Ashby’s Ice Cream

Maybe I don’t give the 21st century enough credit. Smart phones, the Internet’s coming of age, the MP3 player – all have had the same blunt impact on daily life as freeways plopped in the middle of Detroit. It’s easy to wax rhapsodic about Henry Ford, Detroit steel, art deco skyscrapers, and the rise of the middle class, but one day, streaming music to your phone from satellites in outer space, live GPS maps, and instantaneous text searches on Google Books’ massive digital library will surely emit that same sepia-toned glow(or perhaps in this case, 32 bits of color tones, but you get the point).

It’s the power of nostalgia, that cloying, sappy emotion that often distorts the sentiments of even the most sensible people. In my quest to uncover and understand the magic behind everyday reality, I’ve grown to realize that the real power is in those moments that don’t take hindsight to fully appreciate, that make us stop in our tracks immediately. Which, neatly, brings us to…

Ice cream! The soda shop and the milk bar may have come and gone, but the ice cream parlor is still alive and well in America, impervious to fashion and changes in taste. Call it Baskin-Robbins or Cold Stone Creamery or what you will, but there it is, continually delighting generation after generation.

Luckily for us Michiganders, few companies make better ice cream than our own Ashby’s. Indeed, the hardworking folks at Ashby’s make ice cream that is 14-16% butterfat, putting a scoop of Ashby’s right up there with the very best Ben and Jerry’s or Häagen-Dazs has to offer. You could could say they put the cream in ice cream. Forget that whipped fluff sold at Dairy Queen – you might as well call it iced milk. Ashby’s is thick but not too thick, the vanilla strong but not overpowering, the end result of some serious soul-searching in the ’80s on what makes quality ice cream, and we’re all the better for it.

Ashby’s is so good, so creamy and soft, that when Tim Allen had Detroit’s National Coney Island head out to California to cater at the set of Home Improvement, National brought some Ashby’s along for the trip so those sunburned Hollywood types could get a full taste of fine Michigan dining. Which was perfect, because in my mind, you don’t know true bliss until you’ve eaten 5 coney dogs and a small mountain of Ashby’s. The weightiness, the sense of floating on grease and fat down a clogged tunnel of love, your belt bursting open in triumph – magic, man.

Not content with just making plain, good ol’ fashion ice cream, Ashby’s stuffs about every fruit, nut, and sugary concoction you could think of into its many varieties of ice cream, from blueberry pie to cotton candy, toffee to whiskey. The company is a veritable terror at the World Dairy Expo, taking home awards not just for its vanilla ice cream but its Belgian chocolate ice cream and Spumoni ice cream as well, the latter a delirious combination of cherry amaretto, pistachio almond, dark chocolate, and golden rum.

Of course, I’m sure that by now that you’re thinking I’m on the take, Ashby’s presumably drowning my journalistic integrity with gallons of sweet, free ice cream. But you have to believe me when I tell you I’m not. It’s honestly that amazing.

And look, as much as I enjoy Ashby’s, I’ll readily admit it’s not something I’d eat everyday. For one, I’d be as fat as a cow. But more importantly, I think the company does put a bit too much sugar in some of its flavors – more than I can handle sometimes. After a hearty scoop of Key Lime Pie ice cream, for example, I’m tapped out for the evening, my gums buzzing. It’s kinda like trying to eat a whole bag of fun sized snickers… fun when you’re a kid, but as an adult, you’ve got limits.

What I guess I’m saying is I enjoy Ashby’s, but in moderation. It may be priced like an ordinary ice cream, but it definitely doesn’t taste like one.

A Tale of Two Cities

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Yes, quoting the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities is a ham-fisted way to start off an article, and using the title of the novel as the article’s title is arguably even worse. But hey, if it fits, it fits, and I can’t think of a better way to describe downtown Detroit, a strange brew of black and white, timeless and the past its prime, incredible wealth and even more incredible poverty.

