Maurice Cox, the former planning director of the city of Detroit, remembers the first time Matthew Naimi wandered into his office in paint-splattered overalls in 2018, with fingernail polish, a kaffiyeh on his head, and his bare arms a constellation of tattoos. When Naimi told him that he wanted to develop a multimillion-dollar low-cost housing complex for artists out of one of the city’s most dilapidated automobile factories, long abandoned, “it was bordering on satire,” Cox recalled.
But Naimi, 51, who is of Iraqi heritage, and who runs a community recycling program, was dead serious. So was his partner, Oren Goldenberg, 41, a filmmaker and events producer who devoted his 20s to revitalizing a local synagogue. (His father is Israeli.)
And together, this odd couple of historic preservation has transformed the 1908 Lincoln Motor Company factory into Dreamtroit, a $31 million affordable haven for artists. Seven tumultuous years in the making, the nearly four-acre campus they own and have developed now has 76 studio lofts, retains its graffiti-splashed interior walls and is crowned with a steel sculpture — the “Freak Beacon” — inspired by the TV Tower in Berlin.
Detroit’s decaying factories have long served as photogenic backdrops for the motor city’s “ruin porn,” with local officials regarding them as eyesores ripe for demolition and redevelopment. Dreamtroit represents a new direction, its buildings “keystones of the city’s automotive industrial heritage seen as places of possibility,” said Daniel Campo, an associate professor of design and planning at Morgan State University, in Baltimore.
Goldenberg and Naimi exemplify what Campo, in a recent book, calls “Postindustrial DIY,” an entrepreneurial improvisatory spirit forging a path in a “post-abandonment city,” he said. Dreamtroit, where residents started moving in last year, and officially opened last month, is in the vanguard of several developments poised to transform moribund automotive facilities into apartments and lofts.
Walter Bailey, 75, lives and works in a studio apartment in “the art colony,” as he calls Dreamtroit — “a place of creative growth,” he said, with a soaring ceiling and huge windows. His unusual painting technique consists of applying paint to the reverse side of curved acrylic panels, which refract light and magnify images like “The Hornsmen,” Bailey’s ode to jazz musicians. He calls the genre “Art ain’t flat no more.”
Bailey moved in early last year when Dreamtroit was still mostly empty. “When it rained, you needed an umbrella,” he observed. “But artists seem to persevere in the darnedest of places.”
The site — about four miles north of downtown — was built by the Warren Motor Car Company, one of Detroit’s earliest automobile manufacturers, and then purchased by the Lincoln Motor Company, which developed military aircraft engine prototypes for World War I. In 1922, the place was sold again to Henry Ford, who produced fledgling Model T’s here. The entrepreneurial spirit continued with the designer Raymond Dietrich, who brought aesthetic elegance to early Cadillacs, Lincolns (and later the Gibson Firebird guitar).
The original brick buildings, which are now on the National Register of Historic Places, were constructed for assembly line production — with 13-foot ceilings, mushroom-shaped columns and massive windows and skylights. But in later years, a hodgepodge of generic structures were added — some 90,000 square feet of them — resulting in a stylistically amorphous behemoth.
For Naimi, Dreamtroit’s origin story begins with garbage. In 2007, he founded “Recycle Here!,” a city-funded drop-off recycling center run by volunteers in a far corner of the complex.
Detroit was reeling from decades of population loss. Naimi’s family had had a food distribution business in the complex and after college, he got ownership of the building after gradually paying $179,000 in back taxes to the city, informally leasing some spaces to artist and musician pals to scrounge together his $3,000 a month in down payments.
He conceived the recycling center, which has its own artists-in-residence, as a town square with live music, in which community members would bump into each other.
Naimi also fantasized about fixing up the historic core in a way that might protect the city’s creative culture. But the entire complex was derelict, with leaking roofs, damaged bricks and most windows covered with cinder blocks. Like Detroit’s other abandoned industrial structures, it was fertile ground for graffiti writers (whose work has been lovingly preserved throughout Dreamtroit’s interiors).
In 2017, a tragedy occurred that kicked improvements into gear. Jordan Vaughn, a.k.a. Tead, a street artist and a close friend, died from a fall through a roof while working on a graffiti mural. Naimi was devastated, prepared to call it quits, but Goldenberg, who regularly attended Naimi’s raucous full-moon bonfire parties, decided to jump into the fray. A financially savvy realist, Goldenberg teamed up with Naimi — whom he considered “an antidote to a dying public sector.” He helped Naimi stabilize the buildings, making them safe while preserving cultural touchstones, like an art park in back of the complex. In response to Vaughn’s death, the city had ordered the property to be vacated until the two negotiated a timetable for major repairs, which the city approved.
The idea of turning the complex into housing that might help artists remain in the city came from a trusted Yoda figure, a real estate attorney named Mark J. Bennett, who introduced Naimi and Goldenberg to sympathetic public officials, architects, bankers and potential funding sources. Still, it took nearly four years to assemble the Rubik’s Cube of loans, grants and tax breaks (including historic tax credits) allowing the project to move forward. It was so complicated that Naimi had a color-coded flow chart of the tax structure tattooed on his arm.
Making a profit was not their mission. “You can’t put a price on the community we were already in,” said Naimi, who proudly wears a hard hat with his nickname, UNCLE MEATBALL.
