It's not hard to find a good mulberry tree in a city; the challenge comes in finding a good place where you can go and safely harvest them with your kids without worrying about little pickers wandering off into a road or something. I knew of plenty of perfectly good mulberry trees along sidewalks near our house from the stains the berries leave on the soles of my boots, but it took a bit of investigating to find enough of them in safe, out-of-the-way places to do some proper gleaning in the city with the kids.

Our not-so-secret apple-picking spots are safe (they're well off any road). But we only knew of a few mulberry trees in desolate spots where we could hop out of the car and pick a few at kid height.

 

The real score came when we discovered that the parking lot of an abandoned hospital near downtown was full of mulberry trees. The parking lot has only one way in and out, so I was able to park the car sideways to block it and ensure that we would have the entire parking lot to ourselves. The only other person we saw was an old trainspotter watching and recording the cars that passed along the nearby tracks from Canada. 

Several of the trees had branches that were perfect for kids to reach. We brought a ladder, but didn't even need it. The trees were full of fruit and it didn't take long to fill our pails. Mulberries are delicious: sweeter and less tart than blackberries but similar in appearance. Also: no briers. With a rich, dark juice, mulberries are full of antioxidants. Their skins are very delicate so they do not transport well, and outside of the Middle East I think they're rarely sold commercially. Gleaning is the only way to get mulberries around here (they don't have u-pick mulberry farms, obviously), and we were happy we only have to drive a couple miles to do some serious picking.

Read More

Nothing I have ever done has resonated as much as the photos of what I called "feral houses" last summer. A quickly dashed-off blog post written while children tugged at my sleeves ended up capturing the attention of hundreds of thousands of people around the world and I still get hundreds of hits to that post every day. Even Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us, e-mailed me about them. With a new summer here, I am tempted to add to the typology. Here we even have a feral church:

Living in Detroit, you can easily grow numb to the things that seem remarkable to people who live elsewhere. With so many journalists and photographers parachuting in over the past few years, we have allowed outsiders to document these things and define them. Detroiters are, after all, used to all the abandoned shit. We drive past the grand ruins without a second thought. It can also be easy to avoid the parts of the city where these "feral houses" are because there is little reason to go there: nature is taking them over because nothing else wants to be there. It is often easier to just travel the web of depressed freeways than it is to drive through depressing neighborhoods. But I'll always prefer a side road I've never seen to a rut I've been in a thousand times. Seeing these feral houses is a part of our daily life in this city, and I feel compelled to document them.

[this post has a lot of pictures, click here to see the whole thing, and if you click on individual pictures you can see them much bigger]

"There are more than 400 liquor stores in Detroit. But if you want to buy food, good luck. In the entire 140 square miles of the city, there are no Krogers, no Safeways, only eight supermarkets, and they’re discount stores."  ---Chris Hansen, Dateline NBC, April 20, 2010.

This post is part of my ongoing response to lazy journalists like Mr. Hansen who love to echo silly hyperbole because it's so shocking (whether or not it's actually true). This is just a humble post about how we manage not to starve to death here in the city of Detroit despite a lack of national chains. "But where do you shop?!" is a question I get all the time when people find out we're raising a family in Detroit. It's a question I remember asking myself back in the late 90s when I first started coming here to visit a house full of artists, musicians, and urban gardeners that my friend knew well. I remembered mentioning some hand-wringing magazine article I'd read about "food deserts." But of course what I really wondered was, How far do you have to drive to get to the Kroger? This presumes, of course, that national chains are the best place to buy groceries. Over the last few years I've learned that's not at all true, and sometimes it's a good thing that Detroit doesn't have any large chain supermarkets. Honey Bee Market La Colmena is a good example why.

A few days after we moved into our current house, some kindly neighbors brought over a 64 oz container of fresh salsa and bag of house-made tortilla chips from Honey Bee Market La Colmena. From the first bite, we were hooked. I sat down the other day with Ken Koehler and his wife Tammy Alfaro-Koehler outside their Detroit grocery store, and they cracked open a tub of the same fresh salsa and a bag of their chips while we chatted about the history of the store. It felt just right.

