Candidate Forum this Wednesday

There will be a candidate forum this Wednesday, October 14, from 6 - 7:30 p.m. at the Edison Branch of the Detroit Public Library (18400 Joy Rd.).  It will feature candidates for the Detroit City Council as well as the School Board and the Charter Commission.  Everyone in the Warrendale neighborhood is invited to attend.

This event is sponsored by the Cody/Rouge block clubs.

Transit Candidates Forum

The TRU Detroit City Council Candidate's Forum is this evening, Thursday, October 1, at the Considine Recreation Center (8904 Woodward Ave.).  This forum will start at 6:30 p.m. and will focus on mass transit.  It is sponsored by Transit Riders United, which is a leading advocate for mass transit in Detroit.

For those not familiar with the Considine Recreation Center, it is on Woodward Ave.; approximately 3/4 of a mile north of W. Grand Blvd.  If anyone is interested in taking bus from the Warrendale neighborhood to this forum, which is oddly appropriate for a forum on mass transit, it will take approximately one hour to complete your trip.  I recommend the Crosstown bus to Woodward and then transferring to the Woodward bus to go north.

City Council Candidate Forum Tonight

All eighteen of the candidates for the Detroit City Council will appear at a forum this evening, starting at 6 p.m. This event will happen at the Greater Grace Temple (23500 W. Seven Mile), which is approximately four miles north of the Warrendale neighborhood.

The moderators for this event are Huel Perkins from Fox 2, Angelo Henderson from WCHB and Stephanie Davis from WWJ.

This forum will be streamed live on MyFoxDetroit.com.

Redeveloping Kosciusko: The Options

The Detroit Community Design Center and the City of Detroit's Historic Designation Advisory Board convened the second of four meetings yesterday evening that are designed to solicit community input regarding the potential redevelopment of the historic Kosciusko Elementary (20220 Tireman St.). This school has been shuttered for years now.

The first meeting was designed to identify the strengths, weaknesses and desires of the Warrendale neighborhood. This included strengths such as the diversity of our neighborhood, Rouge Park as a destination point as well as our proximity to health care, nightlife and retail.

During the second meeting, the Detroit Community Design Center presented a series of 16 design options. Each option was designed to maximize one of our strengths, address one of our weaknesses or otherwise meet one of our desires. Some of these options included:

• Targeted residential use for artists or senior citizens;
• Business incubator space;
• Cultural center;
• Music education and performance space;
• As well as several other options.
  

Residents were then invited to vote on what elements of these 16 options they liked the most. Design elements that involved the arts seemed to be the most popular as were those that involved child care.

Architects from the Detroit Community Design Center will next refine their ideas based on the community's feedback on their 16 ideas. This will then be presented at the third meeting, which will happen on Monday, September 21 at 6 p.m. in the Don Bosco Hall (19321 W. Chicago St.). Everyone is invited to attend this meeting, even if you weren't able to attend the first two meetings.

Number 1, Baby

I just discovered that if one searches for Jeri Ryan on Google Blog Search, my post from last Thursday (More 7 of 9) comes in as the number one item out of the 45,782 blog posts that it finds.

Number 1. Out of 45,782.

I'm pretty sure even Jeri Ryan herself would find that to be at least mildly cool.

Blogs Get Makeovers Too

It's been awhile since I've made any changes to the layout of the Warrendale (Detroit) Blog. It's been well over a year since my most recent round of "freshening up" and that's an eternity in internet time.

The most important parts - the news about Warrendale and the surrounding neighborhoods - remain unchanged. The new masthead is perhaps the most noticeable change. It's a photo of Rouge Park on a foggy November morning.

One of the reasons for this change is that people now read blogs in a variety of different ways. Some readers subscribe to email alerts, such as the 26 people who get daily alerts from Feedblitz. Other readers prefer to follow it - and usually several other blogs - on Google Reader or another RSS feed. My changes, of course, do the best to accomidate for this, which is why one will notice Google's "Join This Site" as well as the RSS feeds in the right-hand column.

As always, if you simply prefer to bookmark and visit this page directly, you will continue to find the same quality content that I've been posting since way back in 2005.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts about these changes. Please take a moment to look around and leave a comment.

Redeveloping Kosciusko Elementary

The Detroit City Planning Commission and its Historic Designation Advisory Board received a grant from the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office to do adaptive reuse studies for two closed Detroit Public Schools. Simply put, they are looking for new uses for this vacant and historic building.

The Planning Commission, in turn, has contracted with the University of Michigan's Detroit Community Design Center to manage a process to come up with a community-driven design for new facility uses.

On the west side, the school building selected is Kosciusko Elementary (20220 Tireman St.) which was built in 1955. The Community Design Center has scheduled a series of four community meetings to gain neighborhood input on potential new uses for this building. The ultimate goal is a design plan for the chosen reuse option, to be completed by University of Michigan architecture students who will be led by architect and faculty member Dr. Craig Wilkins.

The first community meeting will be this coming Monday, July 27 at 6:00 pm in the Don Bosco Hall (19321 W. Chicago St.). Refreshments will be served. Everyone from the Warrendale neighborhood is invited to attend.

Additional meetings on this topic are scheduled for:

• Monday, August 24 at 6 pm;
• Monday, September 21 at 6 pm; and
• Monday, October 19 at 6 pm.
  

Each of these meetings will be at the same location, the Don Bosco Hall.

I should caution everyone that simply because we as a community come up for a plan for reusing Kosciusko, that does not necessarily mean that funding will be available to implement whatever plan people come up with. However, a plan such as this is the first step in the process.