The real deal looks like this:
The weather was absolutely dreadful on the way to pick him up from the airport, raining the proverbial cats and dogs:
But by the time I got to Metro, the weather was splendid:
We had sort of planned to go out to eat to my favorite restaurant downtown in Greektown, Pegasus, and because the weather did turn out wonderful, we decided to go ahead and try to see if we could get in (dinner time on a Sunday evening usually means a significant wait). We had to do a little bit of backtracking on the expressways to get to that part of town, and I tried to get the hubster to take a picture of Ford Field (home of the winningest football team in America, the Detroit Lions) while I was driving. He got a bit of the side here that you can see if you click on the image to embiggen, and you can also see the top of the Ren Cen in the distance where GM now lives or sits in its coma:
As usual since the opening of all the stupid casinos in Greektown, parking was difficult to find, plus there was a Tigers game that was just about to begin, so every restaurant in Greektown was packed to the brim with fans grabbing a meal before taking the People Mover to the game. Because this area of downtown was so packed, I opted to just leave the camera in the car as I figured we might just get a small table and be scrunched in without much room. To our great luck, the wait was really only 15 minutes, and we were able to score a roomy booth.
I miss that part of the downtown area a lot. In the 80s my sister and I used to club hop down there; our fav, like many others, was Trapper's Alley, a multi-storied building harkening back to the days when fur trading was the viable concern in Detroit (ganked photo).
The building's main floor still houses Pegasus Restaurant, and the upper floors housed several small shops and boutiques and the bar at Trapper's that overlooked the city. In the summer we'd go to the riverfront concerts and locally sponsored art shows and festivals. When I was in college and living downtown in the Cultural Center (not nearly as glamorous as it sounds in Cass Corridor in the middle of the annual Dally in the Alley), I went to Greektown nearly every weekend, walking around the various shops and dining on chicken gyros, saganaki (OPA!), and the most scrumptious roasted potatoes.
In the 70s and 80s, the place was distinctively Greek, with Greek music blaring from tinny loudspeakers atop most of the ground-floor restaurants, and all of the waitstaff at the restaurants and shops speaking Greek. Street musicians played on several corners on weekends. Often there was some sort of live street entertainment. Free and ample parking abounded, especially if one was not averse to parking a block or two from Monroe Street and navigating some of the dicier alleyways back to the main drag.
Trapper's Alley didn't survive past the early 1990s, though. The misguided plan to redevelop downtown spurred on by the legalization of Native American-owned casinos destroyed most of it and also killed the other street-level shops that had been there since the 60s and survived the riots in '68. Now the place is overrun with casino patrons, hoping to score this month's rent or car payment. I find it particularly vile to build casinos in a decidedly economically stricken area. I also find it despicable to raze the once beautiful 19th Century architecture that filled the city in favor of shitty new construction that lacks any personality or life whatsoever. I'd much rather see these older buildings restored and renovated rather than see their skeletons end up in a landfill somewhere.
Since we moved so far out into the suburbs a few years ago, we rarely get around to going downtown. The drive is long, traffic usually heavy, and parking nearly intolerable since the casinos moved in. But this was a lovely way to spend the evening: dear hubby was home, and we had a chance to enjoy a beautiful night downtown.
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