Native American Graves on Water Street Property

Everyone knows about the Native American artifacts and bones on the west bank of Riverside Park. But what about EMU and even the Water Street property? There's more to the story--check it out at YpsiNews.com.

Image: the 1927 Hinsdale map showing a burial site (marked with cross in circle) north of Washtenaw.

9 Questions for Ypsi Fire Inspector John Roe, Former Customer of Ypsilanti Iron and Metal

Kind readers may recall that city Fire Inspector John Roe very kindly gave of his time to accompany Dusty D and her ninja corps to Water Street. Turns out he was a former customer of this metal salvage and recycling operation. Mr. Roe kindly answered some follow-up questions, which I post here with thanks to him.

1. You related getting I-beams from YI+M when you worked in
construction. When was that?

1. BETWEEN 1975 AND 1984

2. Is it correct to say YI+M was both a metal salvage and recycling
operation? What sorts of things might they buy from you if you had
scrap metal? And what sorts of things did people go there to get aside
from I-beams?

2. DON'T KNOW ABOUT THE RECYCLING. I-BEAMS, BASEMENT POST, FLAT STEEL STOCK, LINTEL'S FOR OVER WINDOWS AND DOOR OPENING, FOR LAYING BRICK ON, ANGLE IRON, ROUND AND SQUARE STOCK, RE-ROD FOR BASEMENT FOOTINGS, WIRE MESS FOR PLACING IN DRIVEWAYS AND SIDEWALKS.

3. In the first building we visited, there were electrical switches
hinting that there might have been heavy machinery in there. Was this
the building where they sawed up metal?

3. THE HOLE IN THE FLOOR WAS A SCALE FOR WEIGHTING STOCK AND THE BUILDING HOUSED THE TRACTOR THAT WAS USED FOR MOVING THE STEEL AROUND.

4. The second building was a big aluminum warehouse. Was something stored here?

4. THIS BUILDING WAS USED FOR BUILDING AND WELDING CUSTOM PIECES FOR CUSTOMERS.

5. What was the function, if you know, of the third small building,
where we climbed in the window?

5. DON'T KNOW.

6. We found slag--was there a smelter or incinerator on the site?

6. I DON'T BELIEVE THERE WAS, BUT A LOT OF CUTTING STEEL WITH TORCHED HAPPEN ON THIS SITE.

7. There was a junkyard here too, possibly preceding YI+M--did it
become part of Ypsi Iron and Metal?

7. DON'T KNOW.

8. Was this a noisy site? What might someone hear and see when
visiting here back when it was active?

8. NOT TOO BAD FROM WHAT I REMEMBER.

9. What else about the site is interesting that I haven't asked?

9. THIS WAS A PLACE WHERE YOU WENT TO GET VEHICLES, TRAILERS AND OTHER THING WEIGHTED FOR YOUR LICENSE PLATES. A YARD WHERE CONTRACTORS PURCHASED STEEL FOR COMMERCIAL AND RESIDENTIAL BUILDING.

Thanks to Mr. Roe for sharing his recollections of this Water Street site.

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.

Giving Wings to Water Street (And Drumsticks!)

Dusty Diary has been pondering the proposal being quietly bandied about to turn a relatively pollution-free area of Ypsilanti's Water Street brownfield into an organic free-range chicken farm.

Well, it wouldn't be the first time for poultry on Water Street.

Here's an undated Archives picture of the Boston poultry house, once a large building at 24 Water Street. The sign says "Good Live Poultry of All Kinds Wanted." What does this mean? Was it a chicken farm, or a slaughterhouse doing the processing for the onetime proliferation of backyard Ypsilanti chickens? Perhaps both.

Assuming the people in front are the sum total of the BPH's employees, the place gave jobs to 23 people--which meant money for up to 23 Ypsilanti families. It's hard to date this photo since there is no entry in the Archives' "Businesses" files for the BPH, suggesting that it was a less-prominent operation in town. But can we take a guess from the clothing? Hmm...very late 1800s/turn of the century? It's interesting to note that whereas fancy fashions have definite historical styles, the clothes of working people are far less distinctive.

According to what has been heard about the proposal, the free-range farm would be only part of a cycle of farming operations on the site including harvesting and composting the high-nitrogen chicken fertilizer, mycoremediation, and other interlocking, mutually beneficial aspects, a la the famed Salatins' Polyface Farm.

Although the prospect of reclaiming Ypsilanti's famed heritage as a garden city is appealing, with local schoolkids learning about and participating in a Polyface-style farm right on their doorstep, it would take hard work. However, brownfield remediation via urban agriculture is a fast-emerging field--one in which Ypsilanti could be at the cutting edge, especially with the resources and knowledge of Growing Hope to draw on.

At any rate, perhaps someday some crazy dreamer with a posthole digger, preparing for a poultry fence on Water Street, might find in her dirt-pile a worn white feather--a tiny legacy, and possibly unwitting sign of encouragement, from the Boston Poultry House.