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From the Detroit Free Press
Three New Residential Developments in Lafayette Park, Riverfront, and Midtown
by JC Reindl
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| DaCharme place in Lafayette Park |
Nearly 500 more market-rate apartments near Detroit’s downtown moved closer to construction today as developers gamble that the area’s growth in rental housing will continue.
State development officials approved $12 million in Brownfield redevelopment financing
today for three projects: the 290-unit Orleans Landing on the near-east riverfront; the 185-unit DuCharme Place in Lafayette Park and the 23-unit El Moore redevelopment in Midtown.Two of the projects are scheduled to break ground later this year. All three could be ready for their first tenants by late next year or early 2016.
But some developers predict that this coming wave of apartments won’t satisfy the demand for downtown residential rental space.
“You have probably tens of thousands of people that ultimately want to live in downtown and Midtown. I think we’re a long way from a saturation of the market,” said developer Christopher Jackson. He plans to break ground next spring on The Mondrian @ Midtown, a $26.6-million building at 3435 Woodward.
The biggest project approved today is the $61-million Orleans Landing — 19 apartment buildings on the waterfront ranging from one to four stories. The development would rise on five blocks on Atwater Street east of the Renaissance Center.
Of the 290 apartments, 210 would be one-bedroom units, 46 would be two-bedroom units and there would be 34 two-bedroom townhouses, according to a news release.
The developer of Orleans Landing, McCormack Baron Salazar Development of
St. Louis, anticipates that cleanup site work would begin next month. The price range of the apartments was not available Tuesday, although 56 units are reserved for people making below the Detroit average income
.DuCharme Place in Lafayette Park will be built across from the Mies van der Rohe-designed high-rises.
The DuCharme would consist of four, four-story buildings with the ground floor devoted to parking. There would be 185 apartments, many of them two-bedroom units.
The lead developer is David Z. Cohen of Birmingham and the architect is Michael Poris.
DuCharme will feature its own fitness center and outdoor swimming pool.
“This will be one of the only urban apartment buildings in Detroit that offers many of the same amenities that you get in suburbia,” Cohen said.
DuCharme was initially proposed a decade ago as 66 townhouse condos, but those plans lost momentum in the economic downturn. The new DuCharme Place will instead be all rentals.
“The market is not there yet for condos,” Poris said. “People still have a hard time getting loans
.”Anticipated rents at DuCharme would range from about $1,000 for a one-bedroom unit up to $1,600 for a two-bedroom unit.
The third project, redevelopment of the 116-year-old El Moore Apartments at 624 W. Alexandrine in Midtown, is already under way. It will create 13 apartments and 10 by-the-night hostel rooms. Four of those hostel units will be “urban cabins” situated on the El Moore’s roof.
Developer Tom Brennan said he has yet to determine the rates
for his apartments, which could be ready by next spring.“The Midtown market is changing rapidly,” Brennan said today. “I don’t want to lock in anything 10 months before we open.”
Contact JC Reindl: 313-222-6631 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @JCReindl.
From Crain's Detoit Business
New Ford Field college bowl game gets a name: Quick Lane Bowl
By
Bill Shea
NATHAN SKID/Crains Detroit Business
The Lions announced in July 2013 that they'll host a new
bowl matching Big Ten Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference teams at
64,500-seat Ford Field under six-year deals that begin this year.
Related links
Not surprisingly, the name of the new college football bowl game at Detroit’s Ford Field will have an automotive connection: The Dec. 26 game will be called the Quick Lane Bowl.
Quick Lane Tire & Auto Centers is the Dearborn-based chain of more than 700 auto service outlets created by Ford Motor Co. for its Ford and Lincoln dealerships.
Members of the Ford family also own the Detroit Lions, organizers of the bowl.
Financial terms of the multiyear title sponsorship were not disclosed.
The team and company officials announced the deal this morning at a Ford Field press conference, ending a year of speculation about who the bowl’s title sponsor would be.
The game will air at 4:30 p.m. Dec. 26 on ESPN.
In July 2013, the Lions announced that they would host a new bowl matching Big Ten Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference teams at 64,500-seat Ford Field under six-year deals that begin this year. Rather than an automatic tie-in based on conference finish, the participating bowl teams will be selected by the conferences and the bowl staff at the end of the season.
