POWER HOUSE REPORT

Memorial Day, 2009.

After a nice shish kabab BBQ and some beers, Gina and I decided to set up our long awaited Fountain of Youth.  Down the alley there are two little houses set back in the lot to where they but up against the alley.  Last year sometime they caught fire and have since been abandoned.  Because they sit so far back and are quite small, like the size of two garages, their front yards are huge and very green and lush.  Under one of the houses the water main has been running.  We have called several times for the city to come shut it off, but still they have not arrived to stop the flow of gushing fresh water.

SO today we are going to make use of this clean water source and create a water fall spring and thus make the alley into a canal of some sort.  We have been saving this day ever since our friend Ace from across the street gave us an old pre-formed waterfall thingy.  We took the water fall thingy over to the alley house with the gushing water and after an hour or so of wrangling with the plumbing we successfully installed a spring in the alley coming out of a burnt our house and magically creating a water fall.

Not long after we had it going several young kids and some of their older teenage syblings noticed the alley starting to fill up with water.  Curious, they found our water fall and immediately became excited wanted to help.  They brought over some snow shovels and some rocks and dug and built and splashed and played in the new fountain/stream/canal.   The canal didn’t last long though.  A sewage drain about 20 feet down the alley created a final water fall into the ground making a nice hollow waterfall sound.

This turned out to be a nice ending to the beginning.  Gina and I left them there splashing and playing and making a big mess.  Reminded me of my youth and how we used to build damns in the streams near our house and make a huge mess, coming home all muddy and wet.

Wonder how long this fountain of youth will last?

Long time no see, yes I know.  Yes we have been neglecting out interweb presence and we have focused instead, for the time being, on our physical presence and the building thereof.  We are planning for the FUTURE.  FUTURE PLANS.

Work on the Power House continues, but also slowed due to some interesting developments such as the potential help from a new DC electrical system company Nextek Power Systems in wiring and supplying the house with much needed advanced electrical expertise.  An energy Audit by the Warm Training Center was performed last week and we are waiting for those results.  The Power House community garden has been somewhat planted-although still underway. Planting our home garden, giving lectures, planning a collaborative public arts project in Brightmoor with artist Wylie McDowell called the Talking Fence.

We are also in the beginning stages of buying another house, which by the way has fire damage from a couple years ago.  This time for one US dollar with hopes that it will become the home of an ongoing artist/community residency.  More on that later.

ALSO:

We are taking the Power House Project/Design 99 franchise on the road with THE HEARTLAND MACHINE: NOW UNDER CONSTRUCTION.  This machine is a one of kind all terrain cultural contraption with tremendous extracting power.  What is that?  Were not sure, but we are sure that it’s gonna be awesome.  Within the next couple weeks will be taking this beauty down through the Heartland, stopping along the way to collect information about and for the Heartland.  Our trip will end in Miami where the Heartland Machine will become  a part of CONVENTION an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami.  It may look something like this:  And this our poster designed by Nina Bianchi.

The Power House now has a new front door.  One that actually fits the original size of the frame.  It took me about a week to find the time to actually get the door to fit and level, but it’s in and there’s a lock.  The Bosnian construction workers watch me in probable horror all week working on the door and today one of them came up and asked why I didn’t ask for help.  “It should have taken no more than a couple hours.  I have the tools, why didn’t you ask?”  I really didn’t have a good answer, I just didn’t want to turn it into a job, but was actually enjoying the symbolic and clumsy aspect of slooowly putting in a new entrance to the house.  More exciting however is that I replaced the old front porch light with a 6watt 12volt LED that’s connected to the big battery in the attic.  I’m trying to get away from the solar powered security motion lights and into something more permanent and constant.

Today was a great spring day.  One of those amazing Michigan sunsets that seem to hover over the houses, forever illuminating with a thin soft light that just makes you smile and stop everything your doing to just sit and watch the day turn into night.  As I was finishing the trim around the door John Babayan called and asked if I would come and take a picture of  him with his blooming peach tree.  I took one look at the sky and closed up the Power House and grabbed the camera.  As I walked down the street to his house there was about 6 kids playing soccer in the street.   John was in great spirits and stood next to the flowering peach tree as Lexy tried to play along with the kids soccer game in the street, but from within the fenced in yard.   I snapped a bunch of photos of John and his peach and pear tree and then played our own game of soccer with Lexy.

