Dimitri Hegemann founded Tresor, one of the world’s most famous techno-music clubs, in the abandoned bank vault beneath the bombed-out Wertheim department store after the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago. He has since turned a former East Berlin power plant into an 86,000-square-foot event space. On the roof, he keeps 120,000 bees, whose honey he sells in the basement nightclub. “We call it Techno Honey — a natural energizer,” he says.
For his next act, according to Jack Nicas, writing from Berlin for the Wall Street Journal, he hopes to start a dance club in Fisher Body 21, the dilapidated auto plant near the intersection of I-94 and I-75 in Detroit. For the project, he has enlisted a Detroit real-estate developer, a Detroit architect and a Swiss foundation that helps redevelop abandoned buildings. Hegemann is confident the contamination issues can be overcome, but if not, he said he would turn his sights to the deserted Michigan Central Station in Detroit.
“The Germans’ love of Detroit is palpable. When they were here it was expressed daily and often,” said Walter Wasacz, a Detroit music journalist who is Hegemann’s Motor City point man.
The Fisher plant is not far from the Packard Plant, the much larger -- and even more devastated -- industrial campus purchased last year by a Peru-based businessman who plans to develop it.
Detroit’s view of the Germans isn’t always as romantic.
Berlin gardener Erika Mayr is trying to get Detroiters to use vacant lots there for commercial beekeeping, arguing it would create jobs and improve neighborhoods. “Where there are bees, things are growing and getting more colorful and more happy,” she said.
But after eight trips to Detroit in 10 years, she said no locals have bought in. “They say, ‘If it’s such a good idea, then why don’t you come and do it?’ ”
Extra reading: The New Yorker on Hergermann, Berlin and Detroit's influence on techno
