the glassblowing action. Soon, the two moved out to a workshop on Dawson's Millpond in Pontiac.
I think I met Jeff Bourgeau in a storefront along East Huron, near the corner of Woodward. He was hanging out in the space with a friend, who I believe became his wife. I listened as he talked about his plans for the future. Although the space was empty except for the furniture, I believe I was an early visitor of MONA, the Museum of New Art.
Why am I so tentative about saying I’ve met Jeff Bourgeau? As I understand Bourgeau’s practice, the artist creates personas, and then he builds art world reputations around those personas. When MONA finally moved into a building on South Saginaw Street, Bourgeau presented a show for all of these artists he had impersonated. Although, again, I can’t be certain. Something told me that these artists were really inventions of Bourgeau’s mind, and I listened politely as the curator talked.
MONA moved often. One day, the museum announced its grand opening in the Book building. I only heard the announcement because Jeff Bourgeau had begun a collaboration with Chamber Music at the Scarab Club. I was acquainted with Nadine Deleury and Velda Kelly, founders of the musical series. We were fellow members of the Scarab Club at the time.
Because the museum celebrated new art, the first show in the Book made the audience into the exhibition. For a twenty-five-dollar donation, Bourgeau photographed portraits of everyone who visited the museum, all posed in the same way. These photographs went on display instantly, thanks to a photographic printer. I’ve never parted with twenty-five dollars so easily. And yes, I wish I had that image in my collection. Bourgeau accumulated scores of portraits to fill the walls of a great marbled wall chamber that he had managed to occupy during MONA’s brief residence at the Book building.
Deleury and Kelly delighted often in two artistic acts. First, the pair found musical manuscripts by forgotten composers to bring back to life. Second, the two scoured the Detroit scene for unusual locations with great acoustics and low rent. I wish I had kept all of the program notes I had stashed away and lost over the years as a fan of Chamber Music at the Scarab Club. I followed this ensemble on the run all over town, from the Unitarian Universalist Church in Grosse Pointe with its unusual sanctuary to the Sarah Smith House in Bloomfield Hills., a house that Sara and Melvyn Smith commissioned Frank Llloyd Wright to design in person. The couple met Wright at Taliesin. Wright called it his “Little Gem”. A. Alfred Taubman himself bought the window glass for the Smith House when funding stalled its completion.
When CMSC performed at the Smith House, the docent opened up the patio windows, each wide enough for a violinist or a cellist or a flautist. The patio had enough patio windows for a string quartet. A nearby drummer practicing drum solos nearby was invited to the concert. The cicadas sang back to the music.
The search for unusual venues with great acoustics brought Chamber Music at the Scarab Club to the chamber where MONA resided briefly in the Book building. We were a small audience seated on folding chairs. I cannot describe Deleury’s cello solo to you adequately, but you should know I coined the word Deleurious shortly thereafter. It’s a word that I’ve kept to myself until now. And I’ll never use it again.
No, wait a minute. I think I actually printed this word in the Scarab Buzz, a periodical of the Scarab Club I wrote and edited for a brief period.
The word Duede as Federico García Lorca developed it in Theory and Play Of The Duende comes closest to describing what I witnessed as I beheld that cello solo. Deleury was so lost and yet so confident in that solo, as if possessed by a spirit. The spirit of Duende. One can read the Lorca essay or pass an afternoon in Silo City of Buffalo, seeing who the Poet Noah Falck has lined up to read at Duende, arguably the most artistic cafe in America.
Dan Gilbert, you got your 330 million dollars’ worth when you wrote the check for the Book properties and their renovations. Hopefully, what Bedrock-Detroit presents at the grand opening will be as cool as the two-month stand of MONA in the Book building.
I really got lost in this essay. Duende lost.
