Oak Park — I’ve only had one personal experience with Oak Park. When I was a senior at Jackson Lumen Christi in 1983, their boys basketball team beat us in the state tournament by 32 points. Since that high school game, I’ve had no cause to think about that city.
It’s claim to fame is it was home to the Fieger boys—Geoffrey is a famous attorney and Doug was the lead singer of the band, The Knack, that had the hit “My Sharona.”
I didn’t miss much, or so I thought. That all changed when I responded to a Facebook Marketplace listing for a piece of furniture in Oak Park.
Driving the beltway around the city of Detroit, one town seemingly blends into another, with only city limit signs to remind you the next stretch of strip malls is being taxed by a different municipality.
On the way out of Oak Park, with the piece of furniture in the trunk, on Nine Mile I found an oasis of public art in the suburban dollar store desert. It’s the Nine Mile Redesign.
The city says it is a “grant-funded public improvement project that aims to transform the Nine Mile Corridor into a walkable, vibrant public space packed with amenities for users of all ages and abilities.”
It works because of its bright-colored art that dots the two-block park area. There were 10-foot-high pastel colored metallic flowers along the path and a large bike path.
I’m generally not in favor of bike paths, because a simple yellow stripe on the road gives a false sense of safety to a cyclist. But the Nine Mile Redesign separates its bike path lanes from the regular car traffic with cement cinder blocks. That’s commitment.
The piece of art that jumped out at me was a 10-foot-tall metallic replica of a kid dribbling a basketball. It was surrounded by small bushes in a garden spot and erected just off the pedestrian sidewalk and near a covered park bench. It was fitting.
I thought back to that Oak Park basketball team that whooped us. They made it all the way to the Class B state championship game that year before losing a close game. The next year, Oak Park won the title.
If you win a high school state championship in Michigan, you have a legacy to be remembered. Now it is.
The Nine Mile Redesign brightened my spirits immediately.
Public art doesn’t work just for the sake of art. I ride my bike a lot on the Falling Waters Trail in Jackson County. It’s a beautiful trail that is being littered with metallic pieces of public art that have no business on a nature trail. Nature is art unto itself. It doesn’t need man-made interventions.
But Oak Park has something here. This park is a reprieve from the run-of-the mill commerce that runs endlessly along the Detroit beltway. Now it can be proud of something other than just the Fieger brothers.
Tom Gantert is a contributing writer for Michigan Enjoyer.
