The one place you could have seen

I'd go back to the early '50s and ride along through 1965.
What a time to be coming of age in America. On the surface, at least.
That stretch from, say, 1955 through 1962 would have been a lot of fun.

 

There are other Detroiters on here that have better first-hand accounts of the place before the 1967 riots and the white flight than I, but according to my grandparents who came from farms in Canada to the city in the 1910s, Detroit was truly "the Paris of the Midwest." Wide avenues lined with prospering businesses, the mansions of Brush Park, the busy Michigan Central Station, the waterfront. It must have looked like a sparkling jewel in its day.

Even my parents, both born in 1935, remember Detroit as a very nice place in which to grow up. My mother remembers the peddlers with their horses, the milk deliveries, the corner markets, the trips to Hudson's (where she worked as a teenager), lunches at Sanders, dances on the Bob-Lo boat, the local malt shop and riding the street car with her father down Grand Avenue to Briggs Stadium or the Olympia for games. My dad grew up in Royal Oak and then Warren, and was in the first graduating class at Mumford (made famous by Eddie Murphy), which at that time was predominately Jewish.

However, it's easy to overlook the bad things happening there as well: the influx of poor white and black laborers during the Depression, Henry Ford's vicious attacks on the union organizers, the first Detroit race riots in 1943 and the growth of the western and northern suburbs after World War II, which hastened the loss of population and jobs when "the city got dangerous." And my father recalls -- as do I -- that Detroit's air had an acrid chemical and metallic smell to it from the manufacturing plants. Plus Detroit was a noisy industrial town: The steel stamping plants at night kept me from sleeping when we'd visit.

I can stand in the Roseland Park cemetery on Woodward Avenue in Berkley at my grandparents' gravesite and see the hospital in which I was born in 1958, and at the same time be less than a mile from Berkley High School on Catalpa, which now occupies the site where my great-grandfather's house stood when my father was born there 86 years ago. That's the blink of an eye for four generations, but Detroit is almost totally unrecognizable even in my lifetime.

 

Corky, that's beautiful. Shibe/Connie Mack was the stadium of my youth. My first game there, age 7, had Jackie Robinson in it. Dodgers won 3-2 in 12 on an Elmer Valo pinch hit. Can't remember names of new neighbors, but I'll never forget that. But honesty compels me to note that Shibe/Connie Mack was a complete dump by the early '60s.
PS: Hank Aaron hit the most doubles off the right field scoreboard. But I did see Allen hit one out of dead center that went over the wall, then over the little enclosure where they kept batting cage shit, then the higher wall behind. Center field was 447. Had to be 500 at the bare minimum.

 

I have heard that it was a dump near the end. One of the longtime copy editors at the paper where I work part-time is a die-hard Phillies fan, and I gave him a couple of the radio broadcasts I have from that park (including the final game of the Brooklyn Dodgers). He also shared that there was nothing much to it by the end and that it was a kind-of demolition by neglect. Still. I would have loved to have seen up-close the rotunda where Connie Mack's office was. Or see the giant scoreboard. Or sit in the upper deck in centerfield, under the roof. People mostly complain about going to these places, but I get such a kick out of going to Fenway, Harvard Stadium, Yale Bowl and Yale Field, Matthews Arena, etc.
In fact, I think tonight I'll head outside again once the wife and daughter are asleep, as it's 79 degrees out, and listen to the Giants-Phillies game from May 17, 1969 at Connie Mack. Gaylord Perry vs. Gary Wagner, with Russ Hodges, Lon Simmons and Bill Thompson on the call.

 

I've always had a desire to hover a couple of hundred feet above my house/town and see how things have changed all they way back in time year by year.
It's been a family farm since my great grandfather bought it more than 100 years ago. I am close enough to town to figure it was some sort of inhabited homestead dating at least back to the about the 1760s. Prior to that, I am certain - because we have a big creek running through the bottom of the farm - there was a Cherokee encampment because of some of the artifacts we've found.*
Beyond that, there probably wasn't much going on in terms of human activity, but it would be cool to see a dinosaur walking around in what would become my front yard!


*I have a museum quality stone ax head that we plowed up several years ago.

 

Although not exactly what you're describing, there is this British TV show that I loved to watch when we used to use Kodi to watch TV. It was on BBC4 (I watched a lot of British TV), called "A House Through Time." The host, David Olusoga, would take one house and through research, trace its history of everyone who lived there from the time it was built to the present time, and what their story was. The first series was on this townhouse in Liverpool, and the historical research that was done was pretty impressive. This is the first of four parts from the first season. All four parts from the first series are on YouTube, but I can't find the other two or three seasons. I've always felt that a series like this would be pretty popular in America (at least, on PBS or the History Channel).

 

Been there, done that, got the long-sleeve T-shirt.

 

Monitoring the Book Suppository Depository in the week leading up to 11/22/63 to see who went in and who went out.

 

It probably wasn’t nearly as glamorous as the movies made it seem, but I would have liked to ride one of transcontinental trains from the golden age of rail, something like the Super Chief or California Zephyr with a private Pullman sleeper, the Fred Harvey dining car, the glamorous, mysterious people on board (Hollywood wouldn’t lie, right?) and the whole works.

 

Minus the Pullman cars, you can ride Amtrak from NY to LA for $189 in a little more than 3 days.

New York to Los Angeles Train - Amtrak Tickets $189 | Wanderu

 

This would be the ultimate SJ outing. A three-day party on the train,
and then when we get to LA, hey look we're only 15 minutes from Tahoe.

 

I posted the pics on here a decade or so ago, but Shibe had a fire that destroyed part of the stands in the early 70s after the Phils left. The neighborhood also deteriorated, graffiti was painted on the rotunda and the field was full of weeds and trees. The pictures of the park are both fascinating and depressing.