lol white people, part 87
Utopia-seeking squatters struggle to create oasis in rough Detroit neighborhood
Taylor Dall (center), 20, and Sarah O' Connor, 24, leave the Innate Healing Arts Center owned by Dr. Robert Pizzimenti while heading back to the house they live in on W. Golden Gate in Detroit.
They arrived in the neighborhood speaking of peace and love. They said they wanted to start a community for the spiritually minded and the artistically inclined, a place where people could have self-sufficient lives off the grid.
And they chose one of Detroit’s worst areas as their new home.
A couple years ago, residents of Goldengate Street were scratching their heads as people with strange names like Coconut and Mars started moving into the street’s abandoned homes, decorating them in wild colors and planting vegetable gardens in empty lots.
There’s about a dozen or so of them now, along with waves of couch surfers who pass through. They live in houses with no electricity or water or heat. They warm themselves with wood-burning stoves and wash themselves outside with buckets of water on warmer days. Their toilets are outhouses.
Each wound up here for different personal reasons but with a shared goal of creating a self-sustaining, eco-friendly community. They thought that Detroit, with so much abandonment, would be the perfect place to create it. And they figured if nobody wanted all these abandoned houses, they’d gladly take them over - with or without permission.
It was a culture clash from the beginning. Establishing a utopian community in a rough area proved harder than expected.
Some residents saw the newcomers as easy targets for robbery. Hangers-on showed up and took advantage of the group’s friendliness. Mostly, neighbors complained about suddenly having a circus on their street.
“That’s what I keep telling them - how is it that you’re part of this ‘peaceful community’ when the people who actually belong here, you’re actually screwing over to have your dream?” said Larry Lions, 43, who bought a home here five years ago.
But the newcomers say they came to improve the neighborhood - not take it over or cause a disruption. They give free bicycles to kids, mow lawns on empty lots and hand out vegetables from the garden.
“Everybody’s here because they want to be here, because they see the possibility of creating change,” said Mars, otherwise known as 31-year-old Marshall Symons. “We’re not here to gentrify, we’re not here to turn it into something where poor people can’t afford to live here. We’re here to invest in this community.”
A different world
The neighborhood began changing 13 years ago when chiropractor Robert Pizzimenti opened the Innate Healing Center at the corner of the street at Woodward. He didn’t know much about the area at the time.
“It’s a whole different world here,” he said. “I never realized how bad it is here.”
Sade Lewis aka 'Cookie' 21 wraps her hair while dressed as Calypso from Pirates of the Caribbean while hanging out at Golden Gate Vegetarian Cafe.
The State Fair neighborhood - bounded by Woodward, John R, 8 Mile and McNichols - is in collapse. It lost 51% of its population in just a decade, according to the last census. It’s home to Robinwood Street, which gained notoriety a few years back because 60 of its 66 houses were abandoned. Prostitutes roam the area by the dozen at all hours and in all weather, and drug houses are everywhere.
“There’s more crack around here than tobacco,” said Pizzimenti, 51. “I’m amazed at the amount of crack and heroin around here.”
Pizzimenti painted his new building sunshine yellow, held weekly drum circles featuring music and meditation, and grew the clinic from a simple chiropractic office to a vegetarian restaurant to an herbs store to a community center.
It couldn’t have been more out of place in this impoverished, violent area.
Pizzimenti has been robbed twice at gunpoint, his center has been burglarized and he was once jumped by a pack of pre-teens. He’d been giving them money now and then. They wanted more.
“I was more sad about it than angry,” he said, pointing to a bite-size scar on his arm.
But he’s almost apologetic about these kinds of incidents.
“I know a lot of the bad guys, and they’re not really bad guys,” he said. “I’m amazed at how they survive. They’re just desperate. But if they have money in their pocket they become beautiful.”
Though things still get stolen now and then, his presence has become accepted by the area’s residents, who all know the eccentric doctor on the corner.
“One time my violin was stolen, a $7,000 beautiful violin,” he said. “I go into one of the crack houses looking for it and they’re all like, ‘Hey Dr. Bob!’ I’m like, oh my God I’ve been here too long.”
