By Joel Thurtell
Four years ago, I retired from my job as a reporter with the Detroit Free Press. One of the last stories I wrote for the Free Press was about a seemingly hopeless community in Southwest Detroit known as Delray. Once a town in its own right, Delray was taken over by Detroit early in the 20th century. It was a vibrant community of immigrants who worked in nearby factories and steel mills, but as the 20th century carried on, things got bad for Delray. Plants pulled out, but pollution remained and seemed to increase. Yet the community hangs on, and may become the site of a new international bridge between the US and Canada, despite opposition from Matty Moroun, the monopolist who owns the Ambassador Bridge, the outmoded but lone bridge over the Detroit River. Here is a story I wrote about Delray, reprinted with permission of the Free Press.
Headline: SEEDS OF HOPE GROW IN DELRAY
Sub-Head: GROSSE ILE CHURCH VOLUNTEERS CLEAN, PAINT, START GARDEN
Byline: JOEL THURTELL
Pub-Date: 10/7/2007
Memo: DOWNRIVER; RAN ALSO IN DETROIT PG 3.
Text: One of the most torn-up, burned-out and generally trashed neighborhoods in Detroit is Delray in the area of West Jefferson just before you get to Zug Island. Vacant homes stand beside charred frames of houses. Heaps of rubbish line the streets.
Overshadowing the community are the smokestacks of Detroit’s wastewater-treatment plant. And yet here and there, you see houses with kids playing on porches or in front yards.
The kids are what keep John Williams believing there’s hope for this area. Williams, 57, is director of the Delray Neighborhood House, an educational and recreational center based at a former city gym.
Hope too is what inspired Barbara Kuhn of Grosse Ile and others from her church, First Presbyterian Church on Grosse Ile, to become involved with Neighborhood House.
“Smell it?” Williams asked me. The stench of rotting plants comes from a nearby composting business. Two steel-making operations were set up nearby. One of them is very near. It’s on Zug Island, and pours out smoke and grit, with uncovered heaps of coke and slag allowing coarse particulates to fly through the air.
With a nearby oil refinery, salt works, gypsum plant and with plans for siting an international bridge near Zug Island, it really seems like metro Detroiters prefer to place everything ugly, noxious and stinky in or near Delray. Running directly adjacent to the Neighborhood House and lending its racket to the ambience is I-75.
Even positive efforts can be overshadowed. Take the garden that was laid out behind the house earlier this year by volunteers directed by Margarete Hasserodt from First Presbyterian Church. It was supposed to help dozens of kids from poor families learn how to produce their own food.
“We were hoping the neighborhood kids would take it under their wing, and it kind of didn’t happen like I thought it would,” said Kuhn, 52. “It was so hot this summer, that to expect kids to go out and weed a garden was a lot to ask. Plus, it’s also in one of the most polluted areas in the United States and the air quality is probably one of the worst. I weeded for an hour and washed my hands and I just had this yellow junk on my hands.”
Kendrick McPhail, 14, helped plant seeds early in the summer and on a recent fall day he was picking tomatoes. But he has no illusions about the garden vegetables. “You gotta wash ’em for a week!”
“I’m going to have the soil tested for pollution to make sure this area is okay for kids,” Williams said.
Steel bars on the Neighborhood House’s rooftop-mounted air conditioner are testaments to another problem – metal-thieves have tried to pry off the aluminum cooling tubes. Plus there were three separate Delray homicides in recent weeks, Williams said. Families who live in Delray mostly are “challenged,” and some of the kids at Neighborhood House come from homes where drugs are dealt, Williams said.
Into this place six years ago John Williams came, assigned to run a summer camp with a $6,000 budget for about 50 kids. Williams, a minister, has a bachelor’s in Chinese studies from Michigan State University and a law degree from Indiana University. As he picked up trash, he wondered why he should stay.
“What made the difference was the kids,” he said. “Once you begin to interact with the children and see the needs – that was the challenge. Are you just going to go where things are nice and you are not really needed?”
Sitting in the new meeting room of the Neighborhood House, Williams told me how things changed one day in 2002.
“I was praying, ‘Lord, how am I supposed to do this, because without Your help, this is not going to get done.’ I see all of a sudden this little blond lady with this blue dress and I said, ‘She’s lost.’
” ‘Lady, can I help you?’ ”
It was Kuhn, a leader of a youth group at First Presbyterian Church. Kuhn told Williams that the young people at the church were taking mission trips to far-off places like New Mexico. Maybe, she thought, there were mission projects closer to Grosse Ile.
“I said, ‘I was kind of hoping I can help you,’ ” said Kuhn, who had been in the area during Christmastime to deliver gifts to a family the church adopted and came back to check out the Neighborhood House a few months later.
“I said, ‘I work with youth at Grosse Ile Presbyterian Church and I’m looking for a place where my kids can come to do some work this summer.’
“What has happened since that day is just an unbelievable thing,” Kuhn said. “We did go down there. We painted, we cleaned up the playground, we painted the playroom.”
