Cliff Bell’s is one of the oldest Jazz clubs in the city - a little history from Cliff Bell's website:
Through the 30's 40's and 50's Cliff Bell's and the Town Pump Tavern anchored two ends of what was Detroit's busiest night crawl with clubs, pubs and Burlesques dotting Park Avenue. During the 70's and 80's the Club operated under a series of other names. Many remember The Winery, La Cave, or AJ's on the Park.
In 1985 the famous club closed and remained empty until in late 2005.
Like a lot of places in Detroit, it was left empty for a long time. The plaster cracked, the ceiling leaked, but that all changed in 2005 when Paul Howard and Scott Lowell began the renovation of the shuttered club.
In this video, the owner of the building that houses Cliff Bell's talks about the restoration of the club.
This video was shot by Lindsey Smith, and produced by Juan Freitez.
When you think about improvisation you might think of comedy or jazz. The idea of cartooning or drawing comics is probably not what comes to mind. But a little comic book shop in Dearborn is giving artists a space to try out new ideas, together, on paper.
Green Brain Comics hosts a monthly comic jam. It’s similar to the writing exercise known as an exquisite corpse. In this case, an artist draws one panel, then passes it to someone who draws another panel, and so forth. The end result is an entire comic strip, created by eight artists.
It's something a lot of parents dread. Lice in your kid's hair.
Pesticides in shampoo form is one way to tackle the problem, but some people go pesticide-free.
Kyle Norris filed a report on Rapunzel's Lice Boutique in Ann Arbor for the Environment Report. I tagged along with her with a camera when she visited a family getting a treatment and we put together this slide show:
A few years back, we at the Environment Report did a comprehensive series called, "The Ten Threats to the Great Lakes." Doing our best to make it comprehensive, we broke each of the Ten Threats into several stories.
We joked that the "Ten Threats" series turned into a 33-part series as we dug deeper into the issues.
For the series, I traveled to northwest Ohio and met with Lynn Davis. His grandfather had started a farm drainage business in 1910 using a steam powered trenching machine. Davis later took over the business from his father and uncle.
Changing Gears reporter Kate Davidson put together this look at the Detroit Produce Terminal. The Terminal was built in 1929 by a railroad company. Produce was shipped in by rail and wholesalers bid on it at an auction. The Terminal has changed but there is still a lot of action in the building, including fights over cauliflower.
Petrie learned how to weave at the nonprofit Cross Village Rug Works. She says anyone can learn how to weave if they have patience and like to work with their hands.
Credit Jennifer Guerra / Michigan Radio
Jasmine Petrie has her own rug weaving studio in Petoskey. She makes wool rugs on a Cranbrook loom.
Credit Jennifer Guerra / Michigan Radio
These looms were owned by the Cross Village Rug Works. When they closed, they sold their looms at steep discounts hoping to keep independent rug makers in business. The leftover looms were donated to North Central Michigan College.
Credit Jennifer Guerra / Michigan Radio
Jasmine Petrie's wool comes from a friend's farm in Cross Village. She dyes the wool in her studio.
Cross Village in northern Michigan is like a lot of small, rural towns in the state, where money is tight and jobs are scarce. And when winter comes around and all the tourists are gone, the outlook is even bleaker. So a group of women started up a cottage industry of rug making to help locals sustain themselves through the lean months.
23-year old Jasmine Petrie wears her hair in pigtails and has tattoos on her back and arms; she looks more like a rock star than a rug weaver.
There’s a lot of change happening in Detroit. And city leaders face a lot of challenges – like what to do with vacant land and dilapidated building and a lack of basic amenities in many parts of the city. School leaders have their own challenges.
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