One house, one garden
Down the street, clusters of abandoned homes have stood empty for years. Pizzimenti bought one of them and moved in.
One day, someone calling himself Mars showed up.
He was living in San Francisco when he came across a website touting a burgeoning eco-village called Fireweed Universe City, founded near the healing center by someone who’d hung out there.
The idea sounded so good, he biked from California to Detroit. The trip took two months.
He was greeted with a letdown.
“I thought I was moving into something established,” he said. “I thought I would get here and there would be, like, all these households with all these community gardens. And it was one house, one person, one garden.”
And that one person moved away. But he was inspired by the original concept and stayed to carry out its goals.
He moved into the abandoned house next door to Pizzimenti and founded a community bike shop. He’d post on couch-surfing websites inviting travelers to come stay on the block. And when Occupy Detroit took place two years ago, the vacant houses filled up.
“We went down there and said, ‘Hey, there’s all these empty houses by us. Come occupy these.’ So some of them did,” he said.
Not everyone who accepted the invitation shared the community’s ideals.
People showed up drunk or high, started fights, stole things. Not long ago, a young woman living in one of the houses was nearly raped in a driveway by a stranger who’d spent a month here doing chores, fixing houses and claiming the same ideals as the community.
It became hard to tell who was sincere and who was there for a free thrill ride - or worse. Few wanted to contribute to the hard work that community members asked of people.
“We’ve had a few of these vacationing squatters,” Pizzimenti said. “They’re not bad kids, but they’re not really doing anything, either.”
'I love it. I feel safe all of those guys watch out for us. It's kind of like a family. We fight a lot but we still love each other. It's fun and dysfunctional,' Sarah O'Conner 24 while showing the house where she lives with two other women that is owned by chiropractor Robert Pizzimenti on W. Golden Gate in Detroit.
Pet chicken
A chicken walked into the open door of Sarah O’Conner’s house. She picked him up and pet his feathers.
He was a stray from the days when there ducks, chickens, goats and pigs next door, until fed-up neighbors called police and had them hauled away. Now he’s the house pet.
O’Conner has been here since spring. The 24-year-old grew up in Macomb County, went to college Up North, and then came home. She found living in her car was preferable to staying with her parents, and staying with friends in this area was better than that. She’s been living in this abandoned house with two other young women ever since.
Her roommate, 20-year-old Taylor Dall, had been part of the Occupy movement in Traverse City, came across Innate Healing Center’s website, found the community and moved in. She works at the healing center, as do neighbors like Cookie and Artyst, who live across the street in a house whose windows are filled with colorful bottles cemented in rows, creating a stained-glass effect inside.
The light was dim inside the women’s house except for the warm glow from the wood-burning stove. Its smoke escaped through a pipe funneled through the fireplace and up the chimney.
Drums were stacked in a corner; an acoustic guitar rested on a wall. A gaudy portrait of Jesus and Mary was propped atop the fireplace mantle. So was a hand-scrawled cardboard sign announcing that “God is love.” A sign in the doorway listed community chores to be done.
Like the others in the empty houses, they say they live off the grid to have minimal environmental impact.
“That’s the complete ideal,” said 25-year-old Sara Bohan, who lives here, too. “All there is in the world now is to live sustainably and live without the means of corporations. I found a home here, and I’m happy here.”
Neighbors complain
The community gets little attention from the police, partly because Pizzimenti is slowly buying the abandoned homes they stay in and partly because unless the owner of an abandoned house complains, police can do little.
But the neighbors had plenty of complaints.
“My 12-year-old daughter came in and said, ‘Dad, the ladies is running up and down the street naked,’ ” Lions said. “And I come outside, and they was just acting the fool.”
O’Conner admits there’s sometimes wild behavior here.
“There’s been some things, there’s been some nudity in the community that maybe some of the neighbors didn’t appreciate,” she said. “You get some free spirits in here.”
Lions said he’s complained to them a number of times.
“They try to make it seem like, oh, you’re just not ready for ‘the change,’ ” Lions said. “But to me it’s like going backwards. It’s like we’re regressing into animalness. You’re living in a house where you don’t have any lights, you don’t have any water, you’re not washing up. You’re basically a caveman.”
