For years, the popular perception of heroin was that of a drug consumed mainly by edge-walking musicians and people who sleep under bridges. Somewhere between Kurt Cobain and the kid down the street, that changed. Today, if heroin were a record on the charts, it would have a bullet next to it. Scott Masi, outreach […]
Quality of Life
Michigan is a great place to live. Bridge will report that fact often — and on potential threats to the assets that make it so.
Posted inQuality of Life
Remaking a river
Demolition crews in August took down the old powerhouse at the Brown Bridge Dam near Traverse City. This is part of a larger project to remove two dams and modify a third on the waterway. Bridge photo contributor John Russell reports that the powerhouse was built in 1922; was 33 feet above the waterline; and […]
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Stirring the pot for Detroit development
One came with a poster-sized drawing of the television studio he wants to build. Another distributed a map of a light-rail system – a fantasy system, to be sure – covering much of Southeast Michigan. A third spoke of her plan to put addicts on the road to recovery via horticulture. And the last had […]
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Poverty, then pregnancy for teen mothers
The Catherine Ferguson Academy is on its summer schedule, and the custodians’ floor-polishing has pushed much of what is unique about the Detroit charter high school into the halls. A line of high chairs blocks a row of lockers. A table with built-in chairs for four infants stands near a pushcart designed to hold nine […]
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Learning life outdoors: Old idea, new generation
Dick Laing recalls with pride working with Michigan Tech Universityon a residential “boot camp” style program in forestry and conservation skills in the Upper Peninsula that helped disadvantaged youngsters develop life skills. The program eventually fell victim to budgetary neglect, he says. Laing never doubted, however, the value of the effort to put children from urban […]
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In Detroit, wheels on the bus go round and …
At a time when many of his peers are finishing college to find a still-depressed job market, Andy Didorosi isn’t waiting for anyone to offer him a slot. At 25, the college dropout describes himself as a “social entrepreneur” and is currently at work on his latest start-up — the Detroit Bus Company, founded with […]
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Sorry, baby: Delivery docs in short supply Up North
Kristin and Warren Scaife fishtailed along the gravel road that winds south out of Grand Marais, on the rocky shores of Lake Superior. Kristin was in labor, but she couldn’t go to the closest hospital. Helen Newberry Joy Hospital didn’t have a birthing unit. A decade earlier, Kristin’s mother-in-law had found that out when she […]
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CMU eyes locals to relieve doctor shortage for rural Michigan
Northern Michigan needs to take a gardening approach to solve its shortage of medical services, and grow its own doctors. That’s the advice of Ernie Yoder, dean of the yet-to-open Central Michigan University College of Medicine. The shortage of physicians in the northern half of the Lower Peninsula and in the U.P. causes some rural […]
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Kicking cancer, embracing hope
When Jamiah Williams sat down to watch the St. Jude Telethon, an annual event dedicated to raising money for children’s cancer research, she did so simply to spend some quality time with her mother. Little did the 9-year-old from Detroit know that just a few months later she, too, would be diagnosed with cancer. “It […]
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Talking Detroit's Eastern Market, the hunt for the Michigan potato, and other food stuff
Dan Carmody joined Detroit’s Eastern Market Corp. in 2007, just in time to catch the local-food wave. The market district covers one square mile on Detroit’s east side and holds about 150 businesses, but the public draws are the five city-owned structures where, on Saturdays year-round, Metro Detroiters flock to buy fresh produce, meat and […]