I am not a sports fan. I have the greatest respect for sports fans. I know some of my 10 regular readers follow various sports intensely and even play them and I have a wonderful young first-cousin-once-removed who is working in the baseball industry for his first after-college job. I think it’s all cool. When I was a little kid, I *did* sports. Oh, not anything organized. Just pickup games of kickball in the street or occasional baseball in the back corner of the Pingatore block (I think there’s a house there now). *Always* running and jumping and bicycle-type contests. I was good at that stuff when I was a kid. I don’t ever remember any adult involvement at all.

Sitting in stadiums. I am not so good at. To be fair, I’m not good at sitting in theatres watching plays either. My kids were theatre rats instead of sports rats. Same difference in so many ways. I don’t like to sit. At least not without my laptop or [one of] my UFP[s] or my iPhone or whatever. Yes, I am bad.

I can’t exactly remember how many times I have been in the old Tiger Stadium but I’m sure I could count it on one hand. So why do I care that they are seriously talking about tearing it down? Because the key word in the decision seems to be “development”. I dunno. Here is yet another place that I am out of my league. I have never spent a lot of time in Detroit. I used to go there to visit my grandparents in its heyday, before the 1967 riots forced them out to Birmingham. But I was a little kid and I only remember little snippets. Henry Ford Museum, Top of the Flame, Cobo Hall, downtown Hudsons, my grandaddy’s Cadillac with the push-button windows. Heck, back then in the Yoop, on the rare days that you might need a little air-conditioning or whatever, you rolled down the windows and, if you were lucky, Grandroobly’s cigar butts didn’t fly out the front window and get sucked in through the back window into your lap.

Again, I am out of my league because I do *not* have a comprehensive view of the geography of Detroit but I believe that there are large tracts of land in the city of Detroit that now have so few houses on them that they are reverting back to field or woods or prairie or whatever. So… Why are we tearing down Tiger Stadium for “new development”? What is going to be “developed”? Why can’t the “new development” happen on some of those old dead parts of the once vibrant city? There is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Tiger Stadium. I’m sure it has the usual difficulties about raising money but why *can’t* the old stadium be restored and maybe used for some different purpose. And why can’t the blasted developers re-use some of the land where houses have been destroyed to do whatever re-vitalization they are envisioning.

But then there’s the Yooper in me who has to ask, “What’s so bad about letting devastated city blocks revert to field/woods/prairie?”

Questions here but no answers… Like I said, I am out of my league.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.