3. Riverside Park

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Located at the foot of West Grand Boulevard, Riverside Park is a narrow green rectangle along an industrial southwest Detroit waterfront. Michael Lauchlan uses it as the name of one poem, and it is the unnamed setting for Mary Minock' s poem "Down by the Boulevard Dock." It has long been a fairly simple park-just an expanse of grass bordered on its west end by railroad tracks whose busyness reflects the fortunes of the surrounding industry and on its east end with benches landscaping a cement seawall pedestrian walkway. Both Minock and Lauchlan describe it as a setting for the simple pleasures, such as fishing, kite flying, napping after work, and running children. To Minock, it is a place

Laughlan describes "a flame" pouring "from the sky like a serpent" which "at the last / jerks its kite face from the river's teeth."

For generations the park has provided for children the excitement of boats, trucks, and trains that compete with the modest collection of children's playground equipment. Here the river is at its narrowest between Detroit and Windsor so the details of passing freighters and pleasure craft are easily visible. The north end of the park houses both the Detroit Fire Department's fire boat and the "mail boat"-a boat with its own zip code. The J. W. Westcott delivers mail and sundry supplies to passing Great Lakes freighters.

The Ambassador Bridge soars above the Westcott company offices, and trucks thunder across in both directions, looking like matchbox miniatures.

…The bridge towers over the caught caught                                                                            iron river on the spreading shadow                                                                                             and hums with crawling taillights                                                                                           flickering behind cables. (Laughlan)

Riverside Park is part of a Riverfront Greenway Initiative, so it has received modest physical improvement. But it is a park currently without picnic tables or restroom facilities, although a governmental report notes that they will be added in future stages of the Initiative (Detroit's Riverside Park). Plain and unkempt as the park is, its lure is its glorious view. Looking upriver, the Ambassador Bridge frames a panorama of the Detroit and Windsor downtown skylines

Jane Hammang-Buhl is Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of the Professional Studies Division,and Associate Professor of Business at Marygrove College. As a child, she played with her cousins at Riverside Park.                                                                                                                                                                                     Photos by Anna Fedor.                                                                                                                                                  

Works Cited

"Detroit's Riverside Park Promenade in Building the Riverfront Greenway: The State of Greenway                                Investments along the Detroit River. " Metrpolitan Affairs Coalition: Regional Solutions for                           Regional Issues. 2001. Web. 9 March 2011.

Laughlan, Michael. And the Business Goes to Pieces. Highland Park, MI: Fallen Angel, 1981.

Minock, Mary. Love in the Upstairs Flat. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1995.

Updated 14 March 2011