Before dark fell I returned to the Power House with John to show him the progress.  He gave me a lecture about security and making sure that the new windows had steel or something over them.  I told them they would be fine with a clear lexan layer sandwiched in the frame so you couldn’t tell, but also couldn’t break.  Didn’t seem enough for him though.  He hung out on the front porch as new friends and some old came by and chatted as I finished the door and installed the new LED porch light.

When it was too dark to work I went home to find some tape to put up the old 1950’s newspaper we found under the kitchen floor as a screen for the square window on the door. when I heard a large BOOM!  I thought it was a cherry bomb or something like that, some fireworks, but Gina didn’t think so.  I returned to the power house to put up the newspaper, when the neighbor across the street, the same one who couldn’t understand the slow and clumsy building technique I had going,  asked if I heard the gun shots.  Someone drove up and stuck a shotgun out the car window and fired on a house, then drove off.  He said in a tone that made me believe he has said this many times before, “Let them shoot themselves…fuck em…”, and then later he mumbled something about “…those niggers.” Other neighbors came out as well, but the strange mood of the evening seemed to make everyone feel calm and complacent.  We talked for a while about who could it be, and the recent history of gun violence and crime in the neighborhood then we went our separate ways.

I came home and told Gina what happened.  “Should we call the Police?”, she said. ” I dunno, you can if you want.” I said.  She then got irritated and confused by my strange mood and boldly stated “Your not going to call the Police? THIS ISN’T NORMAL!”

I agreed with her and felt guilty for being unmoved, but I was in some kind of hypnotic state produced by the surreal Detroit sunset.

What a strange couple of weeks.  What a strange month!  Gina and I feel like we got run over, beat down, sucked dry.  That’s not to say we didn’t enjoy it because we did, were just a little fried out, burnt up and crispy creamed.

Not sure what happened.  I think we learned a lesson about having people come and “work in the neighborhood”.  Not sure how to explain what happened or didn’t happen, or what we thought should have happened.  Not trying to be vague, just confused.  That said the fine young men and women of apparently controversial Detroit Unreal Estate Agency were productive in cleaning out a couple vacant lots, painted a building to be painted further and put a down payment down on a building and mapped and photo documented several blocks in the neighborhood!
Somehow the neighborhood seems less friendly this week.  Maybe it’s just the warming of the weather that brings out the rats, fires, garbage, and druggists, prostitutes, weirdos or maybe it’s just me.  Most disheartening however is that there has been an increase in break-ins, including our good friend John’s house who had His two back doors kicked in and lost some irreplaceable jewelry that he made during his jewelry days.  Although he has a beautiful German Shepherd - Lexy, for security, she was of no help.  John suspected someone had been feeding her at night for about a week as she stopped being interested in breakfast, but he thought it was the neighbor kids throwing her scraps.  In reality someone might have been trying and succeeding to befriend her before the big heist.  She is a very sweet dog although she still is young enough that she could be trained to kill future intruders.

I tried replacing his back door, but as usually with these old houses as soon as you take something apart you reveal years of problems.  In John’s case it’s the rotting and sinking of the back porch.  We discussed jacking it up and sure enough as I crawled under the porch to see what was up, there was already a jack under there with several things wedged in on top of some shaky cinder blocks which are on top of sand.  I’m not sure if we can improve on that system in the near future so my idea was to just add to the top of the porch.  If it keeps sinking, just add another layer to the floor.  Eventually maybe it will become a solid mass and then it will be done!  Why fight it, unless a new foundation is poured, which isn’t going to happen.  John didn’t want me to finish the job until we fixed the sloping floor so I boarded up the unfinished back door and put a 2×4 behind the other broken back door for security.