 [This is a long post with a lot of photos, so click to continue reading on a separate page]

 

A few days ago we went over to the Georgia Street Garden on the city's East Side and a really nice group of kids from that neighborhood came out and helped us make a few hundred seed bombs as part of a small project to beautify Detroit. On its surface, this neighborhood is pretty typical of the city. It isn't shockingly empty like some of the more dramatic areas nearby, but you'll find no shortage of burnt-out shells of houses, or vacant lots where houses once stood. But to focus on those would be to ignore the reality that this neighborhood is not abandoned. Plenty of good people live in this neighborhood; plenty of the houses are well-maintained with proud lawns by proud people. There is new infill housing. There are churches and schools. But the most striking thing about this neighborhood are the gardens. Over the three years I've been coming here, I've seen more and more gardens popping up, some well away from the central community garden started by neighborhood hero Mark Covington back in 2007-8 (I first wrote about him here). Smaller vacant lots are getting transformed into new gardens, and more backyards are being tilled this year than last. The rooster's cry vies with that of the alley pheasant.

Still, despite the good that the gardens bring, it's a tough neighborhood, particularly at its edges. There's no getting around that fact. Like so many other neighborhoods in this city, the residents of the Georgia Street neighborhood must contend with the everyday realities that crushing poverty brings. I don't want to sugarcoat this post with any nonsense about how coming to this neighborhood for an afternoon and making wildflower seed bombs would do anything about the crime, or the lack of jobs and opportunities that these kids face. I didn't do this to "help" these kids; I really went there hoping they could help me and my children better understand the city we're living in, outside of the natural bubble we've created for ourselves downtown. I want to stress that I am not writing this today in search of any recognition for my humble efforts, but because I want you to see for yourselves how cool these kids are, and give you a vision of the city of Detroit as something more than ruins, prairies, and vine-covered houses. 

My daughter, a veteran of the seed bomb manufacturing process, stood by my side as I explained the basics. I could tell she was proud of already knowing what to do, and wanted to help show everyone the process. She's usually so shy, and I was pretty proud of her for jumping right in there among the big kids to get her hands dirty. 

I was hoping to make 1000 little seed bombs, but the kids developed their own technique of making bombs the size of baseballs filled and covered with native Michigan wildflower seeds. They were like neutron seed bombs. I also brought some peat cups to plant sunflower (and other) seeds in, with the idea that they could be stuffed in the cracks of broken porches or hulks of burned and abandoned homes. It didn't take long for the huge board we would use to dry the bombs to start filling up, or for my reserves of soil, peat, and clay to start running out (and I'd like to thank the anonymous Sweet Juniper reader who sent a $20 bill to Busy Bee Hardware to help fund this project). 

Once the board was full and the supplies were dwindling, the kids were ready to clean off their hands and get started learning how to work the cameras I brought for them. As I briefly mentioned in this post, I have been meaning to get some cameras in the hands of a few Detroit kids in order to document their own lives (I know this is hardly an original concept, but I wanted to do it my own way). I wanted to give the kids cameras with no strings attached, but still offer them my services to help them develop, digitally edit, and publish their work online and display their printed work. After writing about it, I received dozens of offers for working digital cameras and for a few days our mailbox was flooded with them. I received so many that I was able to take the money I had set aside for cameras and use it to buy extra digital media cards, film, batteries, and an identical carrying case for each kid. Thanks to all these generous Sweet Juniper readers, there were some really excited kids on Georgia Street that evening.  The kid in the middle of this picture, Benito, looked up at me and quietly said, "You mean, this camera is mine? Like, until I die?"

After the initial excitement wore off, the kids sat down with a book I'd made of many of the photos that I've taken in this city. It was pretty interesting for me, to suddenly see my photographs through their eyes. Occasionally Mark would point to something and tell them where in the city the subject was; when they saw this photo one of them said, "Hey, that's Tippy-Toe Ty! He's always asking for a dollar." When I admitted to giving him a few, the kid replied, "See, now that only encourages him." When Mark saw the first photo in this post he laughed, "I know that dog. My wife named him. Zeus." The things they knew about my own photos confirmed to me the reason I wanted to give them cameras. I hoped they would help them tell their own stories in a way I never could.

My wife finally swung by with a car full of pizzas, and when she got out she said one of the kids ran up to her and breathlessly reported, "We're getting our hands muddy on purpose! And some guy over there gave me a camera!" before running away. He didn't even know about the pizzas yet. The pizzas from Supino were a big hit among the seed bomb makers, and my son proved bold enough to get the first slice (even though he spent most of the evening hitting raised vegetable beds with sticks held in his muddy hands). Two-year olds. 

