The NFL Draft begins in downtown Detroit tomorrow. The damage to the Rosa Parks Transit Center, not far from the NFL Draft stage, won’t be repaired by then. But after months of inaction, something was done today.
Late July of last year, I noticed that one of the canopies over the waiting area for the buses had been torn. At the time I assumed it was a very recent storm that had also uprooted a large tree on Bagley Avenue. Emergency repairs seemed to hold, but there was no urgency for a more permanent fix.
An insulting and otherwise uninformative FOIA response informed me that the damage had actually occurred a month prior to when I first noticed it. If I accepted the much-stalled FOIA response at face value, it would mean that the mayor, City Council and the Detroit Department of Transportation (D-DOT) have been completely unconcerned about this particular issue.
Which is plausible. Mayor Mike Duggan (D?-Detroit) and Councilwoman Gabriela Santiago-Romero (D?-Detroit City Council District 6) are much more concerned with kickbacks and perks than with actually doing anything for their constituents or for the city. But can it really be the case that they haven’t communicated with D-DOT at all?
At least something was done today, or maybe yesterday. All the remaining torn canopy fabric has been removed. It’s embarrassing, but nowhere near as embarrassing as it would look if they left the torn material like in the picture from just ten days ago.
This is progress. Very little, very late, but progress nevertheless.
It will be easier for the NFL Draft tourists to look at the canopies of the Rosa Parks Transit Center and assume that’s how the transit center is supposed to look. Because they won’t be worried about a large piece of whatever material that is falling on them.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to the mayor’s office in person and I was told that City Council approved a budget with “capital improvements” for the Rosa Parks Transit Center and that the mayor signed it, but couldn’t get any details as to what that entails. If, for example, the executive director of D-DOT wants a bigger office for himself in the Rosa Parks Transit Center, that would count as “capital improvements,” right?
A lot of the NFL Draft tourists won’t see the Rosa Parks Transit Center. But I guarantee you that a lot of them will. For whatever reason, they will pass through Michigan Avenue, right in front of the transit center.
Several southwest Detroit residents will also see the Rosa Parks Transit Center as part of their NFL Draft activities. There’s going to be a free shuttle that will begin boarding on Livernois (couple of miles west of downtown) and will make stops in Mexicantown and Corktown. The destination: the Rosa Parks Transit Center, where they will debark and walk over to the NFL Draft stage.
The NFL Draft will start tomorrow and continue to Saturday. A lot of the barricades might still be up by Monday, but the tourists will be long gone by then. And then what incentive will there be to permanently repair the most visible damage to the Rosa Parks Transit Center?
This is not about just one canopy. If the things that tourists see don’t get repaired, there’s no hope for the things tourists don’t see.
UPDATE, Friday: I have a correction regarding the NFL Draft shuttle for southwest Detroit. I boarded the shuttle yesterday around 3 p.m. It does pass in front of the Rosa Parks Transit Center, and passengers get a clear view of the canopies and the missing canopy, but the shuttle actually drops passengers off a couple of blocks south of the transit center.
Most of the passengers were white men, there were three or four women, and only the chauffeur was black. The diversity was more in the sports teams these NFL fans support. There were Lions fans, as is to be expected, but also Steelers fans, Packers fans and Vikings fans, plus a couple others I couldn’t quite identify with certainty.
I got off the shuttle and walked over to the Rosa Parks Transit Center. I saw several NFL fans walking on the sidewalk in front of the transit center. In pondering who would pass by the transit center and see its external damage, I only considered people driving by in personal vehicles. I failed to consider that some people might park west of downtown and then walk on Michigan Avenue to get to an NFL Draft checkpoint.
In the Rosa Parks Transit Center proper, I saw hardly anyone wearing any NFL team’s apparel, but I did see one man wearing an NFL Draft shirt. In the building, I went to the men’s room, where new stall dividers had been installed, maybe a few weeks ago, I can’t tell you for certain. But the soap dispenser was out of order and labeled as such with a handwritten sign. Presumably the hand drier works, but then again, do hand driers ever really work?
So yeah, some stuff that tourists don’t see does get fixed. The old, rickety stall dividers in the men’s room were probably an accident — and lawsuit — waiting to happen. Therefore, that had to be fixed. The soap dispenser… no one cares.