The emotional issue of building farmers-market sheds this summer in the middle of Kercheval Avenue is the starting point for an exploration of the six-mile long Detroit-Grosse Pointe border by Bill McGraw in Bridge Magazine.
The sheds blocked one of the crossings between the mostly black, poor city and the largely wealthy, white east-side suburbs, but the sheds are only one of seven barricades Grosse Pointe Park has erected over the years where its streets intersect with Detroit, writes McGraw, a co-founder of Deadline Detroit.
While the Grosse Pointes further enforce the border with ubiquitous police and periodic crackdowns on students suspected of living out of the district, the Bridge article notes the border can also be fluid:
The sheds fiasco arrived as the Grosse Pointes are undergoing significant racial change and Grosse Pointe Park is attempting to rebrand Kercheval as a regional destination.
While hard and forbidding to black Detroiters in places, the border has been more yielding in others. Besides shopping, dining and working in the Grosse Pointes, African Americans are gradually reshaping the Pointes, especially the Park, where 10.5 percent of the population is black, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. The Park was only 3.5 percent black in 2000.
The Grosse Pointe school district, which includes some students from Harper Woods, is 19
percent African American this year; Grosse Pointe North High School is 29 percent black. Ebony magazine sits on the shelf of the main library and a group of residents has formed a community group called the Grosse Pointe Black Cultural Association.
African Americans are also opening businesses in Grosse Pointe Park. The Rev. Marcia Fairrow’s Higher Grounds Ministry owns the three-story building at Nottingham and Mack that features a coffee shop on the ground floor.
Fairrow, who lives near the border in Detroit and, can look out of a second-floor window at the sagging porches and boarded-up windows of the homes Nottingham on the Detroit side of Mack. Behind the building, in the Park, Nottingham is filled with modest but stylish old homes and finely sculpted lawns and trees.
“You’re not going to see blight in Grosse Pointe Park because the city has rules and regulations, and they enforce them,” she said. “You’re not going to see garbage on the street in Grosse Pointe Park. You’ll get a ticket. In Detroit, you can have garbage on the street and nobody will give you a ticket.
Across the street from Fairrow’s building, also in the Park, Jai-Lee Dearing, a Grosse Pointer whose family runs Bert’s Warehouse in Detroit’s Eastern Market, opened Rockefeller’s Oyster Bar and Grill in August to positive reviews. A few blocks away on Charlevoix Avenue, a recently opened fitness studio, Rock n Ride, is also black-owned.
“I love Grosse Pointe Park,” said JeDonna Dinges, an African American and former Detroiter who lives in the Park’s Cabbage Patch. “It’s a very pretty community. Most people here are very friendly. Schools are great. I love my block and I love my neighbors ‒ single people and families, black and white, single moms, senior citizens.”
In the months since the sheds appeared, the episode has spawned debate that is taking place in city hall meetings, letters to the editor and demonstrations in both Detroit and the Park about the nature (and limits) of city-suburban relations.
Grosse Pointe Park’s City Hall is only six miles from Detroit’s, and many Park residents work and play in Detroit. Dick Olson, who has lived in Grosse Pointe Park more than 30 years, told members of the Park planning commission that he and his wife “love Detroit” and are heavily involved in its cultural attractions.
“We do not want to live in a walled-off city,” Olson said.
Hans Barbe, a 30-year-old music teacher, told commissioners that the Kercheval entertainment district should be extended across the border into Detroit. “What’s good for our side would be good for their side as well,” he said.
“The city-suburb divide is very palpable,” Barbe said. “Those walls, in their physical form, represent something inside of us that hasn’t been resolved yet in society.”