The Georgia Street Community Collective is so much more than a series of gardens that provide delicious and healthy food to the neighborhood every summer. The organization is essentially a counterattack against forces that have been besieging the neighborhood for decades. It shows how one good man in one neighborhood stood up to say "enough" only to discover how far from alone he actually was. The collective has made great strides in transforming an abandoned liquor store into a corner store for the neighborhood that will sell the sorts of things that the garden can't provide. Next door, the collective has secured and transformed an abandoned home it obtained for back taxes into a burgeoning community center. In these spaces, the community will continue to celebrate events like the annual Easter Egg Hunt, the school supplies giveaway (with free haircuts!), the reading and movie nights, the Super Bowl Party, holiday dinners, and all the other events that make this organization so inspiring. Eventually I hope to install some computers in the community center where the kids will be able to edit their own photos, but for now I'm just so excited to see how they document their summer in the garden and beyond.

At the end of the day, I was so grateful to Mark and these kids for spending some time with my family on this somewhat silly, mostly-symbolic project, and also grateful to our friend Meghan as well as Mitch, Gina, and Eva from the Powerhouse Project for helping out. I don't know if the seed bombs will produce any flowers, but I think everybody had a good time (which is all I really wanted). And who knows; maybe some of these seeds will produce something after all.

 * * * * *

I'm still getting more cameras ready to give to a new batch of kids, and I hope to be able to share some of their work with you relatively soon. I do keep getting e-mails about more cameras and I think I'm all set for now. If you are interested in contributing something to the Georgia Street Community Collective, I'm going to be giving you a really unique opportunity to do so in a couple weeks. So stay tuned.

So I've been working on some fun community projects that have been sucking away some of the free time I have to write blog posts. One thing we're planning is making a thousand (or more) wildflower seed bombs with some kids in a few weeks, but first we wanted to experiment at home before we drag all the materials over to the neighborhood where we're going to set up the seed bomb assembly line. Seed bombs, if you don't already know, are an old hippie guerrilla gardening technique of mixing soil, seed, and compost into a throw-able device in order to "plant" wildflowers in inaccessible lots or just overgrown places on the side of the road. As you've probably noticed from my photos, there are a lot of places in Detroit that look like this:

Illegal dumping is a huge problem here. I went through a pile of dumped belongings a few weeks ago and found wedding albums, tchotchkes, and unopened mail from a house in a suburban community where I presume the owner died and someone was paid to haul the contents away and didn't want to pay the disposal fee at an actual dump. I've also seen suburban rat poison dumped in the city. But many Detroiters are just as guilty of treating their city like a trash heap. I can't tell you how many times we've walked behind someone who just tossed an empty bag of chips or soda bottle on the ground just feet away from a garbage can. The best evidence of this annoying behavior is usually a chain-link fence somewhere near a bus stop on a windy day:

Well, Spring is here and we figure it makes sense to start tossing something into overgrown lots other than garbage. We started by heading up to Busy Bee Hardware for the basic ingredients.

When we brought our native wildflower seed packets, potting soil, and plant fertilizer (don't hate, you hippies) up to the counter and told Sandy what we were doing, she refused to let me pay for any of it. When I threatened to leave a sawbuck on the counter, Roy advised from across the store that it was definitely not in my best interest to do so. I promised to make our huge purchase for the full project at Busy Bee and walked out wondering when the last time a cashier at Home Depot fell so in love with the story of a project that she let the customer walk out without paying for any of the materials. At the store, Sandy and I speculated about how we were going to get the seed balls to stick together. She suggested using emptied eggshells and I told her the old hippies used Christmas ornaments. Clay was the consensus. I didn't want to go to the art store to buy fancy (and expensive) molding clay, and it occurred to me that kitty litter was just clay pellets. I went to the nearest pet store and sure enough, the cheapest kitty litter available listed clay as its only ingredient. 