The intent is to grow the game into a local and national fixture, Lions President Tom Lewand said.
“This has the potential to be, in the winter, what the grand prix is in the summer,” he said, referring to the Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix races on Memorial Day weekend that draw about 100,000 fans.
“It’s an opportunity to plant a tree in the city in the middle of December that the nation can gather around.”
A source familiar with the situation who agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity said Detroit mortgage giant Quicken Loans Inc. was interested in being the bowl’s title sponsor, but a deal couldn’t be worked out.
Lewand declined to name any other companies the Lions had talked to about the bowl. He said Quick Lane emerged “several months ago” as a contender for the title sponsorship.
“We looked at a lot of different partners,” he said.
The new game supplants the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl, which will not be played this year. That game, which leased Ford Field, previously had been called the Motor City Bowl when it launched in 1997 at the Pontiac Silverdome.
The game’s executive director is Kelly Kozole, the vice president of events at Ford Field.
Marketing effort
Quick Lane will use the new bowl as a marketing opportunity.“We’re hoping to continue to raise awareness among consumers for the fast service, value and convenience our Quick Lanes deliver,” Frederiek Toney, a Ford vice president who also is president of the Global Ford Customer Service Division, said in a statement.
The bowl could provide up to $10 million worth of media exposure value for Quick Lanes, one local analyst said.
“In terms of national exposure for title sponsors of a bowl game held prior to
New Year’s Day, those brands have averaged slightly more than $5 million of in-broadcast exposure,” said Eric Wright, president and executive director of research at Ann Arbor-based Joyce Julius & Associates Inc.
The firm calculates exposure by comparing the brand’s visibility and number of mentions during the telecast to the ad rate charged for the game. Wright was speaking in general terms rather than specifically about the Quick Lane deal.
“Additionally, media coverage via highlight TV programs, print articles and Internet news stories, along with on-site sponsorship elements and promotions conducted by a bowl game, typically generate about another $4 million to $5 million for a bowl sponsor,” he said. “So, all together, Christmas week bowl game title sponsors average around $10 million of exposure value.
“Generally speaking, the bulk of the media coverage, national TV highlight programming notwithstanding, occurs in the game’s local market, as well as the local markets of the participating teams.”
The first Quick Lane opened in 1998, and for several years, Ford has expanded the network across the country and into a few overseas markets. There are now 700 in the U.S., another 50 in Canada and a total of approximately 1,000 globally.
The automaker had 3,260 domestic Ford and Lincoln dealerships in 2013, so the Quick Lane chain has some ways to catch up.
The plan is to double the number of Quick Lane stores over the next five to 10 years, Toney said this morning. Ford also is creating a scalable option that will allow smaller dealers to add Quick Lane service, he said.
Dealers with Quick Lane stores are more profitable than those without, Toney said.
Quick Lane stores offer routine vehicle maintenance and light repairs, such as brake repairs and tire replacements, on all vehicle makes and models.
Quick Lane, along with the Motorcraft-branded line of Ford original and replacement auto parts, sponsors the No. 21 Ford Fusion owned by Wood Bros. Racing in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.
Internal expertise
The new bowl will be handled by the Lions’ in-house entertainment division, DLI Entertainment. It has promoted many large-scale shows and events at Ford Field, including seven consecutive sold-out Kenny Chesney concerts, a Taylor Swift concert, the 2003 Basketbowl, 2008 NCAA Men’s Basketball regionals, 2009 NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four and 2010 NCAA Men’s Frozen Four ice hockey tournament.“It’s because we have that capacity internally, we felt we could host a bowl,” Lewand said.
Tickets for the game — the participating teams won’t be known until
the end of the football season — go on sale at 10 a.m. Thursday at the
Ford Field box office, quicklanebowl.com or by calling (877) 212-8898.There is precedent for an NFL team hosting a college bowl game: The Houston Texans, through their Lone Star Sports & Entertainment event marketing arm, since 2006 have run the AdvoCare V100 Texas Bowl (known until last year as the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas) at 71,054-seat NRG Stadium (formerly Reliant Stadium).