A few residents went beyond complaints. One came banging violently on the door of one of the houses one night. When the people wouldn’t let him in, he opened fire through the door, hitting a young man in the groin.
A neighbor once stabbed Symons in the shoulder with a screwdriver in his own house.
And theft is so ingrained among some in this long-poor area that someone broke in and stole bicycles from the bike shop, even though they were being given away.
Yet community members answered these assaults by reaching out to their perpetrators. Symons not only forgave the man who stabbed him, he fixed his bike, too.
This kind of reaction was foreign to the area’s residents.
“It’s not cool culture to them,” Symons said. “You’ve got mainstream hip-hop culture - cash, money, ego, and we’re like, ‘Dissolve your ego, live in peace and harmony.’ It’s not cool. They’re like, ‘What do I get out of that?’ It’s a hard sell.”
Evelyn Galinac poses for a photo outside of the Innate Healing Arts Center on W. Golden Gate in Detroit on Thursday October 31, 2013. Galinac and her husband have worked to repair a house they have been squatting in on W. Golden Gate replacing windows, doors and clearing out the home that was being dumped in. Galinac works as an assistant to Dr. Robert Pizziminenti's wife Tissheama Pizziminenti while also helping out at the Innate Healing Arts Center.
Focusing on the good
They still insist the good moments have outweighed the bad.
They’ve drawn donations including clothes, furniture, bedding and tools from people who’ve heard of their rustic existence and share their ideals. Tangent Art Gallery held a fund-raiser last summer that helped bring in more bikes than were stolen. Someone donated a new steel door to replace the one burglars broke. A tree-removal company donated thick logs.
Though some neighbors remain quietly hostile, some realized these newcomers who give their kids bikes, mow people’s lawns and hold spring cleanups of the neighborhood might not be worse than a street full of abandoned homes.
The freeloaders have gone away, as they do every winter, leaving behind a core of believers who - even in the face of ill will and hardship and odds - remain hopeful about establishing a new kind of community in an unwelcoming place.
“Out of any negative thing beautiful things can come,” O’Conner said. “Something beautiful has the opportunity to grow here. And this is a little beautiful gem to find in Detroit.”
source
Taylor Dall (center), 20, and Sarah O' Connor, 24, leave the Innate Healing Arts Center owned by Dr. Robert Pizzimenti while heading back to the house they live in on W. Golden Gate in Detroit.
They arrived in the neighborhood speaking of peace and love. They said they wanted to start a community for the spiritually minded and the artistically inclined, a place where people could have self-sufficient lives off the grid.
And they chose one of Detroit’s worst areas as their new home.
A couple years ago, residents of Goldengate Street were scratching their heads as people with strange names like Coconut and Mars started moving into the street’s abandoned homes, decorating them in wild colors and planting vegetable gardens in empty lots.
There’s about a dozen or so of them now, along with waves of couch surfers who pass through. They live in houses with no electricity or water or heat. They warm themselves with wood-burning stoves and wash themselves outside with buckets of water on warmer days. Their toilets are outhouses.
Each wound up here for different personal reasons but with a shared goal of creating a self-sustaining, eco-friendly community. They thought that Detroit, with so much abandonment, would be the perfect place to create it. And they figured if nobody wanted all these abandoned houses, they’d gladly take them over - with or without permission.
It was a culture clash from the beginning. Establishing a utopian community in a rough area proved harder than expected.
Some residents saw the newcomers as easy targets for robbery. Hangers-on showed up and took advantage of the group’s friendliness. Mostly, neighbors complained about suddenly having a circus on their street.
“That’s what I keep telling them - how is it that you’re part of this ‘peaceful community’ when the people who actually belong here, you’re actually screwing over to have your dream?” said Larry Lions, 43, who bought a home here five years ago.
But the newcomers say they came to improve the neighborhood - not take it over or cause a disruption. They give free bicycles to kids, mow lawns on empty lots and hand out vegetables from the garden.
“Everybody’s here because they want to be here, because they see the possibility of creating change,” said Mars, otherwise known as 31-year-old Marshall Symons. “We’re not here to gentrify, we’re not here to turn it into something where poor people can’t afford to live here. We’re here to invest in this community.”