We waited for the next sunny day and went outside with a bucket of potting soil, a bunch of different wildflower seeds, a big bowl of kitty litter, and a 2-liter of water (in which we mixed some of the miracle grow). The kid poured the water onto some kitty litter until it turned into nice plain clay:

We started with a few seeds, balled them up in the soil, and then surrounded the soil with a layer of clay. The idea is that when thrown, the hardened clay will break and the seeds will flourish in the soil (ideally, the soil would also have some compost rather than fertilizer mixed in). When we used up all the seeds, we'd made 60 or so bombs (each had about five seeds inside):

We lined up the balls to bake in the heat of the afternoon sun, and then went inside to wash our hands. After a few hours, the balls were grayish and hard, and we put them in their secret-seed-bomb satchels. I put mine in the old Freitag messenger back I bought on eBay back in 2003 when everyone was making simple text posters with Helvetica and the Swiss could do no wrong:

The girl put hers in a fanny pack we found at the thrift store. My wife said the only way it could be better would be if it had the Jordache mustang on it:

Soon (right before the next good rain) we'll be off to start seed bombing Detroit. I'll take before/after pictures of the spots we bomb to see if it works. There is, however, a part of me that won't be crushed if somebody tries to steal that tempting Jordache fanny pack out of our car or bike and then finds themselves wondering why we keep a fanny pack filled with tiny balls of poo.

I'm no professional hippie; if anyone wants to POLITELY offer some advice about how we could do this better I'd be glad to hear it. We're going to be getting a lot of little hands dirty making these in a few weeks and I want to make sure we do it right.

There's an old legend around these parts about a red dwarf who is seen before or during disasters that have befallen the city of Detroit. He's called the Nain Rouge, a child-sized creature in furry boots with "blazing red eyes and rotten teeth." He's sort of a cross between the Mothman and the Mobile Leprechaun. When I started telling my daughter stories about the Nain Rouge he was a harbinger of doom, but frankly the kid has never really been all that into doom so I had to turn him into a nice 600-year-old Francophone imp who lives in a hole at the base of a tree behind our house, smoking a long Peterson pipe and playing a wee accordion. Soon he was riding around in a chariot pulled by four pheasants and herding rabbits away from wily foxes. Whenever I suggest that he might have something to do with the fire that burned down the city in 1805 or some other calamity, she insists he's innocent. "He's just misunderstood," she tells me, a phrase that has become sort of a catch-all defense of any monster who might ordinarily scare her. Frankenstein, vampires, zombies, hobgoblins, mummies: they're all just "misunderstood." I sense a bleeding-heart liberal in the works here, folks.

Last weekend some 200 local goofballs and hooligans participated in a march to drive the Nain Rouge from the city. There was the promise of a marching band, costumes, dogs, and a good old-fashioned effigy burning. When I told the kid about La Marche du Nain Rouge, she insisted that we not participate in any banishment parade. In this household, we are pretty serious about not crossing the wee folk. Also, I feel fairly strongly that when you're a city hemorrhaging population as quickly as Detroit, you shouldn't be exiling anyone (even impish doom harbingers). So we decided it was the perfect occasion for a protest and busted out the placards.

On Saturday, some friends stopped by our house and stumbled upon our preparations. One of these friends happens to be really, really short and a really, really good sport and when she heard about our counter-demonstration in defense of the red dwarf, they headed straight for the thrift store to get a red outfit for her to wear during the parade. They even went to the craft store to get red face paint and extra placards. At some point she was worried she might make the marchers actually feel guilty but I was all YES, GOOD. Make them feel guilty! LONG LIVE THE RED DWARF! After we made our signs, I wasted no time writing up some literature [link goes to PDF of our flier] to hand out. I had way too much fun writing that (it's not often that I get to write in the slang of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century foppish dandy). I spent more time trying to ligature that text than writing it.  

The Friends of the Nain Rouge met up along the parade route and prepared some chants and our lovely Nain Rouge practiced glowering while smoking a cigar and drinking from a chalice filled with a fine wine made from the blood of early French voyageurs.

Here I am trying to teach the kid how to do a terrifying impish jig:

One little Nain Rouge in training was ready to give that angry mob a piece of her mind:

As the parade passed, nobody really took any of my literature. I think our protest was more confusing than convincing:

[three previous photos, credit Alex Wright]

The kid decided that the marching band and the people in the costumes were terrifying and hid behind her sign. I was left to shout "Don't blame the dwarf!" all by myself. Pathetic. I was all, "You guys! We have to stay in character!" and they were all, Um, we don't really know that man.

