The Open Wound

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We can see it from our house--a large L-shaped pit where Steeb Dodge and a Clark gas station used to stand. The pit is half filled with muddy water, the rest a mess of weeds, litter, chunks of old sidewalk, and stacks of plastic and concrete pipe. It's all surrounded by a bright chain-link fence.

I've seen ducks at the corner of Michigan Avenue and South Lewis Street where the digging for The Village Marketplace + Lofts development was deepest. This May a small canyon opened and much of the deep pond drained, possibly into the partially installed underground water retention system. On the southern edge of the site, formerly part of Saline's Historic District, heavy rain sometimes causes muddy water to overflow across Henry Street.

Advertising for Michael Concannon's development once boasted that 30,000 cars pass the site every day, entering the city. Now people coming into town see the wasteland next to a sign proclaiming Saline as one of CNN/Money Magazine's 100 Best Places to Live, 2005 & 2007. How did this embarrassing blemish occur on the face of our city?

Demolition began in November 2006. The process ran into difficulties from the start: there were months of relentless pounding in the winter of 2007-08 as pile drivers hammered in a wall of steel to prevent cave-ins along Lewis and Michigan and to control water drainage during the brownfield cleanup. There was grappling with neighbors and the Historic District Commission over the intrusion of the development onto West Henry Street.