Sure, there’s been a lot of press about the resurgence of downtown Detroit, and it’s not altogether untrue. Take Campus Martius, for example. Once Detroit’s great public square, by the 1990s, all that remained was the Michigan Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, its bronze Amazon warrior leading a Ulyssess S. Grant-era U.S. Army into battle amid the formidable complexities of a monstrous modern intersection. It wasn’t exactly a pretty sight.

Today, though, you’d never know. Campus Martius was reopened as an urban park in 2004, and corporate investments in the area by Compuware and Quicken Loans have it again looking like the center of a bustling metropolis. Just take a seat in one of the many available chairs and check out all the name tags and IDs – if you didn’t know any better, you’d think you were in Quicken Loans’ cafeteria. Set against the occasional gritty Detroiter in street clothes, it’s quite the spectacle. This is Gentrification 101 in action, folks. Could it really be that Detroit is on the upswing?

Not so fast, buckaroo.

About a block away, Capitol Park tells a quite different story. Here, the buildings are mostly empty, the pedestrians few, and the design unfortunate, the grassy, leafy landscaping found at Campus Martius discarded in favor of a curious urban frying pan concept. The pigeon poop on the statue of Michigan’s first governor, Stevens T. Mason, and the occasional panhandler drives the dreary image home, like mainlining a dose of reality. Forget about the Campus Martius amusement park – this is, for most Detroiters, the real Detroit. Beautiful but tarnished, loved but neglected. Home.

Sure, if you’ve got the money – like Compuware or Quicken Loans – you can carve out a little fiefdom of prosperity, but Detroit is a city in terminal decline, from a population of 1.8 million to 700,000 and still free-falling. If it has a bottom, you’d probably find it at the end of one of Olive Garden’s “Never Ending” Pasta Bowls.

Quickly, too, it’s becoming a tale of two cities. The first is well off, connected, and – more often than not – white. The second is “mixed income”, not sure who to trust, and overwhelmingly black. The river of between the two is widening, and if Capitol Park is gentrified, it’ll mean that the second city has gotten that much smaller.

Richmond, Michigan

In New York City, people tend to judge you by what shoes you wear. A cursory scan of the floor on the R Train reveals a colorful assortment of gaudy Nike basketball shoes, skimpy Burberry sandals, and leather Camper boots, a spotless, scuff-free world of status and appearance just underfoot the blank stares of the too cool passengers. Each shoe makes a statement, says something about the individual that bought them.

You see, in one of the world’s great urban cities, what you wear on your feet matters. If you want to be somebody, you have to look like a somebody.

In Detroit, the Motor City, life is a little different. The average American doesn’t want to walk more than about 600 feet from where they parked to their final destination – in frostbitten Detroit, you can probably knock a good 300 feet off that estimate. We want to park and be there already.

In that kind of an environment, your car becomes a de facto status symbol, your shoes secondary, an afterthought. After all, you don’t want your neighbor in Bloomfield Hills to see you pulling into your garage in a ’97 Ford Fiesta. Only a new Toyota Camry or Ford Fusion will do, or maybe a Honda CR-V if you have a family - hey, that sports equipment takes up a lot of room, right?

So when you turn off Gratiot Avenue onto Main Street in Richmond, on the absolute northern outskirts of what could be considered Metro Detroit, with country music blaring from the cracked windows of the dented vans, rusted pickup trucks, and compact ’90s antiques with sun roofs, it makes an impression. As Judy Garland said in The Wizard Oz, “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

In fact, Richmond feels more like a town in rural Kentucky than a part of the Detroit–Ann Arbor–Flint megalopolis of sprawl that the federal government counts as one of America’s great combined statistical areas. Squat brick buildings, a profusion of wood and aluminum siding, and strange ’60s era attempts at modernization – like turning the wide avenue next to the railroad into a psuedo-parking lot – gives the city of over 5,000 a timelessly stagnant atmosphere. The city, founded in 1879, moves on and stays the same all at once.

