Priorities a head-scratcher

There's a house on 18th Street that deserves better.

Between Bagley Street and West Vernor in southwest Detroit, 18th only runs for a tenth of a mile. On one side of it, there's a paper company. What's left on the other are three houses and a shell.

The nicest of the three has clean white siding, a hidden courtyard with sculptures, and dozens of pots and planters full of flowers. Most of the flowers are plastic, but they're pretty anyway, with happy bursts of red and pink and purple.

Looming over the nice house is a ruin. It used to be white, too, but that was before it caught fire twice. Now it's a charred hulk, surrounded by weeds and brush and tall dead trees, with the upper floor completely open on one side as though it were some sort of giant urban dollhouse. It's been that way for two years.

Four-fifths of a mile from the pristine house and its rotting neighbor, they're tearing down Tiger Stadium.

Memories tumble down

By the end of last week, the metal jaws of the long-necked wrecking machine had torn through half of what was left standing after the first round of demolition. A sweeping mound of rubble -- a dune of it -- stretched from home plate to beyond the third base dugout.

Andy Kumm of Berkley pulled his GMC Jimmy to the curb on the centerfield side Friday, unloaded a ladder, and climbed to the third rung so he could peer over the screened-off chain link fence and shoot photos of the destruction. Kumm, 41, was with his son Eddie, 11, who was looking through a hole in the green plastic screen.

"He was able to go to one game here when he was 2," Kumm said, in 1999, the last season the turnstiles clicked. "He doesn't remember it, but you can still see the section in the upper deck where we sat."

Preservationists had thought there might be a market for that sort of memory. The city never pictured anything on the corner but a flat, empty lot, and it embraced the chance to create one, even as thousands of other sites go begging for a bulldozer.

You have to wonder what might have happened if Detroit had actually worked with the people who loved the ballpark years ago, instead of repelling them. Some of the proposals were all but written in crayon, but credible people with serious interest had to fight to get through the gates. Marvel that it is to see a new Doubletree Hotel behind the bricks of the old Pick-Fort Shelby, it wouldn't be there if the developers had been limited to one grudging, 45-minute visit.

Last respects

Darren Proctor, 44, drove in from Dearborn with his brother and sister to eat barbecue at Slows and pay last respects to the stadium. It was surreal, he said, to watch the heavy equipment while his mind played clips of the '84 World Series and the night he met Ernie Harwell.

Like most of the other mourners at the extended funeral, they took pictures. "The one that gets to me," he said, "is the one with the American flag flying undisturbed, as if it still awaits a game to be played."

It's an illusion, of course. The last home run will always be the grand slam by Robert Fick on closing day. The last strikeout was the preservationists, missing another fundraising deadline in an economy that's having trouble supporting police departments, let alone monuments.

Now it's up to the city to show that it has real plans for the site -- actual, firm, financed plans, with drawings and a developer, the things it has demanded of every interested party but itself. And it would be nice if they'd knock down that rotting wreck on 18th Street.

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