After the parade passed us we realized we still had an actual, face-painted Nain Rouge in our midst, so she drove us around to various Detroit landmarks for impromptu photo shoots. Oops, looks like it's going to be another lukewarm season for the Motor City Kitties (that's what you get for putting Curtis Granderson in pinstripes, you assholes).

After that shot with the Spirit of Detroit statue we were planning to do a shot with the Nain Rouge fist-bumping the Joe Louis Fist, but suddenly this weird voice came out of a hidden loudspeaker ordering her off the podium. Nain Rouge, please step away from the Spirit of Detroit. We were being watched! Was it the ghost of Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac? We hightailed it out of there and decided that if the Nain Rouge really were to appear in contemporary Detroit, it would probably be at a casino.

The Nain Rouge lost about $7.00, but her appearance foretold gloom and doom for at least 600 people chain smoking menthols and staring at her while losing nickel after nickel in the glow of a thousand jabbering slot machines.

[if you are at all interested in other stories of early Detroit history and folklore, check out one of my favorite new blogs, The Night Train] 

 

 

The buildings in our neighborhood aren't lit; instead security lights shine outward all night, towards the grounds and sidewalks, illuminating bushes and corners to deter would-be burglars, muggers, and rapists. Move along muggers, rapists: you'll find no cover here. 

With all this light, it's become clear the neighborhoods rabbits propagated well this year, their peppery coats even more obvious now against the snow. There is almost always one out there at night, but even in daylight we see them. I also keep seeing possums, and twice that old raccoon. In the morning, the prints in fresh snow show the exploits of this wild syndicate during the hours we slept. The dog, I think, sleeps with one eye open all night, watching their muscles twitch in the cold and dreaming of opened doors.

* * * * *

There's a trail of blood in the park where I bring the dog each evening, right under the trees where he harasses the squirrels. As the neighborhood's self-proclaimed #1 menace to small mammals, I naturally suspect him. "What did you do?" I ask the mighty hunter, but there's an innocent look to his eyes and the short trail leads to the silent corpse of a small rabbit, pristine but for the cavity in its chest where all its slithery guts were yanked out in a hurry. The next day I bring the kids to the park and the body is still there, a bunnysicle, and we stare at it, speculating about the culprit. "Was it Wendell?" my daughter asks. "No honey, it was something else," I say, and we move on.

* * * * *

I get a call from one of the two saints who live next door and suffer all our family noise. "Have you seen the fox?" he asks. He describes several red fox sightings. We saw him chasing something along the sidewalk; and we saw him a few days later on the other side of the neighborhood. I begin to ask everyone I run into on the sidewalks, "Have you seen the fox?" And tales begin to emerge: I was running along the river and saw a pair of them standing out on the ice; I opened my front door and there he was, darting across my path. Finally, at dusk a few days later, I glimpse him myself.

There's the culprit, I think, and wish him luck on further hunts. To a poultry farmer, he might be a menace. But here, in the heart of the city, he is a most welcome murderer.

* * * * *

I drop the girl off at school and her classmates are not on the playground. We spot them across the street, in a vacant field wandering among the shards of a great fallen tree. "We saw a pheasant on the playground," her teacher explains. "We followed him over here."

Half an hour later, the boy and I are out with the dog as usual, all bundled up, searching for fox tracks in the field not far from where I spotted him. We see squirrel prints; rabbit; Bichon Frise? We find suspicious paw prints under a female gingko, passing among the fallen fruit that smells like rancid cheese even now at 20 degrees. I want to find his den. A couple of neighbors walk past, the same couple we see out there every morning, and I ask them if they've seen the fox. "No," the man says, "But look up there."

He points high in a bare honeylocust, where a massive red-tailed hawk is perched and curiously watching my toddler stomp around in the snow. A few silent seconds later, the bird swoops down out of the tree towards some distant part of the field, where he scoops up a fattened black squirrel in his deadly claws.

This is the second in a series of posts responding to the idea that there is nowhere to shop where we live because so little national retail exists in our city (read here for more details). 

I never gave much thought to what was on the second floor of R. Hirt Jr., right above the spot where I've ordered dozens of pounds of cheese, cured meats, bacon, eggs, butter, and paid for many hundreds of gallons of milk over the years. Hirt feels like an old-fashioned store because it actually is one: the layout seems not to have changed much in more than a century that it's spent at this location. But I don't have a true sense of this history until retail manager Judy Jagenow takes me on a tour upstairs, past the "employees only" sign and about a hundred years into the past. "This is the apartment where the original Hirt family lived," she says, leading me through rooms with faded and peeling Victorian wallpaper that's been stuck there since 1890 when the building was built.