Richmond, along with nearby cities like Armada and Romeo, are perhaps the last true remnants of Macomb County’s agricultural past. People still farm. Trains still roar past Main Street. The “tap room” at the Cook Hotel, a two-story wood building as old as dirt, still serves drinks. Proud pioneer families originally settled these lands, draining swamps, chasing off coyotes, and tilling the lands, always one bad crop or late frost away from starvation. You have to believe a little of their spirit lives on in the streets, in the faces of the farmers.

But maybe not forever. The economic realities of America aren’t necessarily kind to tradition. As the machinations of sprawl and globalization press on, farms in and around cities like Richmond have become fertile grounds for the next generation of spacious subdivisions, industrial parks, and supermarkets. Land where apple and peach orchards blossomed in the spring, pink and white leaves dancing under the yellow sun, the drab efficiency and conformity of human development reaches its steely hands for and tears up.

Of course, it’s progress, and what’s new today is tomorrow’s good ol’ days. Perhaps one day they’ll shed a tear when the McMansions and condos are overgrown with weeds, the paint chipped and faded. I’m not sure. What I can say is that if you wanted to know the heart of Made In Michigan, communities like Richmond were it. The rattling thrum of the thresher, the buzz of the sawmills, the deep, vibrating call of the bullfrogs in the rushes – the muses of the poets, slowly fading into the distance.

Back at the Cook Hotel, though, you’d never know. Fine films of dust cover the mausoleum-like dining room, some tables possibly untouched since Star Wars originally debuted. Under the ancient tin ceiling, the crowd at the bar is predictably slumped, the wrinkles consistently deep, and the beer generally lukewarm. The painted signage on the side of the building promises food, but if there ever was a cook here, he or she is long, long gone, a grim, foreboding footnote in the forgotten tomes of culinary history.

On warm evenings, the heavy thump of horseshoes echo across the hotel’s backyard, and laughter fills the air. It could be 1960, or it could be 2013, offering a brief escape from the epic transience of the American experience. That’s the beauty of it, and when it’s gone, remember… it’s gone.

M-8: Davison Freeway

Davison Freeway in Highland Park, Michigan, was the first urban depressed freeway in the United States, a milestone in American engineering. Completed during the height of World War II in November, 1942, at a cost of $3.5 million, Detroiters on their way to factories such as the Chrysler Tank Arsenal in Warren and the Ford River Rouge Plant in Dearborn could now make their commutes through Highland Park in record time, the homes and businesses but an antiquated blur above the freeway’s steep grass embankments. In fact, it was reported that the Davison Freeway shaved roughly 11 minutes off of the average trip time once it opened. It was, by all accounts, a triumph of modern urban planning.

Even before it was a freeway, Davison Avenue in Highland Park was one of the few east-west thoroughfares in the city that could take you in one way and out the other without any sort of rerouting. Consequently, as Detroit grew and surrounded the crowded suburb of Highland Park on all sides with factories and homes, rush hour on Davison Avenue became a nightmare as thousands upon thousands of workers simultaneously took to the modest road each day. A survey taken shortly before the freeway was constructed revealed that over 90% of the traffic on Davison Avenue in Highland Park was heading to another city, demonstrating both its importance to the area and the difficulties it must’ve presented to Highland Parkers. Cars stuck in the middle of intersections, pedestrians selling fruit, honking horns, cuss words, clouds of exhaust fumes – all were common sights and sounds on Davison Avenue in the early morning and midafternoon.

Clearly, something had to be done, and there was only one logical answer: dig a ditch and turn Davison Avenue into a sunken freeway.

Construction began in August 1941, and with help from the federal government, a 1.3 mile stretch of Davison Avenue was soon transformed into Davison Freeway. Any buildings in the way of the new freeway were demolished or moved on rollers, forcing more than one business to hold a “street widening” sale, a not uncommon sight during Detroit’s heady boom years. It was, at the least, a great opportunity to get in some early Christmas shopping.