Rotary connection
Besides bringing young Grosse Ile people to help at the Delray Neighborhood House, Kuhn introduced Williams to Doug Yardley, former principal of Grosse Ile High School and a Grosse Ile Rotary member. For the last three years, Rotary has sponsored a Christmas party for the kids at the Neighborhood House.
“That was nice because even the parents come and it gives a sense of community,” Williams said. “It’s a sense of unity – love in action.” Rotary also has donated $10,000 to the summer program.
“We went from $6,000 to $16,000” for the summer program, he said. The program provides daytime recreation and education, including field trips, to 150 kids in the summer.
“We call Barb our special angel,” Williams said.
The property still belongs to the City of Detroit. It’s leased by the Delray Neighborhood House’s parent, People’s Community Services. Two years ago, the nonprofit added a wing to the gym for a library, a community meeting room and offices.
In the library on a recent afternoon, Yardley was coaching Tamara Colbert, 10, and Mary Sue Sikafus of Grosse Ile was helping Tamara’s 8-year-old brother Daron with reading.
Williams says the neighborhood murders are upsetting. But kids come to Neighborhood House, and Williams is convinced that despite the violence and chaos outside, even the drug dealers see this as a safe haven.
A hopeful sign
And in the midst of the dilapidated and burned-out houses I saw places where people had painted or reroofed or re-sided their homes. They had not given up hope.
As I turned to leave the Neighborhood House, a tall young man with a backpack passed me.
This was Jon Valentine, a 21-year-old Delray native who’s going to graduate from the University of Michigan next spring. He plans to be a teacher. Jon’s a Neighborhood House success story.
“I started here when I was 6 years old. I worked here this past summer – I was the education coordinator. I’d like to come back here to work,” he said. “This place put into me the idea of having pride in yourself and in your community. That’s what draws me here. I didn’t have a father at home. I came here for a positive role model. It was John Williams.”
“We were hoping the neighborhood kids
would take it under their wing.”Barbara Kuhn of Grosse Ile, about the Delray garden
“I’m going to have the soil tested for pollution to make sure this area is okay for kids.”
John Williams, director of Delray Neighborhood House
Caption: Williams, who has degrees in law and Chinese studies, with Barbara Kuhn of Grosse Ile. Kuhn found church volunteers to keep the Neighborhood House summer programs going.
Photos by JOEL THURTELL
Secelia Cosme, 12, of Detroit shows Delray Neighborhood House director John Williams vegetables she harvested from the Delray garden laid out by volunteers from the First Presbyterian Church on Grosse Ile.
Photos by JOEL THURTELL / Detroit Free Press
Williams worries that vegetables grown by kids at Delray Neighborhood House may be too contaminated with particulate matter to eat. Pollution comes from nearby industry and Detroit’s wasterwater-treatment plant
Jon Valentine, who is due to graduate from University of Michigan in April is a Neighborhood House success story.
Illustration: PHOTO
Edition: METRO FINAL
Section: CFP; COMMUNITY FREE PRESS
Page: 1CV
Keywords:
Disclaimer: THIS ELECTRONIC VERSION MAY DIFFER SLIGHTLY FROM THE PRINTED ARTICLE
It’s not just Delray. The question of pollution affecting garden produce in the entire Detroit area is one that has not been addressed. I note that Mayor Bing from time to time talks about wanting to make Detroit a vegetable-garden city — but has anyone tested the vegetables that are grown in Detroit gardens?
Medical “science” wonders why the high-and-growing-higher incidence of autism and Alzheimer’s these days. Undoubtedly, there is more than one cause. But, conceivably, it’s a combination of pollutants in our air and water and food. So why isn’t everyone autistic and why doesn’t everyone have Alzheimer’s? Perhaps it’s because pollutants have a cumulative affect, and when those pollutants reach the tipping point, human cells break down and give in to the toxins in the pollutants. So where someone living in Oakland County may be subject to a lot of pollutants, that person isn’t subject to the same total amount of pollutants as a resident of Delray, or a resident of an area that is subject to major traffic exhaust fumes — such as the residents of neighborhoods in the vicinity of the Ambassador Bridge, where the asthma rate is three times the normal rate.
For some 50 years, those drinking Detroit water have been ingesting the added fluoride, which can affect the bones, teeth, liver and entire system. Some of us are healthy enough and have strong enough genes so that our bodies and our systems can throw off the traffic pollutants and the fluoride. But when one adds all the other toxic pollutants — well, it’s no wonder that cancer, Alzheimer’s and autism are more and more prevalent.
We also have genetically modified foods, as well as a few dozen vaccinations and inoculations given babies and preschoolers too often and at too young an age. And now politicians and Big Pharma want to make it mandatory for our young teenagers — boys and girls — to be given Gardasil vaccinations to — theoretically — protect against sexually associated forms of cancer.
To paraphrase the Hank Williams song, We’ll never get out of this world alive.