With the dissatisfaction of not being able to finish that job I started taking apart the windows and front door of the Power House.  Finally getting back to actually doing some physical work on the Power House, although the anxiety of wanting something finished probably is not the best attitude when doing rehab. Today after three days of working on the front door it’s in and it’s level and it works, but still no locks yet. Since everything was built together and hasn’t been replaced since 1924 except for Home Depot door that was slapped on before the bank sold it to us, everything else is dry rotted or too badly chewed up from previous fixes to reuse.  I spent half the day carving out a new threshold while the Bosnian brothel across the street looked on and made fun of my constant tinkering and leveling.  Finally after much fussing the threshold sat neatly into the spot where the old one laid for 85 years.  Now I need spray foam to seal the deal.  So I boarded up the door opening and headed back home for a sandwich before getting the spray foam and a beer.

Before I could go though I had to check out the daily neighborhood house fire.  Today it was a fire on McDougal.  I have always found fires to be strange community events, even as far as they are tragic.  Today I just found this tragic even though it was a vacant home.  Someone is setting fire to these vacant homes for fun, is all i could think, but the next house is not vacant.  I had no desire to talk to anyone of the many who crowded up and down the street to watch and trade information as I usual do.

On my way back I witnessed a weird car accident where a car full of kids getting out of school clipped an SUV tearing off the plastic front of the truck and rolled into a parked car.  It seemed as if they had no breaks, they just kept going, hitting things, finally running into a parked car. It was one of those weird scenes where the occupants of the car seemed to be in a trance as their car went out of control.

Back home I sit and write this note and drink beer with the cats, it’s all I can do.

The PHOTO is of Lado, from Georgia, one of the Dutch Art Institute students embarking on his project “What is your Future of Detroit?”

Ahh, the Detroit alley systems of old.  Much is to be found in a Detroit alley.  When we first moved into this particular neighborhood north of Hamtramck in Detroit (the Hamtramck Suburbs) Gina and I were taken by the beauty and mess that could be found in the alley behind our house.  People pissing on our black eyed susans behind the garage, dog poop, and of course the dumping of random garbage-chairs, mattresses, couches, tires, dead dogs, trees, food, and the occasional mysterious friendly pit bull(see entry below).   All this sounds kind of nasty, but somehow the alley is a place of wonder.  I didn’t think this was true at first, but every morning Gina takes Blondie down the alley all the way up to the alley nearest to Davison and back.  I would go with her, but I found this morning stroll just made me tense, because of all this garbage.  It’s not that I didn’t appreciate the alley, I liked to walk it at the end of the day as opposed to the beginning.  And yet she found inspiration in all this stuff, but most of all she was noticing the little things that changed, the little things that people and animals were doing with the alley that made it this place of wonder and inspiration.  Now I too like the alley in the morning.  In fact I like the alleys all the times of the days.

I especially like it when the stray dogs go running down the alleys or when Daniel our neighbor and his two hunting dogs appear at the end of the alley at Lawley with his dogs every night and several times a day, just checking things out.  Sometimes he would even have his super crazy bright flash light and shine it all the way down the alley from block to block.  Before Daniel and I got to know each other, or moreover before he remembered who I was each time, he would often shine that intense beam of light down the alley at night and nearly sick his dogs on me.  I would wave and say hi, but still was a little scared that he would mistake me for the other alley dwellers, the garage thieves and crack heads of the day and night, because I knew what kind of gun he carried with him at night.  I will just say it is not the same one he carries during the day.  Only on one occasion did I actually get bitten by his dogs.  I guess I was asking for it riding my back down the alley past his garage.  He had a big German Shepherd that is now deceased that chased my down and bit me on the thigh.  He didn’t break the skin and rip my jeans, but it freaked me enough to take evasive action and put the bike between me and the dogs just like I learned to do while watching Bear attack videos on TV.  Use the bike to make you bigger or at least as a makeshift cage between you and the ferocious beasts of the wilderness/alley.

I also like the alley in spring time when the Bangladeshi women start collecting branches, small trees and scrap lumber to make their squash trellises.  The green foliage is a really nice background to their brightly colored sari’s as they walk by dragging their trees.  You can see them walk from one end of the block to the other in full colorful dress dragging hand fulls of long branches and lumber.