Looking past the boxes of imported olive oil and pasta, you can see what is left of the apartment where Rudolph Hirt, a Swiss immigrant, and his wife Anna raised seven children and built one of the few Detroit businesses that would survive from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first.

There are places where the plaster is peeling away and latticework is visible beneath. There is a hard-earned, honest patina to the place. Seven children were raised here. You almost expect to see notches marking their growth carved at varying heights along the original moldings that remain around the doorways; the moldings remain even around the windows that once marked the rear of the old store but now sit within an interior wall of a building extended well beyond its original shallow footprint.

"We ripped out a drop ceiling only to find another drop ceiling," Judy tells me. "When we ripped that one out we found the original tin ceiling. It had been singed by smoke from a fire back in the early days. The story goes that while he was escaping the fire, Mr. Hirt grabbed what he thought was one of the babies but it turned out just to be blankets, so he rushed back in and saved her. Both were burned, but she lived to an old age."

This story of this family living above their store appeals to me, though such an arrangement was not at all uncommon for the time. The Hirt building lies just west of a number of slaughterhouses; I've read that in the early days, livestock that hadn't been killed were kept in pens on the roofs of the buildings. There was once an Italian grocer next door (that building burned down in the 1980s) and a German dancehall on the other side. It is hard to imagine such a time in our city, and the fact that this apartment survives makes it all seem so much more real. Judy tells me that her grandfather would take the same route she does to work, driving his cattle from his farm in Mt. Clemens all the way down Gratiot Avenue in the days when the Hirt building was still new. The Hirt family's business traces its origins back even further than the building itself, to 1887 when Rudolph invested his life savings in a stall that sold butter, eggs, and dairy products at Detroit's central market. The stall proved lucrative enough that the dairy merchant built the current ornate red-brick Romanesque building for a new store with his own name carved into the stone at its gable. "R. HIRT JR." 

"There was no R. Hirt Senior," Judy tells me. "There was another, unrelated R. Hirt in town so he just added the 'Junior' to distinguish himself for the postman." 122 years later, there is only one Hirt in Detroit (and it's this store, not a man). This store still draws in crowds of people from the suburbs every Saturday. I shop there during the week, usually on Thursday morning after the truck arrives from Calder Dairy with all the sorts of things Rudolph Hirt would have sold at his original market stall: farm fresh eggs, freshly-churned butter, sour cream, cottage cheese, and (starting in late October) egg nog. I come in with a bag full of empty bottles and exchange them for cold ones with white-caps filled with natural milk (pasteurized, but not homogenized). During the week, the lines are less hectic than on market Saturdays and it gives me a chance to talk to and get to know nearly everyone who works there. They've watched my kids grow up and they know exactly what kind of cheese to give them when we come in to keep them busy while I order.

If there's anything Hirt is known for, it's cheese. And if you want some, the minimum cut is a pound.

At the cheese counter there's a 7-page list with more than 300 varieties from all over the world. Hirt's cracker department is practically larger than all of Murray's Cheese Shop in Greenwich Village (Hirt has also been around half a century longer than New York's oldest cheesemonger). As the major cheese wholesaler in Southeast Michigan, Hirt's retail store gives walk-in customers access to the same cheese selection as the restaurants and caterers who buy cheese by the 10-pound wheel. And at the counter you can ask for samples of nearly any cheese, domestic or imported. I once made the mistake of standing in line behind a French couple who sampled several dozen cheeses from their native land, grunting to each other about the fruity aftertaste of the Pavé d'Oc or arguing whether the Camembert was too ripe before placing a sizable order. The store even has a francophone employee for the Saturday rush.

All this talk of cheese may seem like this is only a place for cheese snobs. But Hirt is refreshingly unpretentious. After cheese, their next largest department is wicker. Seriously: the third floor is stocked floor-to-ceiling with wicker baskets.

