Love Letter to Water Street & Ypsilanti Iron & Metal

I took a tour today of Water Street, onetime blue-collar district in Ypsilanti, that left me desolate.

Hours later I figured out why a rock felt lodged in my chest.

The empty buildings represent my father. He was a printing press mechanic for Heidelberg company for over 25 years. His workshop, with milling machine, drill presses, an antique and dangerous 19th-century bandsaw, 2 lathes, and thousands of hand tools, signifies an invisible library of skills honed over a lifetime.

Refined and accurate, these skills allowed him to create model steam engines, whose tiny size meant zero margin of error. They worked. He kept the presses running, with hand-made parts. The perfection of things he created out of slabs of metal ensured that thousands of people continued to receive their paper every day without incident. His accomplishments were invisible, but the bearings and cams and gears he made were visible—all over the workshop, just under my bedroom, throughout my childhood. The milling machine’s whine kept me awake, frustrated, on school nights.

Water Street’s ruin testifies to the sensibility that cannot see beauty in a precision-milled part or an elegantly-turned shaft from a lathe, and that has no idea of the focus, delicacy, and skill required to make the physical things enabling the functions of everyday life in a car or a house or a printing press. From scratch.

It would be wrong to say “market forces” eliminated the blue-collar businesses on Water Street, In 2002, according to the Ann Arbor News, Water Street’s 38 acres consisted of 36 properties with 18 businesses. Onetime businesses included Dave Love’s automotive shop, Jim Fagan’s First Class Services, and Ypsilanti Iron and Metal.

When 10 property owners refused to sell to the city, the city condemned the entire site. By 2004, the city had acquired all the land.

Once a busy and noisy metal supply and recycling site, where construction crews came in to have I-beams sawed to length for house foundations, Ypsi Iron and Metal stands empty. Its four battered buildings have been stripped of metal and wire by methheads and drunks.

Broken glass, dirty yellow insulation fluffs, and an occasional squatter’s fast-food bag litter the interiors. We could salvage only a few artifacts for the Museum.

The best of them was a set of letters from the onetime “YPSILANTI IRON & METAL CO.” sign. These were teased off the front of the building with a crowbar. Luckily for the Museum, the crackhead street value of hand-sawed, hand-shaped Art Deco letters is zero.

This is my love letter to Water Street. Your buildings represent my own experience of blue-collar work that enabled a mechanic’s daughter to get enough college education to disparage her middle-school-dropout father’s prejudices, while moving into circles closed to him. Water Street represents the industries that built this town from the beginning, and the artistry in a handmade car part buried unseen in the engine.

Sparks and clangs and curses once jangled the now-silent ruins. Wandering south from the buildings, an explorer can find old ceramic fuses, a glass insulator, and maybe a gear. Shoes crunch over shards of brick and glass, until the quiet of the place forces a pause. Water Street is silent. Wind moves through the purple-flowering weeds, as distant broken windows stare like black eyes.