The Whitney & Such

I was at a wedding reception this past weekend at the Whitney in Detroit, on Woodward Avenue. It’s an old mansion turned restaurant that was originally built in the late 1800's. They say that Thomas Edison may have personally installed the electrical on the house. So there ya go.

We asked our waiter if we could look around and he gave us permission. They let us look in the different rooms at all the art and wall hangings and wood carvings and fireplaces. It’s a beautiful place, and it was a reminder of how much change has come into the world.

I checked into eating dinner at the Whitney and it’s not for the faint of heart. A couple could easily spent $100 to $150 to eat there. It’s supposed to be great food, but it better be for that kind of money. I could eat at a Chef Ramsay restaurant in New York for that kind of money.

They have a picture tour on their website, which you can see here if you’re interested:

The Whitney

Detroit has a lot of interesting places that are kind of incongruous. There’s this building a little west of Woodward that looks like a castle, with stone walls and turrets. It was apparently a war memorial built in the late 1800's or early 1900's for Civil War vets to spend time together and remember their losses. They’d hang out at the castle and play cards and checkers and spit their chew into spittoons. So on and so forth. No one is doing anything with it right now. There’s no parking and it’s all boarded up. It’s a shame, but finding people to invest is hard to do right now. It’s apparently not an easy thing to do. I took this picture of the castle on one of my photo jaunts downtown a few years ago:

When you walk through the Downtown Detroit area, you see lots of theaters and restaurants and office buildings, some of them towering into the sky. But here and there you also find small little surprises, like Harmonie Park, where there is a fountain and memorials in the pavement in honor of African American heroes. A little while back a friend and I were in that spot when we saw them filming for the TV show Detroit 1-8-7. Never saw the show, but it was cool seeing the set up and all that. Here’s a pic I took of Harmonie Park:

Detroit has some cool spots that you might not know about. It’s worth exploring on a summer day to see what you can find. There’s a lot more there than you might imagine.


Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2011