Though today we see the destruction inherit in ripping up the urban fabric of city for a freeway, the shame in losing all that history for a freeway, back then it was viewed as a sign of progress. Davison Freeway was built with the full blessing of the Highland Park City Council with taxpayer dollers. Who wanted to live in a city so congested with people there were times you literally couldn’t move? It was a point of pride to have a modern freeway in your city.

The quality of the workmanship on Davison Freeway was so high that the original concrete roadbed wasn’t replaced until 1997. For those of us all too familiar with the horrors of orange traffic cones, a road having that long of lifespan seems impossible. You have to give them credit: they not only dreamed big dreams, they turned their dreams into a durable reality, creating a basic framework for society that still we depend on today. If there’s a better way, I haven’t seen it yet.

Tubby’s Grilled Submarines

Dusk in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. Cars accelerate from red light to red light, the drivers in a rush to get home and watch TV. A parking lot on Harper Avenue is bathed in the glow from a pale yellow Tubby’s Sub Shop set back from the main road. Occasionally, a car pulls in and parks, a hungry customer walking out and entering through the building’s glass door. A small vertical strip of stone panels by the front entrance adds a touch of class and sophistication to the whole affair.

OK, so the photo wasn’t taken at dusk. Cut me some slack!

“12 inch Steak & Cheese on white!”

“OK!”

Our man has done this before. He’s a seasoned grill cook, and he’s got the burn marks to prove it. A 12 inch Steak & Cheese? That’s nothing, as easy as asking a thief to steal or cheat to cheat. Natural; simple; obvious.

Like an artist dipping his brush into his palette, he takes a small ladle and scoops out the perfect amount of diced onions from the metal container to his right. He dumps the onions onto the grill in front of him with a flourish; the grill hisses and spits back at him in response.

As the onions sizzle he grabs two semi-frozen and quite raw slices of what we’re told is steak from the drawer below him and slams ‘em onto the grill with a resounding smack. Wafer-thin, the meat bubbles in the searing heat, quickly browning around the edges.

Satisfied, he flips the slices of so-called steak over and cuts the meat to shreds with his two trusty spatulas, the ends sheathed in grill gunk. That task successfully completed, he mixes the onions in with the steak and waits impatiently for the steak to cook through as his equally greasy coworker to his left plops a bun from Tringali’s Bakery facedown on the grill to soak in the flavors.

The mise-en-scène at Tubby’s.  The motion blur emphasizes the speed of the workers.

Once the steak takes on a nice light brown color – and it doesn’t take long – our cook flips the bun faceup and uses it for leverage as he lifts the steak and onions onto it. His work done, he lifts the bun with his spatula and plops it down on a wrapper at the prep station. Steam rises visibly from the steak, and its wonderful aroma fills the air near the front counter.

“12 inch steak and cheese, all the way!”

The prep girl takes over, swiftly sprinkling garlic salt on the meat and then covering it with triangular slices of processed white cheese that melt into a goo almost immediately. Lettuce, tomatoes, and hearty helping of Tubby’s Famous Dressing – a top secret creamy Italian dressing that’s sweet and not too tangy – tops the sub off. All that’s left now is to wrap it up and hand it off to the salivating customer.

There she is!

And what a sub it is, a Detroit original made assembly line style at Tubby’s. Notice, too, how no oil or butter was used at any point in the process. The natural juices in the steak are, believe it or not, enough. When you consider that they’ve been doing this since 1968, they’re probably on to something, aren’t they?

Honestly, for only $7.29, you can’t go wrong with a large Steak & Cheese. OK, so maybe the “steak” tastes closer to what they serve up at McDonald’s or Arby’s than a filet mignon at Ruth’s Chris Steak House, but it hits the spot in that familiar way only cheap, greasy beef can.

And since a large Steak & Cheese has over 1,000 calories, it’d better!