I Heart "Insert Name of City Here"
A guide to successfully shifting your civic allegiance - part two of a three-part series.
The second in a series of columns about living in certain metropolitan areas of the United States.
As a reminder:
I believe that the identify of a metropolitan area is best defined by three critical components:
Food - this category includes both dining out and what people cook at home.
Sports - professional (and college, and other) sports teams operating in a city provide an opportunity for residents to become quite passionate about their local teams (and, as it is inseparable from sports, their local beers).
Other Attractions - each city possesses its own civic “treasures” which help to reinforce its unique brand (I know what you’re thinking: Wait a minute - this third “catch-all” category is really just a cop-out, which enables you to adhere to your ridiculous “Rule of Three” - what about its music scene, nightlife, business environment, city motto, local celebrities, official city bird, official city flower. . .? First of all, I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as an official city bird, or official city flower - those are state things, so get off your high-horse; secondly. . .my column, my rules!)
When last we were together, we were enjoying all that Philadelphia has to offer. Well, now it’s on to Detroit.
Detroit
Food
Detroit’s identity when it comes to food is a bit murkier than our two previous sites, Chicago, and Philadelphia. In fact, as I was preparing to move to the Detroit area, I asked colleagues who had lived in Detroit what the city was known for, in the food arena - they looked at each other blankly, and weakly suggested, “. . .maybe coney dogs?”
Detroit is indeed known for its coney dog, which is nothing more than a hot dog, dressed in a bun, with chili sauce, yellow mustard, and chopped onions (not a recommended first-date destination, for obvious reasons). Coney Island restaurants (typically owned by Greek-American families, and featuring gyros and other Greek foods, as well as burgers and salads) are sprinkled throughout the Detroit metro area. The two most well-known places for coney dogs in Detroit are located downtown, right next door to each other: American Coney Island, and Lafayette Coney Island; American Coney Island was apparently opened first, in 1919 by a pair of brothers, when, after a falling-out between the two brothers years later, Lafayette Coney Island was launched by one of the brothers in 1936 to compete with the original establishment, right next door. I’ve had plenty of snits with each of my two brothers, as well as my sister, but I was never prompted to found a competing business as a result - spite has never seemed to me to be a solid business plan.
The Detroit area is also home to several iconic pizza chains, although characterized by a very different type of pizza than Chicago’s - Detroit is credited with developing the square-shaped pizza, usually a mid-level crust, and which is quite serviceable. I think those pizza joints are missing a marketing opportunity by not using a tagline such as, “Hey man, don’t be square, get groovy with our square pizza!” delivered by a bell-bottomed, hippie. What? Too dated? Perhaps you’d prefer something more along the lines of a slacker, millennial-delivered line, such as, “Use Square to buy our square pizza - it’s fast, and easy!” while waving an iPhone at a Square-pad. Both Domino’s and Little Caesar’s got their start here, as well as an earlier, but lesser-known Buddy’s.
Honorable mention (or, perhaps “Miss Congeniality”) goes to, the paczki, which is curiously pronounced, “punch-key”; this Polish treat, which is a pastry stuffed with a cream, or a fruit-filling, typically weighs-in at 3-1/2 pounds, and is appropriately unleashed on “Fat Tuesday.” The epicenter of paczki consumption in the Detroit area is the ethnic enclave of Hamtramck (pronounced, “Ham-tram-ick”). I’m told that many local police forces in the Detroit area utilize the “Polish pronunciation test” in testing for sobriety in drivers suspected of drunk driving, by asking that drivers attempt to properly pronounce the following sentence: “I look forward to securing paczki in Hamtramck on Fat Tuesday.” As you can imagine, many fail that test.
Sports
Detroit also serves up the four major food-groups in the sports world: Baseball (Tigers); Football (Lions); Basketball (Pistons); and Hockey (Red Wings) - one of Detroit’s monikers is, “Hockeytown”, and the Red Wings have enjoyed success on the ice over the years.
Baseball - the Tigers have tasted some success over the years, including four World Series titles, its most recent in 1984, hardly a Cubs-like drought. The most striking thing to me about the Tigers, is actually more of a Detroit land-use issue: Detroit struggles to tear down its old stadiums (I think the plural of stadium is actually, “stadia,” but, come on, that just sounds archaic, no?), including the old Tiger Stadium, at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull Avenues, and the Silverdome, north of the city, in Pontiac - both of which they eventually did tear down, but years after they should have.
Football - the Lions perennially disappoint their fans (fun fact: the Lions are one of only four NFL teams never to have played in a Super Bowl, which was first played in 1967 - that’s a long time not to be onsite for the Super Bowl halftime extravaganza, which featured Dixieland trumpet player, Al Hirt, at Super Bowl I (talk about archaic - dial-in Roman numerals!), and Shakira and Jennifer Lopez at Super Bowl LIV (that’s 2020 to you and me), with Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” thrown in for good measure at Super Bowl XXXVII (that was in 2004, for those of you keeping score at home) - we’ve come a long way, baby!).
Basketball - when I lived in the Detroit area, the Pistons played their home games at The Palace of Auburn Hills, which was well north of the city (not “up north”, as Michiganders describe their hours-long drives to vacation homes located in the northern part of the state, which is the only state which can be easily replicated by holding up your right hand - I’m doing it right now - try it, it’s fun - see if you can point to Ann Arbor, or Lapeer, or Bad Axe), but featured the absolute worst parking lot in North America from which to exit after a game - I’m convinced that there was only one exit from the parking lot from which 10,000 vehicles were expected to depart.