Last summer, after the drug house down the street was finally raided, everyone’s garage started to get broken in to.  Most people however don’t really use the garages anymore as far as keeping tools or cars in them, but these crack-thieves really weren’t the kind of guys who did their research.  Still they broke in, often it didn’t take much to pull the rotten doors open or break the little locks.  Maybe they found a few good things to sell for one last hit.  I don’t know, but it was annoying.  Eventually though, they realized they weren’t getting very far with just garages and moved to the houses.  This sealed their fate… but that’s another story.  This is a story about alleys not crack heads getting smoked.

Come Friday we will have 14 or is it 15 new residents to the neighborhood, at least for two weeks that is.  The Power House has been in collaboration with the Dutch group calling themselves The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency for several months now, seems like longer now that I think of it.  They are all very much interested in this idea of social networks, social change through direct action and research and the artistic practice known as social aesthetics and of course the odd and elusive thing that is the Detroit Real Estate Market.  They came to Detroit last winter to study the city and learn more about the possibility of doing something here, specifically bringing some Graduate Students from the Dutch Art Academy.  Gina and offered our guest rooms and our knowledge of our little Detroit corner and left them to find the rest.  We hit it off and have since put into plan this invasion of artists that will work in the neighborhood for the two weeks, both exploring, building, and getting to know the neighborhood and Detroit in a socially dynamic and interactive way.  Our plan is that they create something here from their interaction with the community and the physical environment of the city.  We are planning cook outs and neighborhood dinners, a radio program, some film nights, tours and housing renovations, cleanup crews,  painting crews and photo ops to just list some general projects.  Maybe we will plant some flowers or a garden.  Maybe the 900 pounds of paint I picked up today will be used to repaint the neighborhood.

I have rented two apartments in the neighborhood to house the guests and am still working to clean them and prepare them for their arrival.  Beds and bedding still need to be purchased and made up, rooms to be cleaned and fixed up.  Make sure there are toilet seats, locks on the doors and running water, electric and heat, and windows…you know the usual suspects in Detroit Real Estate amenities.  This has taken me on a crazy path all in on itself and it’s only the preparations.

More on this soon….There are many direct connections to the below story “have we got a deal for you”.

A couple months ago in sub zero icy January, I noticed a dumpster across the street and three guys cleaning out the cute little brick house on the corner.

++++This is a nice house! It features a full basement, three bedrooms, pine tree in the backyard, air conditioning, all brick, hardwood floors, awning over the front porch with iron railings, several rose bushes throughout the yard and a big two car garage.++++

Everything was going into the dumpster, chairs, tables, beds, clothing, dining room table, toys. Looks like another eviction.  This time it was a family of five whom I had talked with on occasion when they needed plumbing help or a year ago when they got a letter in the mail saying the house was going into foreclosure.  The letter was pretty confusing, that’s why they asked me if I could understand it better.  I could not, but I was worried a foreclosure was looming ahead.  It didn’t really mention a time line or a bank or what was really happening. It just said you are possibly about to lose your home due to a foreclosure.  They were angry of course because they had been paying rent to the owner who might not even own the house anymore.  On  one occasion when I was over at their house trying to unclog their sink the “owner” arrived.  There was a huge argument in Bangladesh between the father and the owner.  The mother, Fatima (Not her real name, due to a court battle) translated a little for me.  “The owner said he doesn’t care, it’s not his house anymore.  He took the garage door, he doesn’t care, they can live there if they want, he doesn’t care.”

A little while after the dumpster was  picked up I noticed a for sale sign in the window.  I called and they said the house was in pre-market.  So I waited.  Several of my neighbors also called.  Then one day the sign went down.  A week after that I found the side door to the house was open.  Blondie and I walked in and discovered the entire house had been cleaned out, kitchen sink, plumbing, bars on the windows, water heater, electrical, even the thermostat was ripped off the wall.  The next day we put a new lock on the side door, crewed the front door shut and screwed the windows shut.  I called the number on the lock box that sit on the handle of the smashed in front door.  The woman on the other end told me the house had been sold.  To who?  She didn’t know, but said that it was a bulk sale.  So, the house belongs to no one.

