Detroit's Guardian and Fisher Buildings

I have to make an embarrassing confession. I have lived in Ann Arbor for the past 3.5 years, yet the last time I was in Detroit proper was 2005. I was 20 years old and had just taken the Amtrak from Champaign, IL to Detroit. I was waiting to be picked up by my friends for a trip over the border into Windsor. I will leave the rest of that story for another time.

That's why I was happy when my friend Lisa and her fiance Ben presented me with a reason to do some exploring in Detroit today. A company called Pure Detroit does free tours of the city's iconic skyscrapers, and we decided to go check out the Guardian building and the Fisher building.

The Guardian Building

The Guardian Building sits at 500 Griswold St. in the Financial District of Detroit. It was designed by architect Wirt Rowland, and it was finished in 1929. It is an awesome mix of Art Deco and what they call "Mayan Revival." I was pretty much blown away as soon as I entered the building.

The lighted clock in the lobby gate was made by Tiffany.

The colors, in any other setting, would clash horribly. But for some reason, in this building, they totally worked. There were almost too many places to look; my brain was overloaded. Not in a bad way, but in the kind of way where you wish you had more time to explore the building. 

I was surprised (and a little sad) to find out that the building is only about 50% occupied with tenants. The building has had several owners over the years. I believe it was originally built for the Union Trust Company, which had the motto "safety and security." This motto is reflected in several metal sculptures showing warriors holding a sword and a key. You can see two of these warriors standing guard on either side of the metal gate in the above photo. 

Currently the building is owned by Wayne County, and it uses the building as its headquarters.

Michigan mural thingy on the wall!

After our tour of the Guardian, we had some time to kill before our tour of the Fisher building. We decided to get lunch at Motor City Brewing Works, which has a pretty impressive beer sampler and a great gyros pizza.

The three of us split it...I swear!

The Fisher Building

Next we were off to the Fisher building, which is in the New Center area of Detroit. Even though we were trying our best to get there on time, we still arrived a few minutes late, and we accidentally hit the tour guide with the building's main revolving door. 

The Fisher building is another breathtaking example of Art Deco extravagance. It was designed by Albert Kahn, the same guy who did the amazing William L. Clements Library (and many other buildings) on the UM campus. The construction of the building was financed by the Fisher family, who made an INCREDIBLE amount of money selling the Fisher body to GM. It was finished in 1928.

Love this view.

Gold relief elevators? We got that.

A huge perk to the Fisher building tour is that you get to go to the 26th floor and see a 360-degree view of Detroit from the office space windows. The Fisher also has some amazing mosaic tile work on the main floor, and we all know how much I <3 mosaic tile works!

Mmm...tiles....

I would definitely recommend taking a Saturday morning/early afternoon to go do these tours. The tour guides knew a whole lot about the buildings, and they really seemed to love talking about them. And you can't beat the price...

I'm glad that these buildings were built when they were. If the timing had been just a bit off, the events of late 1929 might have prevented these amazing building from being what they are today.

Now, in the exercise of editing myself, I only included my favorite photos in this blog. If you are interested in seeing more that we took today, check out the following albums:

The Guardian Building

The Fisher Building

Materials Recovery Facility

A few weekends ago, I talked my husband Matt into going to an event at the Materials Recovery Facility in Ann Arbor. We were going to get a tour of the plant, and, best of all, we were going to "create a mosaic tile from clay and found and recycled materials." For some reason, this is what I was expecting my final product to look like (maybe mine would have more dragons? I wasn't sure yet...):

Sweet piece of art found in my mother-in-law's bathroom.

So we woke up at the crack of dawn (okay, 10 a.m.) and headed to the MRF.  There's a long road near the intersection of Platt and Ellsworth that you take for about a mile to get to the MRF building. As we walked up to the entrance, two volunteers greeted us excitedly. They led us up stairway to the community room, and the whole way up I just kept thinking, "Wow, this is a great deal! A tour of the facility AND an amazing piece of dragon art to take home and hang on our wall. Totally free!"

As soon as we stepped in to the community room, Matt grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard. I couldn't look at him, because I was pretty sure that I would burst out laughing. Instead, I slowly nodded my head while looking around and taking stock of the room. We were the only adults, but the room was crowded. Crowded with a Cub Scouts group. I say Cub Scouts because, as a proud former Girl Scout and pseudo-Venture Scout, I know there was no way that these little guys were old enough to be legit Boy Scouts. There were some male chaperones, but they were mostly in the corners of the room on their phones, so I don't really count them as participants in the craft du jour. There was also a group of very small girls with their mother, who WAS doing the craft. Not sure if that really counts, though.

We sat down in some [kiddie] chairs at an empty [kiddie] table and prepared our paper bags on which we were to practice our mosaics.

A very good sport.

We grabbed some "recycled materials" from which we were to create our mosaic tiles.

PINK FEATHER FOR THE WIN, but buttons? Really?

I made sure to grab the only pink feather that I saw, knowing that if I didn't jump on that shit right away, one of those little girls most definitely would. I also grabbed some buttons, but I wondered if these were really recycled materials from the plant. Was there someone standing at the conveyor belt grabbing all the buttons they saw from the piles of other recycled materials? Anyway, back to my craft.

So thankful for my big pink feather!

Not sure exactly what happened to my dragons, but I am happy enough with the final result. Matt engi-nerded the project and arranged all his recycled materials on the brown bag. He then took his little disk of [foam] "clay" and pushed it down really hard on all his little pieces. I don't think he was all that pleased with his result, since he wouldn't let me take a photo of it at that time. So instead I took a photo of it when we got home, because I think it is quite nice.

So pretty!

While we were making our craft, one of the volunteers led a discussion on recycling. "What is recycling?" "What kinds of things do your parents recycle?" At this point I remembered that we were two adults in a sea of children, and I should definitely not be raising my hand.

We then went on a tour of the recycling plant. [BTW, people! Rinse before recycle! The smell was awful, and I feel so bad for the people working there!] 

The tour was really interesting, and Matt made it even more entertaining by pretending to push a lot of forbidden buttons.

Tsk, tsk!

So this idea of mine for an adventure was a bit of a fail, but it was what made me decide to start this blog. Even though I totally misunderstood the activity description (damn you, dragons), we still had a lot of fun! The volunteers at the MRF were great, too, and if I had kids I would definitely bring them to an activity like this. We did get two sweet pieces of art that I still plan to hang in our apartment...

Since Matt was such a good sport (and only made fun of me for about an hour as opposed to all day), I treated him to lunch at Corner Brewer, AND I let him beat me twice in chess. Overall, a good Saturday morning!

Post One

Welcome to my blog! 

I moved to Ann Arbor about 3.5 years ago, but I still feel that there is so much more to discover and experience here in Tree Town. And so much more craft beer to drink. Therefore I am challenging myself to try 2-3 new things a week and to report back about my antics and shenanigans.

Hopefully I can bully my husband and friends into coming along for part of the ride...

Suggestions/recommendations greatly appreciated!