A Day in Detroit, a Train to Chicago

Some birthday reflections!

Visiting The Heidelberg Project | Photo credit: Katie Waddle

​​I started writing this while on a 5-hour train ride last weekend.

For the first third of the trip, I stared out the window, passing yellowing meadows, fields of corn husks drying post-harvest, and trees—mostly green, but peppered with golden and flaming leaves from certain anointed branches. A languorous autumn light coats the landscape like honey, shadows elongate like yawns, the train pulls me across the slow blur of nondescript towns where people carry on with what I imagine to be a Norman Rockwell-kind-of-Sunday. I’m seated facing backwards to the direction of the train, so I can still stare at the past, seconds-old, as I’m hurtling towards the next destination. This trip is my annual pilgrimage to Chicago. 

I know not many people will say this of Amtrak, but for me, a long train ride feels good for the soul. I end up doing my best thinking in the kind of liminality that bears a wide window into the unassuming cross-sections of America—its gridded farms, lily-padded ponds, truck-lined parking lots, manicured backyards. I’m a frequent rider of the Boston-NYC roundtrip route, but this is my first time taking Amtrak in the Midwest. It reminds me of my time in Japan when I rode trains everyday—commuting by the local one-car train to work and ripping through rice fields by Shinkansen on longer trips to visit family. Every time, I get lulled into a wistful state that evolves into hypnosis by repeating scenes of Americana, of the inaka.

Somewhere between Ann Arbor and Chicago

I guess I’m especially reflective because it’s the week of my birthday and I’m headed to Chicago to spend time with a few of my dearest friends. It’s the sixth time that I’m celebrating a birthday in this city—the first time during my first week of college, the last time over ten years ago, on a quick stopover while moving to San Francisco. I’m thinking of those past versions of myself, while watching the recent past ahead of me out the window, wondering what I had wished for each time blowing out those candles. Probably the same thing, honestly. But this year, it felt like a lot of past birthday wishes came true. 

I started off this trip in Ann Arbor, MI to visit Katie, one of my best friends who I lived with for nearly 7 years in SF, now a badass math PhD student. The last time we saw each other was in New York in 2019. During her visit, we ran around the city taking photos of us wearing a Santa hat in the summer heat for our joint-holiday card, a post-roommate tradition we’ve kept up living apart. Hugging her again felt like a dam breaking to a flood of my best memories. I just wrote that and burst out crying. Thank god for window seats. 

Last Saturday, we decided to spend the day in Detroit, a city I’ve always been curious to visit. She suggested we hit up 3 spots: Eastern Market, The Heidelberg Project, and the Motown Museum. 

What I loved most about Detroit is its legacy of creativity and how it has reimagined past spaces to serve new functions—every facade is a canvas; vacancy is a kind of raw potential. We walked around Eastern Market—a large covered farmers’ market located along warehouses converted into restaurants, breweries, and shops. The murals cover buildings both occupied and abandoned. They are vibrant, full of hometown pride, and a reminder that creativity has always been the true infrastructure of this city. After grabbing lunch and a bouquet of flowers, we headed to The Heidelberg Project, an “outdoor art environment” in Detroit’s McDougall-Hunt neighborhood. 

I had no idea what to expect before we arrived, but we pulled up to a colorful, polka-dotted house, a street lined with piles of stuffed animals crammed onto a boat, a crash of kiddie cars, a display of TV sets painted with various “news” labels, vacuum cleaners with gloves on the handles reaching upwards, a classic Detroit taxi cab, a mountain of pastel-painted shopping carts, a basement with no roof, and clocks—so many clocks—painted on everything. And then, we happened upon a person holding a can of purple paint and a brush—Tyree Guyton, the artist behind The Heidelberg Project. Walking around felt like stepping into imaginative chaos, a living installation subject to change, degradation, and replenishment. It’s overwhelming to make sense of it all before you wonder why you’re trying to in the first place.

The Art Environment at 3600 Heidelberg St.