I was standing in front of Zeb’s house watching him rip off the old siding to get to the original wood siding,which so far was looking pretty good, when Fatima walked up and asked in desperation if we could help her move.  She had to move because the roof feel in.

I asked her what had happened.

While the bank was kicking them out she went into labor with their fourth child.  She got into an argument with her husband and he refused to drive her to the hospital so she had to call an ambulance on her own.  By the time she got to the hospital it was discovered that the baby was too big for natural birth, but it was too late for a C section and the doctors were forced to continue with a risky normal birthing which resulted in the baby having a broken arm and shoulder and was in critical condition.

While she was in the hospital with their sick newborn, the father took the van and his stuff, along with their entire savings of $7,000 and left.  When Fatima returned home her stuff was on the sidewalk and her husband, their family mini van and all the money was gone.  She was left with her clothes and bed and a small Toyota, a sick newborn and three other kids, ranging from 3-7 years old.

She was able to find a new rental down the street and moved in.  On the day she asked for us to help her move the ceiling of the kitchen fell in due to a water leak.  She panicked and decided to find another place to live.  The landlord was unsympathetic, however to his credit, she did not give him time to repair the problem.  Instead she just left.  As Zeb and I were moving her stuff, the landlord showed up and asked why we were helping as he knew us from the neighborhood.  He said she was crazy and was late on the rent.

Zeb and I arrived at Fatima new place just a couple miles down in Hamtramck.  It was an OK place, but when we were bringing her bed and crib into her bedroom I noticed major peeling paint.  This is an old house and this is not good, I told her.  The baby cannot sleep in here.  The city will have to come in and inspect.

That day we were able to move everything to her house except for the TV and TV stand.  Later in the week after several calls from Fatima I finally had time a little time to get the TV.  Gina and i picked up the keys and grabbed the TV, another crib, a stroller and whatever else we could fit into the bed of our truck.  When we got to her house we hooked up the TV.   I was able to get three channels, but not ABC which in an hour was going to air an episode of 20/20 titled “Living on the Edge” that included a piece about the power house project and how artists were moving into the neighborhood and fixing up foreclosed homes.  She made us Tea, but we had to leave to catch the airing of “Living on the Edge”.

I told her next time we come we will have tea party and bring a dining room table with chairs.

On Saturday we decided to go ahead with our plan to cut out the exterior wall to the former bathroom.  We had already cut the wall dividing the bathroom and the kitchen to expand the eating area and now we have an opening to the outside where the food will come from.  This  past Saturday March 18th was particularly attractive not only because it was a beautiful day, but also because the show 20/20 from ABC news would be there to record it.  Seemed like a great dramatic visual.  There is a window waiting to fit into the new hole that we found on Craigslist for free.  Perfect!

First we got Jon Brumit to smash the interior plaster off the lathe. Then I proceeded to slice ever so carefully and sort of straight a rectangle following the studs.

The wall was carefully lowered and now we have a drawbridge!  Walla.

Thanks for the advice, Gordon Matta Clark.

Ever since the NyTimes article we have been swamped with phone calls and emails for news time. Were doing our best to keep up. There’s much to tell, but for now we give you this…

Thanks to Toby’s article in the New York Times (see below) I woke up at 7:30am to talk with Trudi Daniels of Mike in the morning on the WRIF! I was bumped back by more Kwame text messages, but came on at 9:30.  All the better anyway to give me time to wake up and eat half a bagel and squeeze a grape fruit. We discussed the Power House, crime and the future of sustainable housing in Detroit.  Thanks Trudi!

I wonder if my favorite Hamtramck liquor store is open that early, commonly known as the “rock and roll liquor store” due to THE WRIF playing at a very loud level in the store, louder as the night goes on.  If they are open at 9:30am,  there is a very good chance my voice was blasted into the ailes of liquor, beer and dish soap for all the early morning drinkers to hear as well as the friendly employees behind the plexy. Thanks rock and roll Liquor store!