jleyrer::blog

What I Love About Detroit

A few days ago, my Twitter friend/Detroit Red Wings PR Extraordinaire Shannon Paul tweeted a request asking her friends/followers to submit “Things I Love About Detroit” lists for inclusion in the Detroit Startup Weekend blog. Having spent the majority of my life in that area, I thought it would be fun to look back on what stands out, in my mind, as my favorite things unique to the city. This may read more as a “Things I Miss About Detroit Since Moving To Chicago” list but for the most part, these are the things I can’t get enough of when go back to visit.

So, in no particular order, here goes.

National Coney Island/Phoenix Coney Island

One word: CONEYS. Best post-bar food ever. Sure, other places have chili dogs but I’ve yet to go anywhere that’s even come close to the perfection Coney Island has achieved. Or, if you’re in the mood for something “healthy” there’s the Hani – a warm pita filled with chicken, lettuce, tomato, cheese and sauce. (Phoenix Coney Island calls this the Geno). Either way, you can’t go wrong.

The Abundance of Inexpensive Canadian Beer

Detroit’s proximity to Canada makes Canadian beer an easy find. In fact, it’s an oddity for a bar/party store to not carry Labatt or Molson, and there are usually several varieties of both. This is not the case in Chicago. Here you will very rarely see a bar serving up Labatt, while Molson is virtually non-existent. If you are lucky enough to come across some Canadian brews in Chicago, it’s almost always priced like any other fussy import.

“Hockeytown”

Detroit is serious about hockey. I’ve never been anywhere, outside of Canada, where people cared more about their professional hockey teams(s) or were more involved, in some form, with hockey themselves.

Detroit has a very well-established amateur hockey community. When I was younger, I was fortunate enough to play in organized leagues. However, for me and everyone else I played with (and our friends), it didn’t stop there. When the weather was warm I’d spend the majority of my after-school time playing street hockey until a break for dinner, and then it was back out to the street until dark. When it was cold enough, the game moved out to one of the several ponds in my city. It didn’t matter if some of the kids could barely stand up on skates, they were out there doing it. It seemed like we never had a shortage of guys, especially on the weekends when there would be several games going on at the same time on our pond.

Then there’s the Red Wings. No other team has been as consistently good over the past ten years but even if that weren’t the case, they’d still have one of the most loyal fan bases around. People simply can’t get enough. This is evident every time I go to the Joe Louis Arena and feel like I just made about 20,000 new friends for the night. Maybe it’s just that the beers are bigger at the JLA than they tend to be elsewhere, but compared to other arenas I’ve been to it seems that the average person at the Joe is much more genuinely excited to be at the game.

Saint Andrews Hall/The Shelter

These are the venues I first started going to regularly to see shows. I always thought that St. Andrews was the perfect size venue – intimate enough to get a good view from wherever you’re positioned, but big enough that the acts you want to see don’t sell out immediately. Between 1995 and the early-2000’s I saw more concerts there than I can keep track of and almost as many in its basement, The Shelter. Places like these spoil the experience of having to go see a band you like in a much larger venue, where the sound quality sucks and you’re lucky if you can even make out individual band members.

Better Made Potato Chips

Better Made potato chips are made locally and unfortunately don’t make it very far from Detroit. I prefer them to the major brands such as Lay’s because they’re a not as greasy and are slightly cheaper. My personal favorite are the Red Hot BBQ flavor. The seasoning they put on these are equal parts spice and crack cocaine. The latter ingredient explains why I cannot stop eating them once I open a bag.

Friends/Family

Most of my family lives in the metro Detroit area, so it’s always nice to get back and see everyone from time to time. Though many of my friends have moved on to other places, a handful still remain in the area. I’ve been gone for almost six years, but these are the folks I still consider to be my best, lifelong friends – the kind of people that would do anything for me if I needed them to.

FM Radio

Unbelievably, the FM radio situation in Chicago is a disaster. It’s been over two years since I’ve listened to it. The reason is that while there are plenty of talk, hip hop/R&B, and oldies stations, there is really only one quasi-rock station – Q101. This is a station that has no qualms about going from something tolerable to diving into a 90’s pop-rock black hole with no warning whatsoever. The day I swore it off was the day they came out of a commercial and launched into a string of Spin Doctors, Nickelback, and 4 Non-Blondes. No thanks.

Detroit, on the other hand, has plenty of good options. There’s the ever-reliable classic rock station, 94.7 – WCSX. Though I have to live vicariously through a podcast subscription, 94.7 just got even better with the addition of Deminski and Doyle in the mornings. Then there’s 89X (88.7), which delivers a lot of new, slightly more obscure (at times) music for when you’re tired of the same old thing. 101.1 – WRIF is what a rock station should be. Sure, they play some songs from time to time that warrant a flip to one of the other aforementioned stations, but for the most part the selection is good.

I’m sure other stations have come and gone since I lived there, but those three stick out in my mind.

The Pizza

Jet’s Pizza / Nona’s Pizza – Detroit-style square deep dish pizza is my favorite pizza, hands down. This is something I never fully appreciated until I left. After I moved to Chicago and started making my way around to all the famous Chicago-style pizza joints everyone raves about, I started to miss Jet’s more and more. In Chicago, you basically have two choices: the infamous and obnoxious deep dish that looks like a cake filled with cheese and doused in sauce, or a brittle thin-crust round pizza that is inexplicably cut up into square pieces. If you told me that, for the rest of my pizza-eating life, I was only allowed to order Jet’s square pizza and Nona’s round, I would be perfectly happy with that.