Hockey - the Red Wings had Gordie Howe, nicknamed, “Mr. Hockey,” appropriate for a player who spent the great majority of his career playing in “Hockeytown”. He likely had a hockey wife, and a hockey house, and a hockey car; we know he had hockey sons, because he exited Detroit late in his career to jump to the World Hockey Association (league motto: “We’ve got aging NHL stars, and their sons, too”), to skate with his two sons in Houston for big money. Sidebar note to my two sons: Don’t get any ideas - I got nothing.
Honorable mention - I hate to even bring it up, but our home in Canton (the one in Michigan, not the one in Ohio with the Football Hall of Fame) was closer to Ann Arbor, than to downtown Detroit (by the way, there’s no such thing as “South Detroit” - sorry, Journey), but I will in no way offer any support for Michigan’s Big Ten dominance over the years, lest I offend my Sparty brethren, camped just a bit north in East Lansing. Such inappropriate “homer” behavior might include shouting, “Go Blue!” or humming “Hail to the Victors”, and I am, frankly, offended that you would even suggest that I might fall prey to that temptation - no sir, not me!
As I mentioned in a previous column, Stroh’s beer was a familiar sight among my friends, in the Chicago area; Stroh’s was a Detroit-based beer. Sorry, but that’s my complete report on Detroit beers - if you want to learn about beer, go to Milwaukee.
Other Attractions
Detroit has been known variously as, “The Motor City”, “Motown”, “Hockeytown” (we already covered that ground), and simply, “The ‘D’”. The reasons for that are as follows:
“The Motor City” nickname stems from the fact that Henry Ford founded his eponymous automobile manufacturing company in the city of Dearborn (eponymous is too a word - go ahead, look it up, I’ll wait). I noticed that Detroiters referred to Ford, the company, as “Ford’s” - I guess they ascribed that sense of ownership to their favorite son, who in turn named one of his sons, “Edsel”, after one of his failed automotive designs. Perhaps it was the other way around, the car being named after the son. In any event, it doesn’t change the fact that the car was a bust.
“Motown” takes its name from Motown Records, founded in 1960 by Berry Gordy, which was responsible for bunches of hit songs, and hit pop groups, and which spawned its own musical genre - how cool is that?
“The D” sounds badass, doesn’t it? No, not Bad Axe, which is a city located in Michigan’s “Thumb” area (again, hold your right hand up, and point to a spot about halfway up your thumb). To me, that nickname aligns quite nicely with a sculpture located in downtown Detroit (no, not South Detroit - there is no such place, remember?), known as “The Fist”, which memorializes Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber”, a championship boxer in the 1940’s - from all accounts, he was badass.
The next stop in our national tour is beautiful, El Paso, Texas. My knowledge of this metropolitan area in West Texas is limited by the very small amount of time I lived there (two months, door to door). But, I have some recollections of my time there.
El Paso
Food
Tex-Mex is the order of the day in El Paso, owing to its sharing a border with Juarez. There are some terrific Tex-Mex places in El Paso; just be sure to bring your cast-iron stomach. I learned that El Pasoans (I know - it doesn’t sound right, and it doesn’t even look right, but it is the right way to characterize residents of El Paso) used to travel across the border into Juarez for lunch, and return to the city after lunch. That did not happen while I lived there, due to the extremely dangerous environment fostered by warring criminal gangs there.
Grocery stores in El Paso featured an enormous array of fresh peppers, of many stripes, and heat levels. The city has been known as “Sun City”, but perhaps another appropriate nickname would be, “Pepper City.”
Also, I discovered that brewing a carafe (or, is it more appropriately described as a decanter?) of sun tea, which typically requires three to 5 hours of sunlight to properly brew, was ready to quaff after absorbing only about twenty minutes of El Paso sunshine. Companies are always looking to shave precious time off their manufacturing processes; consider the possibilities, if Henry Ford had shifted his assembly-line operation to sunny El Paso - bad example, because likely the omnipresent sunshine would have distracted Ford’s workers from their tasks, and it would been a disaster, but I doubt if Detroit would be known today as “The Motor City.”
Sports
There are no professional sports teams based in El Paso, which leaves the playing field open to the University of Texas at El Paso (“UTEP”), and to El Pasoans’ (there’s that clunky term again) pursuit of their favorite pepper. UTEP hosts the Sun Bowl each year (a collegiate bowl game).
Cervezas (beers in Spanish) need to be ice cold in El Paso, given that “Sun City” definitely earns its nickname.
Other Attractions
The Sun Bowl (UTEP’s football stadium) was pretty cool, surrounded by mountains - the Franklin Mountains - very picturesque.
My front yard consisted of rocks, rather than a lawn - much easier to manage, in the scorching heat.
El Paso also features a “Star on the Mountain”, installed by the El Paso Electric Company back in 1940 - very pretty.
Upon review, I note that I deployed the term, “sun,” or some form or variation of the term, in my El Paso recollections, a total of eleven times. Don’t get too cozy with that, friends - as we return to the midwest next week, I guarantee that you’ll experience a whole lot less sun.
Coming in the next installment of this series: a return to the midwest: Toledo, and then Pittsburgh. See you then!
You have a son, daughter, and son-in-law who all graduated from Michigan. Two of them are avid sports fans, and at least one of them reads this blog. Sparty has no place here! Go blue!