A different world
The neighborhood began changing 13 years ago when chiropractor Robert Pizzimenti opened the Innate Healing Center at the corner of the street at Woodward. He didn’t know much about the area at the time.
“It’s a whole different world here,” he said. “I never realized how bad it is here.”
Sade Lewis aka 'Cookie' 21 wraps her hair while dressed as Calypso from Pirates of the Caribbean while hanging out at Golden Gate Vegetarian Cafe.
The State Fair neighborhood - bounded by Woodward, John R, 8 Mile and McNichols - is in collapse. It lost 51% of its population in just a decade, according to the last census. It’s home to Robinwood Street, which gained notoriety a few years back because 60 of its 66 houses were abandoned. Prostitutes roam the area by the dozen at all hours and in all weather, and drug houses are everywhere.
“There’s more crack around here than tobacco,” said Pizzimenti, 51. “I’m amazed at the amount of crack and heroin around here.”
Pizzimenti painted his new building sunshine yellow, held weekly drum circles featuring music and meditation, and grew the clinic from a simple chiropractic office to a vegetarian restaurant to an herbs store to a community center.
It couldn’t have been more out of place in this impoverished, violent area.
Pizzimenti has been robbed twice at gunpoint, his center has been burglarized and he was once jumped by a pack of pre-teens. He’d been giving them money now and then. They wanted more.
“I was more sad about it than angry,” he said, pointing to a bite-size scar on his arm.
But he’s almost apologetic about these kinds of incidents.
“I know a lot of the bad guys, and they’re not really bad guys,” he said. “I’m amazed at how they survive. They’re just desperate. But if they have money in their pocket they become beautiful.”
Though things still get stolen now and then, his presence has become accepted by the area’s residents, who all know the eccentric doctor on the corner.
“One time my violin was stolen, a $7,000 beautiful violin,” he said. “I go into one of the crack houses looking for it and they’re all like, ‘Hey Dr. Bob!’ I’m like, oh my God I’ve been here too long.”
One house, one garden
Down the street, clusters of abandoned homes have stood empty for years. Pizzimenti bought one of them and moved in.
One day, someone calling himself Mars showed up.
He was living in San Francisco when he came across a website touting a burgeoning eco-village called Fireweed Universe City, founded near the healing center by someone who’d hung out there.
The idea sounded so good, he biked from California to Detroit. The trip took two months.
He was greeted with a letdown.
“I thought I was moving into something established,” he said. “I thought I would get here and there would be, like, all these households with all these community gardens. And it was one house, one person, one garden.”
And that one person moved away. But he was inspired by the original concept and stayed to carry out its goals.
He moved into the abandoned house next door to Pizzimenti and founded a community bike shop. He’d post on couch-surfing websites inviting travelers to come stay on the block. And when Occupy Detroit took place two years ago, the vacant houses filled up.
“We went down there and said, ‘Hey, there’s all these empty houses by us. Come occupy these.’ So some of them did,” he said.
Not everyone who accepted the invitation shared the community’s ideals.
People showed up drunk or high, started fights, stole things. Not long ago, a young woman living in one of the houses was nearly raped in a driveway by a stranger who’d spent a month here doing chores, fixing houses and claiming the same ideals as the community.
It became hard to tell who was sincere and who was there for a free thrill ride - or worse. Few wanted to contribute to the hard work that community members asked of people.
“We’ve had a few of these vacationing squatters,” Pizzimenti said. “They’re not bad kids, but they’re not really doing anything, either.”
'I love it. I feel safe all of those guys watch out for us. It's kind of like a family. We fight a lot but we still love each other. It's fun and dysfunctional,' Sarah O'Conner 24 while showing the house where she lives with two other women that is owned by chiropractor Robert Pizzimenti on W. Golden Gate in Detroit.
Pet chicken
A chicken walked into the open door of Sarah O’Conner’s house. She picked him up and pet his feathers.
He was a stray from the days when there ducks, chickens, goats and pigs next door, until fed-up neighbors called police and had them hauled away. Now he’s the house pet.
O’Conner has been here since spring. The 24-year-old grew up in Macomb County, went to college Up North, and then came home. She found living in her car was preferable to staying with her parents, and staying with friends in this area was better than that. She’s been living in this abandoned house with two other young women ever since.
