<
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/12/arts/design/dreamtroit-a-low-cost-bohemia-for-artists-revs-up-in-motor-city.html>
"Maurice Cox, the former planning director of the city of Detroit, remembers
the first time Matthew Naimi wandered into his office in paint-splattered
overalls in 2018, with fingernail polish, a kaffiyeh on his head, and his bare
arms a constellation of tattoos. When Naimi told him that he wanted to develop
a multimillion-dollar low-cost housing complex for artists out of one of the
city’s most dilapidated automobile factories, long abandoned, “it was bordering
on satire,” Cox recalled.
But Naimi, 51, who is of Iraqi heritage, and who runs a community recycling
program, was dead serious. So was his partner, Oren Goldenberg, 41, a filmmaker
and events producer who devoted his 20s to revitalizing a local synagogue. (His
father is Israeli.)
And together, this odd couple of historic preservation has transformed the 1908
Lincoln Motor Company factory into Dreamtroit, a $31 million affordable haven
for artists. Seven tumultuous years in the making, the nearly four-acre campus
they own and have developed now has 76 studio lofts, retains its
graffiti-splashed interior walls and is crowned with a steel sculpture — the
“Freak Beacon” — inspired by the TV Tower in Berlin.
Detroit’s decaying factories have long served as photogenic backdrops for the
motor city’s “ruin porn,” with local officials regarding them as eyesores ripe
for demolition and redevelopment. Dreamtroit represents a new direction, its
buildings “keystones of the city’s automotive industrial heritage seen as
places of possibility,” said Daniel Campo, an associate professor of design and
planning at Morgan State University, in Baltimore.
Goldenberg and Naimi exemplify what Campo, in a recent book, calls
“Postindustrial DIY,” an entrepreneurial improvisatory spirit forging a path in
a “post-abandonment city,” he said. Dreamtroit, where residents started moving
in last year, and officially opened last month, is in the vanguard of several
developments poised to transform moribund automotive facilities into apartments
and lofts."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-listening-to-yellowstone-wolves/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