Conversations with Tyree are succinct and joyful; every answer is enigmatic. He champions this idea of “NO LIMITS!” in art, a mantra he repeats as he surveys the space, painting dots on various objects and clock-hands on plywood. He says things like, “You don’t have to always put art in a museum!” and “Just talking with you made me want to paint this circle,” as a purple disc emerges where his brush touches the lid of a silent CD player. Classical music blares from a hidden stereo inside the house; even with the visual stimulation, the environment is peaceful, inviting all wanders to explore. 

In 1986, Tyree Guyton began collecting found objects and assembled them into structures in the yard of his childhood home. His art expanded, spilling over onto the lawns across the street and further down the road, eventually taking over his neighborhood block. The mission behind the project grows from the belief that “a community can re-develop and sustain itself from the inside out, by embracing its diverse cultures and artistic attributes as the essential building blocks for a fulfilling and economically viable way of life.” Tyree’s terminology for this is called, “Heidelbergology, or the study of discarded materials incorporated into the landscape and fabric of a community and the effects on that community.”  

Information booth at The Heidelberg Project

I asked Tyree where he intended to put the clock he just painted, and he replied that he had plans to set it down for now, until it spoke to him. A few minutes later, he came up to me holding a different painted clock and explained, “You know, this other piece? Well it spoke to me, and I want you to see it from a distance and tell me what you think.” Then he took the large rectangle of plywood, walked through a field, across a road, and hammered it onto a tree. I watched from afar, another instance of the recent past, seconds-old, retreating before me, diminishing in distance. Time, when nailed to a place, goes still. 

I can’t stop thinking about what it means to let time speak to you. And how to move with it when it does.

What time is it?

Subjected to the elements, the surrounding environment takes over these clock-objects, warping the wood, flaking the paint off. Memories too, over time never stay intact. I think about how I am similarly nailed to places, the pangs of longing are just tiny spikes mounting my past to cities I’ve left. Do the clocks grow taller with the trees? How does time expand in space when they’re fixed as memories? 

Before we lived together in San Francisco, Katie and I became friends in Chicago, first meeting in an art class during our freshman year in college. Neither of us live in either place anymore, but in spending time together, memories of those past homes bubble up and gush forth. Perhaps it’s more than that. Your deepest friendships are homes themselves, often the safest architecture we know in life.

It’s us! Photo credit: Tim Starr

I also asked Tyree why he painted clocks to begin with. He looked intently and told me, “What time is it? It’s now. Everything is happening now.” The clock hands stay at fixed angles; a static symbol of time reminds you to be present. It’s so literal that it’s amusing, and yet it works—there’s nothing like wonder to ground you in a moment. 

The time is now.

I’m turning another year older, of course I’m thinking about time. I’m trying to stay present in the final hours of this age, but it’s been a challenge for me. I’m preoccupied by work, I obsess over what to prioritize—the options feel at odds with each other. Spending time with friends takes away from the time to write and create—but does it really? I can’t do those things well without connection and conversations that spark ideas. I think about how Tyree devoted the last 36 years to an art practice so intertwined with his environment and community, self-made outside of any formal arts institution. “I had to start my own museum,” he told me, paintbrush in hand like a wand. The Heidelberg Project takes what already exists and creates new ideas by reframing them into different perspectives—a sensibility I’m learning to be deeply ingrained within Detroit. Later that day on a tour of the Motown Museum, I learned that Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, and Diana Ross lived a stone’s throw away from Motown’s founder and hit-maker, Barry Gordy—another reminder that creativity multiplies with community, exposure evolves into inspiration, and what you seek likely already exists where you are. 

I’m inspired to bring this more into the year ahead—making more art with friends, building community through creativity, being more present, and not letting too much time go by between visiting homes, the human kind.

We just passed a Bertrand Goldberg building, so I think I’m in Chicago now.

Everything is happening now.

For more information on The Heidelberg Project, check out their website here.

I’d also like to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who has subscribed, read, and shared The Drip over the past 6 months. I truly hope it’s something you’ve enjoyed. In that time, we’ve built a community of over 2,000 subscribers, which is beyond incredible to me. I’m very grateful.

Thanks for reading.