The game, also called the Texas Bowl, replaced the Houston Bowl and has tie-ins with the Big East and SEC.
Ford connections
The Lions’ sole majority owner is Martha Ford, who took over ownership after her husband, William Clay Ford Sr., died of pneumonia March 9 at age 88. He bought the controlling interest in the team for $4.5 million in November 1963 and assumed majority ownership in January 1964.
Their son, Ford Motor Executive Chairman William Clay Ford Jr., is the Lions’ chairman. He is one of the automaker’s largest individual shareholders.
While the Ford family owns the Lions and Ford Motor Co., it doesn’t own Ford Field. The football team operates it under a lease from the Detroit-Wayne County Stadium Authority.
Ford did pay to name the stadium — the Lions got $50 million from Ford Motor under a deal that had the automaker pay the money in three lump sums in 2002 to put the its name on Ford Field: $30 million in February 2002, $17.5 million in March 2002 and the balance in December 2002, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission documents.
Performs Saturday, 7:45 PM
Detroiter Freda Payne at Jazz Festival
Freda may be recognized more so for her pop and R&B hits, "Band of Gold" and "Bring the Boys Home" with the producing team of Holland, Dozier, & Holland on Invictus. She was GRAMMY-nominated "Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Female for "Band of Gold," and for the album Contact.
Freda’s musical theatre credits are, Duke Ellington's Sophisticated Ladies, The Blues in the Night, Jelly's Last Jam, Ella: First Lady of Song and Montreux Jazz Festival with Quincy. Come Back to Me Love, her latest CD, signals a return to Freda’s Jazz roots. It’s about time.
Freda will perform with the USAF Airmen of Note Big Band, Saturday 7:45 - 9 PM on the Carhartt Amphitheatre Stage.
The
Line
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| Terry Barr, Detroit Lions, 1957 at Briggs Stadium |
It was a cold December day
in 1957 between Christmas and New Years.
I was a 13-year old kid with ten dollars and some change in my pocket
and on my way to buy a ticket to the NFL Championship game between the Detroit
Lions and the Cleveland Browns. This was
all made possible because my grandparents came through again with the usual and
much appreciated Christmas gift of a five dollar bill in one of those money
envelopes that when you open the flap you see a hole with the face of a
president looking out at you. And I always had a few bucks from doing odd jobs
like shining Dad’s shoes or shoveling snow for the neighbors. I took a bus from
our eastside Detroit neighborhood to the end of the line downtown behind J.L.
Hudson Co. department store and walked maybe a mile northwest on Michigan
Avenue heading to the corner of Trumbull where stood the legendary Briggs
Stadium, a tall, grey ominous hulk that swallowed the space of an entire square
block and looked like an impenetrable military fort built by the Third Reich.
I had been to Briggs
Stadium several times on summer days with my brother or dad to see Tigers games
(My dad and brother were absolute baseball fanatics.) and those outings were
always a thrill. The Lions also played at Briggs Stadium, and I had never been
to a Lions game – this would be my first one, and for a championship title against
the hated Cleveland Browns!
The Lions were my first
and favorite Detroit sports team when I was a kid. I was infatuated with them
and could name all their starters when I was 10 years old. In fact my mother urged me to write to my
favorite players and tell them I was a fan and that they would probably write
back. Sure enough I wrote brief letters to several of them and they all
responded (Well, the Lions PR department did.) with picture postcards with the
player in uniform in an action pose on the front and a short note to me on the
back. I was thrilled to get these and they became my most valuable possessions.
I was a tall kid and played CYO football at St. Juliana grade school where I
dreamed of playing the position of tight end someday for the Lions. So this solo
journey to Briggs Stadium to buy a ticket to the Lions championship game for me
was like a journey to Mecca.
I was several blocks from
the stadium when I noticed on the other side of the street a small two-story building
with hundreds maybe thousands of mostly men waiting in a long line stretching
the length of the building. At intervals
in the line, between the sidewalk and the street, barrels with burning wood
shot sparks into the air and short flames licking around the edges. The
building was the main office of the Detroit Lions Football Company where the
tickets for the big game were being sold. On top of the building was fixed a
large neon sign emblazoned with the team’s logo – a football player in an
open-face leather helmet wearing a Honolulu blue jersey running next to a real
lion, the lion apparently running interference for the ball carrier. (In fact,
that same neon sign was save through the years and now hangs inside Ford Field,
where the Lions now play.)
