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Lighting designers Ron Harwood, left, and Kenneth Klemmer resurrected Detroit's 1890s streetlamps, seen here on Michigan Avenue, elbowing their "cobra-head" predecessors, which will soon be taken down.Countdown to Super Bowl XL
Lighting the way
Detroit's new vintage streetlamps seen as a beacon of hope
Towering, exuberant lightpoles now crown Detroit's rebuilt Washington Boulevard.
Rochester renovated its downtown with whimsy.
Ann Arbor jump-started Main Street with modern acrylic globes banded by metal.
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Eddie Reeves slips off his unicycle and gives the avenue he's been riding up a once-over. He likes what he sees. The street, says the Corktown resident, "has a London look."
That may be the biggest compliment ever paid to this hardscrabble stretch of Michigan Avenue west of Tiger Stadium, but Reeves isn't talking about the boarded-up storefronts.
He's talking about the streetlights.
Marching proudly in front of mostly shuttered, brick commercial buildings, is a parade of new streetlamps that look, in all their delicate finery, like they blew in from the 1890s. Which, in a way, they did.
A host of downtown Detroit thoroughfares are suddenly more handsome, from Broadway to a completely reborn Washington Boulevard to Gratiot Avenue. Even Woodward around Orchestra Hall and the New Center has been spruced up. And while the streetscape improvements include more than just street lamps, it's the lights that are most likely to grab attention.
It's easy to applaud good-looking streets, of course. But skeptics might well ask whether this facelift would've ever happened without the upcoming Super Bowl -- or if these aesthetic improvements make any sense in a city that's laying off police and firefighters.
City officials stress that money for capital improvements such as streetscapes comes from completely different sources than those that fund the fire or police departments, and that one does not rob from the other. They are happier, however, to concede the influence of February's NFL extravaganza.
"Oh, it had a big influence," says Detroit interim Chief Operating Officer Al Fields with a laugh.
"We're not just doing this for that one weekend, of course," says the man responsible for pushing the streetscape improvements through. "But I have been able to use the Super Bowl as carrot and hammer at the same time."
Bright beginnings?
The cynical might snap that in a knocked-around town such as Detroit, pretty lights amount to so much window dressing. But others -- including Lauren Adkins at the National Trust for Historic Preservation -- argue that in a city frantic for development, classy infrastructure is often the bait that attracts investment.
"Putting in streetlights doesn't change everything overnight," says Adkins, a program officer at the Trust's Main Street Center, which works to breathe life back into lackluster commercial streets.
"But the public sector can act when the risk is very high, and nobody else wants to invest in the neighborhood. Then those very same public amenities attract developers and investors."
In part, that seems to have been the case with Ann Arbor. Twenty years ago, Briarwood Mall had nearly bled Main Street dry, giving the city's historic center a down-at-the-heels look.
But in 1990, the city replaced the old generic streetlights with strikingly modern ones topped by clear acrylic globes.
The new lamps helped define downtown Ann Arbor as both historic and contemporary, says Elaine Selo, who's run Selo Shevel Gallery on Main Street since 1982.
"They really enhanced the sense of street life," she says, "and made Main Street a destination location."
It's the sort of renaissance Phillip Cooley can only pray for.
Standing outside Slows Bar BQ, his just-opened Michigan Avenue restaurant near Detroit's old train station, the self-styled "microdeveloper" maintains that handsome streetlamps amount to more than mere symbolism.
What neighborhoods like his need more than anything, Cooley says, are visible signs of hope.
"It's so down around here that the slightest thing helps," he says. "The lights are great. They'll help with crime, and the architecture blends with the neighborhood."
They blend, in fact, because they're replicas of the streetlamps that likely lined Michigan Avenue 100 years ago.
Right now, the Michigan lights run from the Lodge Freeway west to about 20th Street. Al Fields says the hope is to bring them all the way downtown sometime in the next two years, depending on funding -- as well as filling in more of Woodward Avenue north of Grand Circus Park over time.
It started with Comerica Park
Before breaking ground on Comerica Park, Mike Ilitch called in Ron Harwood of Illuminating Concepts to talk lighting. As Harwood recalls it, Ilitch had in mind modern lights to ring the proposed stadium.
But Harwood directed Ilitch's attention out the window.
"I took Mr. Ilitch over to the corner," Harwood recalls, "and pointed out the old lamp standard in the alley. I said, 'That's probably been there since 1895.' "
The streetlight was old, beaten to pieces, and no longer worked. But Harwood saw an opportunity to recreate the look of Detroit's earliest streetlighting system.
"Mr. Ilitch never blinked."
Thus was born the "Comerica Light," which Detroit has adopted as the standard for avenues -- apart from the downtown Woodward strip, which has its own taller, grander streetlamps, first erected about 1925.
Kenneth Klemmer, Harwood's design dirctor, scoured the city for the 19th-century standards, many of which, he says, consisted of cored shafts of Douglas fir pounded right into the cast-iron base.
You can identify the old poles -- still standing in some residential neighborhoods -- by the climbing spikes running up the shaft, necessary because the arc-light electrodes at the top needed frequent fiddling.
Klemmer crafted renderings of the poles and lights, which were then manufactured by an Ohio lighting company at its plant in Matamoros, Mexico.
And that's how Michigan Avenue -- and Gratiot and Broadway -- got spiffed up.
The right look
On Washington Boulevard, however -- Detroit's grand old shopping street -- Klemmer decided the Comerica Light was "a little too colloquial for a high-style street like that."
So he convinced the city and the landscape architects who did the historic redesign, Hamilton Anderson Associates, that a taller, more exuberant lightpole would be more fitting.
The result is a lamp that borrows the base and standard of the 1925 Woodward lights and crowns them with classic "acorn" globes of the sort that used to be typical on Main Streets throughout America.
The tallest poles, scattered here and there, sport five globes arranged in wedding-cake fashion.
If new streetlamps seem a bit like dolling up a worse-for-wear dowager in gown and pearls, there's no denying she looks better afterward, even if wrinkles and scars are still visible.
Harwood maintains that his "new-old" lights suggest hopeful momentum.
"They're sentinels," he says, "that say all the stuff behind them is good. And while it may not be restored yet, it will be soon."
Not everybody, of course, is bowled over.
Waiting for the downtown bus at Michigan Avenue and 18th Street, near the Jeffries Expressway underpass, Detroiter Ellis Burton gives the lights a dismissive look.
"I hadn't really noticed," he says with a snort.
Sweeping the floor at ABG Food, however, Clarence Brown says he and other employees noticed the new lamp standards the minute they went up.
"We admired them. It's like the 1920s," says the Detroiter with the incandescent smile.
"Thank God for the Super Bowl," he adds with a laugh.
"Otherwise, we'd still just have three working lights on this block."
You can reach Michael H. Hodges at (313) 222-6021 or mhodges @detnews.com.
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