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by Jane Hammang-Buhl
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
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where old black ladies and my old white mama fish off the dock and never catch anything... (51) |
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.
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the boy must go too near the water drags me shivering to where the concrete drops "What is an undertow?" wiggling the toes in his sandals and so I pull him back to sit on the benches to where we lick good humors, the freighters drag heavy the mail boat rides high…. (Minock 53) |
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The bridge towers over him, over the 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
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…I gaze against the wind upriver: the bridge to Canada and freedom- the skyscrapers against afternoon sun… (Minock 51) |
Jane Hammang-Buhl is Associate Professor of Business at Marygrove College. As a child, she played with her cousins at Riverside Park.
Photos by Anna Fedor.
Works CitedDetroit's Riverside Park Promenade in Building the Riverfront Greenway:
The State of Greenway Investments along the Detroit River. Online. www.tellusnews.com/ahr
Retrieved 7/10/03.
Laughlan, Michael. And the Business Goes to Pieces. Highland Park, MI: Fallen Angel, 1981.
Minock, Mary. Love in the Upstairs Flat. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Poetry Press, 1995.