By Patty Birkholz/Michigan Office of Great Lakes During these cold wintry days, you may not be thinking about invasive species. Maybe you should be. While we await warmer weather — the type conducive to walking beaches, boating or swimming on our inland seas — invasive species are being shipped around the world; they are stowing […]
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
Pure snark: St. Clair Shores man scores with video spoofs
A slow fade in, and a tinkling piano picks out a familiar phrase. The camera watches a familiar Metro Detroit main drag bathed in the golden light of a summer afternoon, while a mellow man’s voice speaks: “Downtown Royal Oak brings to mind one word.” The shot dissolves to a quartet of young men walking […]
Posted inQuality of Life
When MLK came to Grosse Pointe
Three weeks before he was assassinated in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. made one of his last speeches to a Michigan audience. And not just any audience; he went deep into the belly of the segregated beast, speaking to an audience at Grosse Pointe High School (now Grosse Pointe South) on March 14, 1968. At […]
Posted inQuality of Life
O, brave new world that has such people in it
Considering the works of William Shakespeare have been performed everywhere from Central Park to American prisons, the production of “The Tempest” entering its final weekend at Detroit’s Park Bar doesn’t qualify as particularly strange. But the story of how it came to be is one that anyone interested in economic development or the nurturance of […]
Posted inQuality of Life
Mitten tussle warms map fan's heart
Michigan and Wisconsin have been tussling over the use of the term “mitten” to describe geography. Michigan long has explained its shape (at least for the Lower Peninsula) as a mitten. Wisconsin recently decided it liked the mitten idea and started promoting the idea on its TravelWisconsin site. In no surprise, plenty of Michiganians find […]
Posted inQuality of Life
Kalamazoo gains strength from Promise
Jasmine Granville learned about the Kalamazoo Promise riding the bus back from a basketball game at Battle Creek Central. “I don’t remember if they played it on the radio, or people were calling people,” she said. “I remember a bunch of the seniors were just bawling their eyes out.” As a freshman at Kalamazoo Central […]
Posted inQuality of Life
State effort to replicate Promise yields mixed results
The Kalamazoo Promise has inspired 10 Michigan communities to develop college promises of their own — without relying on a few generous benefactors to underwrite the whole thing. The communities, mostly distressed urban areas, are creating Promise Zones, with the goal of promising all high school graduates living within the school district boundaries financial support […]
Posted inQuality of Life
Promise helps Kalamazoo weather tough times
For a decade, Michigan’s economic dashboard has flashed red: high unemployment, record foreclosures, bankrupt automakers, population declines. And the Kalamazoo region hasn’t been spared from the pain that spread across Michigan. But leaders and families in Kalamazoo are hopeful that the start of the 21st century will mostly be remembered for the birth, in 2005, […]
Posted inQuality of Life
Value of universities exemplified by new hospitals
The other day, my wife Kathy and I went to have a look through the new, soon-to-open University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s and Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospitals. The hospitals, located on the south side of the U of M medical system’s campus, have been under construction for the last four years. (The women’s hospital […]
Posted inQuality of Life
The costs of that "$500 house" in Detroit
A year ago, Jerry Paffendorf showed a friend from New York City how a house was up for sale in Detroit’s North Corktown neighborhood via a tax foreclosure auction. That friend fell in love withDetroit, the neighborhood and the house and bought it online for just a few thousand dollars, less than a few months’ […]
You must be logged in to post a comment.