They even rent the old German dancehall from the building owner next door to store their excess wicker:

It's pretty hard to be a pretentious wickermonger, no matter how many stinky cheeses you sell. Nobody here looks down their nose at you if you want a pound of colby-jack or if you only want the domestic Parmesan (trust me, I know). I asked Judy if any of the cheesecutters are total cheese snobs, and she struggled to think of anyone who'd fit that description. "Not really," she said. "Cheryl knows the most about cheese, she's a real expert. But she doesn't buy a whole lot. Nobody buys all that much of it." I imagine spending your days cutting the cheese doesn't leave you with much if an appetite for it. Cheryl's been working here since high school (her mom was a cashier here before she was). Judy and Jan have been here 23 years. One of the ladies who works up in baskets has been there 21 years. "We do get some turnover," Judy says when I commend such loyalty. "You have to not mind working with cheese." The store is still owned and run by members of the third and fourth generations of the Hirt family, mostly overseeing the warehouse operations and wholesale business.

But it's not just dairy products. Every day, fresh baked breads are delivered to the front door. At the cheese counter you can also get pâtés, cured meats, sausages, jerky, ham, liverwurst, salami and other cold cuts, pickles, tofu, and sliced slab bacon. The rest of the store features specialty goods for which the company acts as a regional wholesaler. Without a grocery store in our neighborhood, we just go to Hirt. You won't find any products distributed by PepsiCo. Nestle, General Mills, Kellogg Co., Sara Lee, Campbell Soup Co. or Kraft Foods here (though Hirt was the first Michigan distributor of Kraft cheeses back in the 1930s). Though it's technically a specialty store, the prices aren't crazy. Those big conglomerates' products are more expensive at the independent "ghetto markets" throughout Detroit than they are at suburban bog boxes because independent retailers can't buy in the volume necessary to make prices competitive. Hirt doesn't try to compete with the big boxes, but instead buys unique and desirable products in great volumes to wholesale for other retailers in the region (and they have a huge warehouse just down the road or that purpose).

They focus on imported and locally-produced goods, but I can go there with a recipe and get just about everything I need, from beef stock to soba noodles; dried cherries to gourmet vinegars; water chestnuts to dried spices; gourmet coffees and teas. It's not one-stop shopping, but it's a surprisingly convenient and high-quality replacement. It's a frugal yuppie localvore's dream, and it's within walking distance of my front door.

Every trip to Hirt usually involves some bribery. About a year after we started shopping there, we discovered that in addition to wicker, the third floor has a toy department, and my kids love picking through the bins of 50 cent toys that make great gift bag stuffers.

You won't find Mattel or Hasbro or licensed Dora or Disney stuff here. Most of the toys are well suited for imaginative play (this is where we stock up on pirate supplies), many are old-fashioned classics, and some of them are even American-made.

It's one of the best toy selections in the metro area and you wouldn't even know it's there. The third floor also stocks Pewabic Pottery, Michigan-made goods and souvenirs, jewelry and tons of handcrafted holiday decorations. To get upstairs you can hitch a ride on the old-school rope freight elevator or take the century's-old stairs.

When you get to the top floor, you can catch a glimpse of why the floorboards have put up with more than a century's worth of traffic so well: the planks are actually arranged vertically:

And what I love most about Hirt are its quirks. The cheesecutter writes down the weight and price per pound your cheese on an old-fashioned bill-of-lading but she doesn't touch your money; she bags or boxes it up while you bring the bill over to the old cashier window, where another employee punches a million buttons on some old-fangled counting machine and writes down the price of each cut of cheese or meat and then adds up the total. Unless you pay with a credit card, there doesn't need to be a microchip or electrode involved in the transaction. You can tell the tourists from the locals by how confused they get checking out.

My mom was recently with me during a trip to Hirt, and she was amazed by my interactions with the staff (who knew her grandchildren so well) and our ability to buy so much of what we needed in such a strange, old-fashioned space. It was a few days before Halloween, and David Devries, the great-grandson of Rudolph Hirt---a busy man who's often buzzing around taking care of business at the front of the store---stopped to hand all kinds of Halloween decorations over to my daughter who was so excited about them. "That's a dollar," he said (about a $9.00 witch). "For you, that's a dollar."

I feel so fortunate to be able to give my kids the experience of shopping like this. This is how everyone shopped once. We all knew the person behind the counter well enough that they could quiet your child down with a sliver of mild cheddar slid across the counter on a piece of wax paper. It may be cheaper to shop at the big box stores (where some have eliminated checkers in certain aisles, replacing them with bumbling computers). The jars of pasta sauce at the Costco might be bigger. But you certainly don't get as much.