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When Detroit's mayor described bold ideas for reshaping downtown two decades ago, it didn't make a front-page splash. The Free Press covered Dennis Archer's announcement in 13 paragraphs on Page 4E, inside the business section.
The master plan -- released by Archer and the Greater Detroit Downtown Partnership in his City Hall office two days after Memorial Day 1997 -- now seems uncannily prescient, a vision largely turned real.
The Freep's vintage clip (shown below this article) surfaces Tuesday on Twitter. It's posted by local urban scholar Patrick Cooper-McCann, who mines newspaper archives the way sports fans read league data.
Mayor Dennis Archer first unveiled his dream for downtown Detroit twenty years ago this May. Now we're living it pic.twitter.com/3d5A4OkGNW
— Cooper (@rethinkdetroit) April 18, 2017
Mind you this was *before* Hudsons's came down. Before the stadiums. Before Compuware and Campus Martius. Before the RiverWalk
— Cooper (@rethinkdetroit) April 18, 2017
In other words, the "reinvestment strategy" from the city's 67th mayor (1994-2002) and his business allies forecast what the future would bring -- and got it pretty much right.
Dennis Archer in 2010
The next morning's article by Daniel G. Fricker, deep in his newspaper's fifth section, begins this way:
Picture Detroit's Kennedy Square transformed into a tree-lined public square and redubbed its historic name of Campus Martius. It is framed by a new traffic circle.
Surrounding Campus Martius are new eight to 10-story buildings filled with offices, stores, restaurants and hotels.
Up Woodward Avenue, retail buildings and residential lofts line the street leading to the two new sports stadiums.
Next to Grand Circus Park, planners envisioned "a loft district of residential and work spaces." They also called for "a public promenade" along the river.
This city of the future was proposed four and a half years before Kwame Kilpatrick's election to succeed Archer, who served two terms. Six years after the redevelopment strategy press conference, Compuware moved from Farmington Hills into One Campus Martius, its new 15-story headquarters.
The direction-setting press conference was 16 years and two months before Detroit's bankruptcy filing.
"This is kind of breathtaking in a town where grand plans so often went to die," comments Michael Lee, managing editor of Crain's Detroit Business, as he retweets Cooper-McCann's scan of the clip.
Not every bit of the blueprint came true. It envisioned "new uses for the Ford Auditorium and a renovation of Hart Plaza," the Freep wrote. "A public gateway leading to the stadiums and the Brush and Adams intersection" also was listed.
Archer, now 75, retired at the end of 2009 as chairman of a major downtown law firm, Dickinson Wright.
The downtown-focused coalition of business, civic and philanthropic leaders still exists, now named the Downtown Detroit Partnership.
Fricker, whose coverage below ran deep inside the paper, died from colon cancer five years later at age 50.