The newspaper said the
ticket office would open at 9 AM and it was about 8:30 AM when I first saw the
building. I thought I’d get there early and beat the rush. Boy was I wrong. I crossed Michigan Avenue
and approached the line. The line went
all the way down the side street, turned at the alley behind the building and
kept going around the building back out to Michigan Avenue! Thousands of
people, and I’m just now getting in line. I panicked, and almost cried. But
I’ve come this far, I thought. Give it a shot.
I got to the back of the
line and began the wait. It wasn’t long before another hundred or so people
were behind me and I felt much better knowing I wasn’t going to be the last guy
in line. Soon a roar went up as the office door opened. The line moved at a
snail’s pace and somebody was always cracking about speeding things up. Every
couple of minutes, a fan emerged from the door triumphantly holding tickets
high in the air. There was a limit – two or four, I don’t remember. General
admission tickets went first for six dollars, then the bleachers for four
dollars. I wore only regular shoes with thick woolen socks and my feet slowly turned
painfully numb. I never would have lasted without the intermittent fire
barrels. A few police cars rolled slowly
along the hand-laid brick street next to the line and occasionally a cop would
mosey out and chat with the guys in line. It was all very friendly, but to me
at 13, it was like I was in the strike line at the Ford Rouge Plant waiting for
a riot to break out. I just wanted a ticket to the Lions game, not get my teeth
knocked out.
Most men smoked in those
days and it seemed everyone in line had a cigarette dangling from his mouth, exhaling
smoke and steamy breath into the cold air. At about 5-feet 10 inches tall, I
could look many of the men in the eye but was afraid to do so. This was 1957
Detroit, the world’s largest factory town. Everyone seemed so tough, like
foundry workers, though spirits were high. Hell, they were Lions fans in the
world’s greatest sports town waiting to buy championship tickets and a lot of happy
banter about the weather and the big game filled the cold air. Profanity in public was not as prominent then
as now, but a few damns and hells and frequent references to guys
freezing their asses off could be heard.
A small group of men sort
of adopted me after I told them my story, impressed by my knowledge of the
Lions and that I was there alone. Soon I was a veteran line-waiter, feeling at
ease with the adult fans. Most people
were with somebody and played tag team – one waited while the other warmed up
in a nearby car. A smattering of Browns fans who had made the drive from
Cleveland (at a time when there were no freeways.) were among the crowd. Sections
of the Detroit Free Press and Detroit Times were passed back and forth
giving everybody a chance to read the entire paper. Pints of whiskey surreptitiously
passed among a few of the stout hearted. Guys went for donuts, sandwiches and
coffee and I was able to get my order in with somebody, keeping track of my
money judiciously to have enough for the ticket and bus ride home. The few times I had to relieve myself in a
nearby alley, somebody would hold my place.
It took seven hours in
line – almost four o’clock – before I was at the ticket office front door. Finally,
with frozen feet and face, I got inside and felt the heavenly warmth of its
tiny, crowded lobby. It was then that we were informed that Standing Room Only
tickets were all that remained at five dollars each. My heart jumped at the
fear that they would run out of tickets with only 50 or so fans ahead of me. So
close! Finally I got to the window and carefully gave the man my grandparents’ five
dollar bill. He handed me the ticket which I immediately secured inside my
jacket.
Outside the office only a
few hundred fans remained in line and darkness was already setting in. I turned for a last glimpse of Briggs Stadium
a half block away before quickly heading back down Michigan Avenue toward
Hudson’s and my bus ride home. Thrilled with my accomplishment, clutching the
precious cargo in my jacket pocket, I couldn’t wait to sit at the dinner table
with my parents, and my older brother (18) and older sister (15) and share my
adventure. Come next Sunday, I was going to Briggs Stadium to watch my first
Lions game in person as they battled Coach Paul Brown, gunslinger quarterback
Otto Graham and the Cleveland Browns for the title of World Champions! Thank
you Grandma and Grandpa. (NEXT: The Game)
©
Roger Lennert, January 7, 2011 Do Not Distribute.
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