As luck would have it, Cox, the city’s planning director, was a frequenter of “Recycle Here” and turned up one day unannounced on his bicycle. He toured the premises with Goldenberg and Naimi, crawling through broken windows and seeing sunlight poking through roofs and walls “They could see beyond the chaos,” he said of the pair’s tenacity. The architectural challenge would be to “liberate the historic buildings from the accretions,” added Cox, who is now professor in residence at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
With Brian Rebain, a preservation architect and principal of the Kraemer Design Group, they demolished nearly half the complex, transforming one of the roofless buildings into an events and garden space but retaining the original metal beams overhead.
The old brick exteriors were cleansed of graffiti to comply with state preservation regulations. The environmental mitigation necessary to make the place habitable was immense, including ridding the buildings of lead and asbestos.
In 2021, with the project finally jelling, Naimi was diagnosed with a brain tumor and underwent a risky surgery. Although the tumor was benign, Naimi contracted meningitis and almost died. Three weeks later he had a second emergency surgery. Goldenberg kept secret from his partner news of a funding snafu that could have jeopardized the project.
“Matt doesn’t know how to say no and his favorite number is ‘more,” said Goldenberg, who did most of the financial heavy-lifting. The cost of the conversion ultimately came to $31 million.
Today, after clearing out 24 palettes of expired Spray ‘n Wash, broken forklifts and other junk, Dreamtroit is providing a sanctuary for more than 60 creative people, including the artist and fabricator Ryan C. Doyle, who was initially looking for a place to park his fire-breathing dragon, Gon Kirin, an 80-foot-long animatronic, flame-spewing beast fueled by 250 gallons of propane and propelled by a 1967 Dodge dump truck. The truck was concealed beneath a skin of glistening “dragon scales” made out of refrigerator sides, shredded Semi tires and other “Detroitus” scoured from city streets. (Its ability to torch rivals dazzled Rachel Maddow, who featured it on her television show.)
Doyle, who conceived Gon Kirin with the artist Teddy Lo, spent over a decade working for Burning Man and now operates out of a 6,000-square-foot garage studio at Dreamtroit. On a recent visit he was finishing up a mammoth “Cyber Cat” built from salvaged car and motorcycle parts, and he also fabricated the “Freak Beacon” that symbolizes Dreamtroit’s contrarian ethos. “In Detroit, word of mouth travels faster than the internet,” he said of his landing here. “This was the place I needed to be.”
Doyle lives part-time in one of Dreamtroit’s apartments, which range from $365 a month for a communal space with shared kitchens and bathrooms to $2,300 a month for one of the project’s rare two bedrooms. More than half the units are reserved for artists making $33,500 to $40,000 a year.
The place is not exactly family friendly: It is zoned for heavy industry — no noise restrictions — and includes a huge club and event space that opened recently. To economize, kitchen cabinets and bathroom doors do not have hardware — just holes for residents to open them with fingers.
The vibe is that of a commune with various artists working in hallways. The street artist known as Fel3000ft, who once illegally tagged these walls, is now legitimately painting them. During a recent visit he was working on portraits of doe-eyed Alice in Wonderland and Dream Girl. Now 52, he has clients that include the Detroit Lions.
Christopher Heine, a 42-year-old architect who lives in the suburbs, moonlights as a guitarist in a heavy pop rock band called the Science Fair. He shares studio space with members of three other bands, who all chip in for rent.
Naimi and Goldenberg’s commitment to a low-cost bohemia for artists arrived at a pivotal moment. The complex sits at the edge of a $3 billion mega-development by Henry Ford Health, to include a new hospital tower, medical research center and housing and retail development. The latter project is led by Tom Gores, founder of Platinum Equity, a private equity firm and owner of the Detroit Pistons basketball team. A neighbor, the Motown Museum, has been planning its own major expansion.
Given the billion-dollar juggernaut in their midst, Cox, the informal adviser, said Dreamtroit “is a point of resistance against institutional development.”
Around the city, other efforts to reinvigorate abandoned automobile facilities include the 1919 Fisher Body Plant, soon to be 433 rental apartments. The original 1905 Cadillac headquarters is becoming lofts. Perhaps the most notable addition is the nonprofit Ford Piquette Avenue Plant Museum — the birthplace of the Model T — which was rescued and restored by volunteer enthusiasts.
Yet major losses abound: the Packard plant, once 100 buildings strong, at least 10 by the famed industrial designer Albert Kahn, is in the midst of demolition. The future of Ford Highland Park Plant, where the moving assembly line was perfected, is similarly unclear. The ignominious gateway to this National Historic Landmark is the “Model T Shopping Plaza.”
But Dreamtroit is now home to Michigan & Trumbull pizza, which left its Corktown neighborhood when the rent got too expensive. Fittingly, its pizza-meister Nathan Peck, 39, was one of the artists who graffiti-stamped the walls of the Lincoln Motor Company in his younger days.
He serves up Packard Pepperoni and other varieties in the square industrial pans for which the city’s pizza is justly famous.
He’s happy to be back in his old haunts. “There’s a playful atmosphere at Dreamtroit,” Peck said. “You can’t walk down the hallway to take out the trash without tripping over something inspiring.”
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