Good evening everyone:

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Particularly during these impossibly difficult, tragic times, I suppose one should take in and cherish any good news that comes through the door rather than looking a gift-horse in the mouth. But I found myself doing that earlier this week. Quite removed from national political developments, but instead involving one of Detroit’s – indeed, America’s – cultural treasures: Aretha Franklin.

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The State of Michigan on Monday dedicated a downtown stretch of the Lodge Freeway – Highway 10 – to Ms. Franklin:

This is wonderful news. Full stop. This lovely expanse of concrete between Livernois and I-94 can use all the uplift it can get, and nobody better to do that than the Queen of Soul.

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But, more importantly, it is a welcome development that travelers into the city from the northwest will be reminded of Aretha Franklin’s contributions to American popular culture. It will also perhaps serve as a reminder for aficionados to hark back to her recording of “Freeway of Love,” with its refrain “City traffic’s movin’ way to slow . . . Drop the pedal and go . . . go come on now, go.” And any time we can honor one of this city’s most remarkable citizens, by any means, we should. So good for Representative Leslie Love, who sponsored the bill that led to the renaming.

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So, here’s the gift-horse’s mouth-looking part. There was just a part of me that wondered whether we should be entirely satisfied with lending her luster to a portion of a rather woebegone 70-year-old highway. If the honorific has to be an avenue, how about giving her name to the 27-mile-long street named for a 19^th Century engineer dismissed by President Martin Van Buren for misappropriating government funds (hint, Gratiot)?

But in fairness, I guess we’ve already done better. Detroit took the appropriate step, for example, of re-naming the Chene Park riverfront amphitheater the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre and designating the cafe in the Detroit Music Hall, Aretha’s Jazz Café. The freeway sign nevertheless turned my thoughts to a step we haven’t taken: a monument.  

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It struck me that we might use our recently-created Office of Cultural Affairs to explore different ways of valorizing through enduring public infrastructure the contributions of eminent Detroiters – starting with Ms. Franklin to be sure, but perhaps extending to Mayors Young and Archer, Focus Hope founder Father William Cunningham, Rosa Parks, Diana Ross, Malcolm X, architect Minoru Yamasaki, jazz musician Marcus Belgrave, Madonna, textile designer Ruth Adler Schnee, Roger Penske, Berry Gordy, Sebastian Kresge.  Could be a very, very long – and exciting – list.

Each of these celebratory gestures could be different in form, style, and location. Wouldn’t it be fabulous to have them scattered throughout the city?

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We already have scores of monuments to worthy people and causes – Abraham Lincoln, Father Gabriel Richard, the Underground Railroad, Martin Luther King, Robert Burns and Johann Schiller (the poets), Michigan Soldiers and Sailors, Governors William Milliken and Stevens Mason (the latter being the very first, and, at 24, the youngest of the State’s governors), James Brady (who in the late 19^th century founded the practice of marking up the price of newspapers and donating the excess proceeds to a fund to buy food, clothing, and toys for children in Detroit), and scores of others.

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I’m particularly fond of the monument to Hazen Pingree, the former Mayor of Detroit and Governor of Michigan in the late-19^th century. Pingree was the owner of a shoe store who made his reputation by battling corruption and fighting on behalf of people who were poor. He is remembered for championing “potato patches” and vegetable gardens to help feed families during the great depression of 1893:

But we would be well-served by updating the list. Not the least because our civic monument collection contains some relative clunkers, to use a polite term.

Take, for example, the statue of Alexander Macomb, who was honored for winning a battle in the war of 1812, but whose parents kept at least 26 slaves:

Or the one erected for Alpheus Starkey Williams, whose statue on Belle Isle commemorates his rather ho-hum accomplishments as a pre-Civil War businessman:

Or the Polish soldier Casimir Pulaski, who – although considered the father of the American calvary during the Revolutionary War – has no connection to Detroit:

Or James Scott, a gambler and complete scoundrel who paid for the Scott Fountain at Belle Isle to honor himself. One of the best Scott stories is that he built a mansion he never intended to occupy just to devalue a neighbor’s lot. Perhaps that scurrilousness motivated the fountain’s designers to have the water spray water directly into Scott’s face:

So, the Aretha Franklin Freeway is certainly cause to celebrate. It’s just that we might do even better.

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