Clouds mostly obscured the June full moon tonight. Last night was clear, and I watched the might-as-well-be-full moon traverse — appear to traverse — the top branches of a neighbor’s tree off to the southeast just after sunset. I knew it already, but I’m always mildly amazed that you can see the movement — apparent movement — of the moon if you stare at it for a while.

Here are a few things you can see on Woodward Avenue in Detroit, also known as Michigan 1, which goes from downtown to Pontiac, Michigan.

I Googled the signature under the wings later. The artist who created the wings, one Kelsey Montague, only in her 30s, has painted a lot of murals around the world. Yuriko specifically wanted to stop and have her picture taken with it. I expect that happens pretty often.

Early Saturday afternoon, we walked along Woodward, at least lower Woodward from Campus Martius Park nearly to another urban green space, Grand Circus Park. This part of Detroit was alive with pedestrians, though not thronging.

Even more conspicuous were the party bikes.

That one was tooling along Madison St., headed toward Woodward, but there were plenty of the vehicles on Woodward itself, their occupants sharing their merriment with the world. After the first one or two, I thought, not those again, but strangely enough by the time I’d encountered a half dozen or more, I enjoyed their spirited arrival.

You’d think that would be the other way around, but I felt that they were out having a noisy good time, with the noise arriving and departing in short order, so I didn’t begrudge them their noisy good time.

I look up the term party bike as well. Such a vehicle is also known, according to Wiki, as a beercycle, fietscafé, bierfiets, pedal crawler, pedal pub, beer bike, bar bike, pedal bar or bierbike. Europeans invented them.

As I said, Woodward was alive on a Saturday morning, as was much of central Detroit, whatever other problems the city has. Not every North American city of Detroit’s size can say that. Lower Woodward also sports some fine old buildings, recently renovated. Such as the amusingly named Shinola Hotel.

I think it’s funny, anyway. The 129-room boutique property, only open since early 2019, offers rooms at north of $300/night sometimes.

“[The] hotel is part of a multimillion-dollar development project by Shinola, founded by Tom Kartsotis of Fossil watches, and Dan Gilbert’s real estate venture, Bedrock, which has acquired and developed more than 100 properties in the city since 2011,” says the New York Times. “The project, which took two years to complete, also includes an alley behind the hotel with shops and two restaurants: The Brakeman, an American beer hall with an outdoor area, and Penny Red’s, a fried chicken spot.”

The alley.

Further north on Woodward.

The David Whitney Building on Woodward. Outside —

— and inside.

It’s a Daniel Burnham design, completed in 1915 and named for a already-dead local lumber, shipping and real estate baron and owned for decades by his family. “When the Whitney family sold the building in 1966, more than three hundred doctors and dentists had offices here…” an historic site plaque on the building says. “It reopened in 2014, rehabilitated for use as a hotel and apartments.”

The plaque omits the fact that the building was vacant by the 2000s. Doctors and dentists are famously reluctant to move their offices — they’re sticky tenants — such that so many leaving a building speaks volumes about the decline of Detroit. Even the Garland Building, an equivalent building in downtown Chicago, has managed to keep many of its healthcare tenants down to the present.

I’d count Woodward as one of the great thoroughfares of the nation, with theaters and museums and retail lining its way far beyond where we walked, and a remarkable history beginning as an Indian trail long ago. Its 2010s revival was no doubt interrupted by the pandemic, but now the revival is being revived. Good for Detroit. Still, I don’t have any illusions that much of the city, beyond the lively corridor along Woodward, remains the impoverished shell of the place it once was.