More of Matty’s hijinks?

By Joel Thurtell

I couldn’t march with the anti-Matty brigade today in support of the 23rd Street Bait Shop and Riverside Park, but a JOTR correspondent sent me a report on what marchers saw at the park extension, part of which has been commandeered by the richest man in Michigan, Manuel “Matty” Moroun.

For late tuners-in, billionaire trucking mogul Moroun several years ago seized parts of the park, demolished its basketball courts and play fields and used the area as s dump for construction junk. His guards also locked the public boat launch.

The city is now suing to evict Matty from the upper section of the park. The ase is in Detroit’s 36th District Court where a judge is dithering while  it appears that Matty is making another move.

Here’s the report from a JOTR correspondent who attended the march to protest Matty’s tearing up of a city street and blocking access to a legitimate business, namely the 23rd Street Bait Shop. The writer describes a public park, a public softball diamond and a public parking lot, where one of Matty’s shotgun-totin’ goons tried to arrest me last fall. The area, we’re told, now appears to be in process of being fenced off by someone, and I’ll leave it to the reader to guess who:

Among other places, we visited the site where we had played our softball game last fall — men had taken down the old fencing in the north end of the field and put in new poles and will be putting in new fencing.  One of the workmen that someone in the group spoke to said that the Detroit Water Dept.  was putting up the new fencing.

(The Detroit Water Dept.??!!)

The new fencing is going to go right across the parking lot area (I think that’s the spot where you were chased?) as they had just finished putting new  poles in.  They look far enough apart so that I think they may be going to put a gate there.  But the way it looks, no one will be able to get in to play ball.

We checked the huge locks on the other two gates; they are new ones – someone said that area people keep breaking the locks but that everytime one is broken, it’s replaced with a new one.

There are piles of construction stuff down by the river – obviously MM is continuing to build his 2nd bridge regardless.

I just pray that Canada holds firm.

I visited the park two weeks ago and saw no signs of construction of a fence.

I’ll be back in town early this week and will go look for myself.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com