Guard watches over Detroit's grand past to ease broken heart

Detroit -- George Batsikouras became a ghost in order to escape one.

He owns a house in Warren but he rarely stays there. In the Warren house, there are too many memories of a woman he once and still loves.

You will more likely find the 62-year-old Greek roaming the corridors of the abandoned Federal Reserve Bank downtown. On many nights, he sleeps in an empty corner office on a Spartan cot.

You can make him out by the echo of his copper and silver keys and the bouncing beam of his flashlight. He wanders past the iron bars that now protect nothing. He shuffles as though he were the unsettled ghost of Jacob Marley and these were the days of Christmas past.

"My wife Angela, she a-passed away six-a years ago," said Batsikouras, who taught himself English and speaks it in a thick, mournful accent peppered with extra vowels. "It's a-very sad of course. You know that. I don't want to stay in the house. I want to go outside. The house reminds me of Angela. She was a-beautiful. My wife. A-beautiful."

He wiped his nose on his sleeve here, just above the gold watch he wears over his shirt cuff. He paused, took a breath and continued. "Any-a-way. That was a long-a time ago."

Batsikouras is something of a superintendent of the old bank located on the corner of Shelby and Fort, hired to keep an eye on the pipes and electrical transformers while trying to keep the looters and thrill seekers out. An investment company bought the landmark bank after the Federal Reserve left it empty in 2005, moving to a new bank near the county morgue.

There are plans to turn the place into commercial space and lofts, but like so much else downtown, the plan has not panned out. The building like four dozen others sits unoccupied. Except for the Greek.

Batsikouras has made the place homey -- as much as one can with tens of thousands of empty square feet of marble and concrete. The toilets are clean, for one. No smoking in the building, for another.

"I gotta people who come by to look-a the place," he shouts as though he is leading a tour group. "It's a-got to look respectable."

Then there are the photographs and newspaper clippings of the Greek's life tapped to the walls near the entrance of the building just below the empty gun turrets.

There he is in standing on a downtown rooftop with friends. Another from 1989 that bears the inscription, "George Batsikouras: Patron Saint of Lower Woodward."

There is a recent newspaper editorial warning about the national debt, the headline of which reads: $10 Trillion and Growing.

The symbolism of a Greek living in an empty bank in the heart of once mighty Detroit, USA, is not lost upon Batsikouras. After all, Greeks and the philosophy of money stretch back to the days of antiquity, when it was said that Zeus plucked the eyes of Plutus, the Grecian god of prosperity so that Plutus would distribute wealth not only to the virtuous but also to the wicked.

According to Batsikouras, the schemings of Zeus have come to fruition, what with the Wall Street Ponzi schemes, the bursting of the national real estate bubble, the New York magazine writers, and a middle class drowning under a debt-to-income ratio of two-to-one that have brought the country to its knees.

"When I a-come to Detroit, to America, there was a-money every place," he says, showing a visitor the cavernous and empty Vault No. 2 with a polished steel door four-feet thick.

"It bothers me. We're a-going in the wrong direction. We need changes the way we're a-living. We must to save the money for tomorrow. Not to borrow because one day if we don't do that this system, there's going to be collapse and the people are going to feel sorry."

Batsikouras was born in the village of Kalamata in 1945, just after the World War ended and just before the Greek civil war began. The son of a hardscrabble goat farmer, Batsikouras made his way to Canada in 1967. There he met Angela, married her and brought her to Detroit where he worked at Woolworth's on Woodward as an electrician. Angela would bear him two sons.

Woolworth's closed in 1985, but the Greek stayed, looking after the building -- for a time without pay -- until 2002, when it was redeveloped as living space.

"Without George, that building would have been ripped up by scavengers," said Rebecca Binno Savage, a historic tax credit specialist who works downtown. "Without him it wouldn't have been possible."

Angela would pass away in 2003 and Batsikouras's heart would shatter. He even gave up gambling on the horses. "There was no fun in it anymore."

He turned his attention to preserving the old bank, a place he has come to consider home.

"Egypt has the pyramids. Greece has the Parthenon. In a-Detroit, we have these old buildings," he said. "We've a-got to save them. That's all that's-a-gonna be left."

And with that, Batsikouras made his rounds. The boiler, the transformers, the vaults.

"They didn't a-leave a two cents behind, believe-a me," he said of the former tenants. "In America, the money is a-more important than the death."

Travels with Charlie charlie@detnews.com">charlie@detnews.com (313) 222-2071