Her roommate, 20-year-old Taylor Dall, had been part of the Occupy movement in Traverse City, came across Innate Healing Center’s website, found the community and moved in. She works at the healing center, as do neighbors like Cookie and Artyst, who live across the street in a house whose windows are filled with colorful bottles cemented in rows, creating a stained-glass effect inside.
The light was dim inside the women’s house except for the warm glow from the wood-burning stove. Its smoke escaped through a pipe funneled through the fireplace and up the chimney.
Drums were stacked in a corner; an acoustic guitar rested on a wall. A gaudy portrait of Jesus and Mary was propped atop the fireplace mantle. So was a hand-scrawled cardboard sign announcing that “God is love.” A sign in the doorway listed community chores to be done.
Like the others in the empty houses, they say they live off the grid to have minimal environmental impact.
“That’s the complete ideal,” said 25-year-old Sara Bohan, who lives here, too. “All there is in the world now is to live sustainably and live without the means of corporations. I found a home here, and I’m happy here.”
Neighbors complain
The community gets little attention from the police, partly because Pizzimenti is slowly buying the abandoned homes they stay in and partly because unless the owner of an abandoned house complains, police can do little.
But the neighbors had plenty of complaints.
“My 12-year-old daughter came in and said, ‘Dad, the ladies is running up and down the street naked,’ ” Lions said. “And I come outside, and they was just acting the fool.”
O’Conner admits there’s sometimes wild behavior here.
“There’s been some things, there’s been some nudity in the community that maybe some of the neighbors didn’t appreciate,” she said. “You get some free spirits in here.”
Lions said he’s complained to them a number of times.
“They try to make it seem like, oh, you’re just not ready for ‘the change,’ ” Lions said. “But to me it’s like going backwards. It’s like we’re regressing into animalness. You’re living in a house where you don’t have any lights, you don’t have any water, you’re not washing up. You’re basically a caveman.”
A few residents went beyond complaints. One came banging violently on the door of one of the houses one night. When the people wouldn’t let him in, he opened fire through the door, hitting a young man in the groin.
A neighbor once stabbed Symons in the shoulder with a screwdriver in his own house.
And theft is so ingrained among some in this long-poor area that someone broke in and stole bicycles from the bike shop, even though they were being given away.
Yet community members answered these assaults by reaching out to their perpetrators. Symons not only forgave the man who stabbed him, he fixed his bike, too.
This kind of reaction was foreign to the area’s residents.
“It’s not cool culture to them,” Symons said. “You’ve got mainstream hip-hop culture - cash, money, ego, and we’re like, ‘Dissolve your ego, live in peace and harmony.’ It’s not cool. They’re like, ‘What do I get out of that?’ It’s a hard sell.”
Evelyn Galinac poses for a photo outside of the Innate Healing Arts Center on W. Golden Gate in Detroit on Thursday October 31, 2013. Galinac and her husband have worked to repair a house they have been squatting in on W. Golden Gate replacing windows, doors and clearing out the home that was being dumped in. Galinac works as an assistant to Dr. Robert Pizziminenti's wife Tissheama Pizziminenti while also helping out at the Innate Healing Arts Center.
Focusing on the good
They still insist the good moments have outweighed the bad.
They’ve drawn donations including clothes, furniture, bedding and tools from people who’ve heard of their rustic existence and share their ideals. Tangent Art Gallery held a fund-raiser last summer that helped bring in more bikes than were stolen. Someone donated a new steel door to replace the one burglars broke. A tree-removal company donated thick logs.
Though some neighbors remain quietly hostile, some realized these newcomers who give their kids bikes, mow people’s lawns and hold spring cleanups of the neighborhood might not be worse than a street full of abandoned homes.
The freeloaders have gone away, as they do every winter, leaving behind a core of believers who - even in the face of ill will and hardship and odds - remain hopeful about establishing a new kind of community in an unwelcoming place.
“Out of any negative thing beautiful things can come,” O’Conner said. “Something beautiful has the opportunity to grow here. And this is a little beautiful gem to find in Detroit.”
source