The vacant Eddystone and Park Avenue Hotels will be demolished as part of the publicly financed hockey arena north of I-75.
While the abandoned structures and their gravel parking lot neighbors are hardly the vision of a shining city on a hill -- at least compared to a new hockey arena and the vaguely promised spinoff development- - Curbed wonders why these likely structurally sound buildings couldn't be redeveloped to anchor the Columbia Street Project new hockey district.
More importantly, perhaps, they raise a valid question about why so much of this supposedly public project remains a secret.
Curbed: What's really disturbing, however, is how little the public has been informed of the development's details. This is millions of dollars in public money going towards a development that'll be downtown Detroit's gateway for the next century. Can't there be some public input? Some transparency? Is announcing the demolition of two historic hotels really only worth a photo caption in the Detroit News?
Clearly, the folks over at Curbed haven't tried Little Caesar's new deep-dish pizza. If they had, they know Team Ilitch totally deserves several hundred million dollars in public money to build their new hockey arena.
I mean, didn't our Founding Fathers intend for the public treasury to be a kind of Make-A-Wish Foundation for billionaire octogenarians? That's somewhere in the Constitution, I'm sure.
