OT: Fare thee well, Northville Downs
A sad announcement today regarding the impending dissolution of the last horse racing location in Michigan.
Was only a couple miles from where I lived. Will miss the smells.
January 18th, 2024 at 2:28 PM ^
Wow. I must have driven or walked past there more than a hundred times in my life. What goes in will probably nice and upscale. Time rolls on and leaves our memories behind.
January 18th, 2024 at 3:31 PM ^
I spent far more afternoons and evenings than I care to remember deep in the bowels of that dump, betting on simulcast racing from around the country. It was totally filthy and rundown. Damn, I'm gonna miss it!
January 18th, 2024 at 9:20 PM ^
$800K homes built 18 feet apart?
January 18th, 2024 at 2:31 PM ^
Detroit News link for those who still avoid Freep links:
Racing's not over (edit: but see below?): "The Downs will move to Plymouth Township where they have purchased 128 acres near the corner of Five Mile and Ridge Roads, the Gaming Control Board said in a news release."
January 18th, 2024 at 2:35 PM ^
I'm not sure if that's a done deal. I live in Plymouth and haven't kept close tabs on it but I know there's still a fair bit of opposition to the development.
January 18th, 2024 at 5:52 PM ^
whatever happened to the thoroughbred track near DTW? i wonder if that’s a site worth considering?
January 18th, 2024 at 2:40 PM ^
I used to clean the clubhouse area before school in 83 & 84
January 18th, 2024 at 2:48 PM ^
Used to go with my parents, never won a single bet.
January 18th, 2024 at 2:48 PM ^
My mom used to live in the condos overlooking the track back around 2007-2010. I only went inside the betting area once and that was plenty as far as I’m concerned.
RIP
January 18th, 2024 at 2:54 PM ^
I've lived in Northville for a while but never go to the track. I would have liked it to stay. It gives the town character. Now it will be replaced with townhomes that are no different than any other town.
No pyschiatric facilities, no womens or mens prisons, no horse track...at least we still have our giant landfill. They are trying to put a new horsetrack by the dump in Plymouth but the locals feel it will harm the image of the dump area of Plymouth.
January 18th, 2024 at 3:30 PM ^
I grew up in Northville, my parents still live in Northville. Vividly remember run awys escaping from the mental institution through the woods.
from a real estate standpoint, it’s great land and will be a great tax generator from the city.
January 18th, 2024 at 4:41 PM ^
My dad moved out there when haggerty and 8 mile were practically dirt roads. He taught at Schoolcraft for 35 years. Miss those escapees!
January 18th, 2024 at 8:10 PM ^
I remember the old dilapidated buildings by the tunnels on the high school bus ride to Northville for sports. Thought they were so cool. Never visited though, unfortunately. Now, it’s just Mcmansions.
January 18th, 2024 at 4:36 PM ^
There are quite a few yard signs in Plymouth about the pending doom. I wonder what it's like to have the time/energy to get so enraged over something so trivial.
January 18th, 2024 at 2:59 PM ^
Didn't they use to televise the races on PASS sports back in the day?
January 18th, 2024 at 3:02 PM ^
My wife grew up in a nice Victorian not too far from there. It seems like a mixed bag of opinions, in terms of for/against. I assume the horses are for it? Go Mustangs (especially Jake Moody)!
January 18th, 2024 at 3:10 PM ^
I swear the biggest value in horse racing (for the vast majority of tracks) these days is real estate.
Massive real estate empires with gambling in the heart of a lot of major metro areas.
Mile long oval track anyone?
January 18th, 2024 at 3:29 PM ^
Yep.
It's an odd industry. I'll frequent the tracks from time-to-time. The lower-tier tracks (which, well, Northville was one of them, so was Hazel Park) were absolute dumps, super depressing to go to.
But the top-tier tracks: Keeneland, Santa Anita, Saratoga. Fantastic places to spend a day.
January 18th, 2024 at 4:41 PM ^
There's nothing like Saratoga in the summertime. Even with the bad weather some days. Even with NYRA jacking up the prices on everything and making things so challenging for the average (i.e. not wealthy) fan.
Go in the morning, sit in the box seats with a bagel and coffee to watch the peaceful workouts. Stay for the races. Go out for dinner and drinks in the evening. Three very different experiences in the same day.
I would like to visit Keeneland and Del Mar someday.
January 18th, 2024 at 4:55 PM ^
"Giddy up over to Hazel Park! Come on out and horse around!"
Anyone remember that ad on WJR?
January 18th, 2024 at 3:10 PM ^
Northville is all over the news today. We also had a resident take a neighbor to federal court because they parked in front of his house.
Thirty seven f-bombs & ALL CAPS insults fly in unneighborly Northville pandemic battle
A children’s author penned hostile letters to his next-door neighbor filled with expletives, exclamation points and carnal suggestions during a parking dispute in Northville Township, according to federal court records that chronicle the fallout from a bitter pandemic battle.
The hostilities along Wildflower Drive, a neighborhood of $700,000-plus homes and white-collar professionals, are described in three letters, police reports and federal court filings that coincide with a surge in neighborhood fights nationwide as employees have spent more time working from home amid the COVID pandemic.
The three letters — spanning 18 paragraphs filled with ALL CAPS insults, more than 200 exclamation points, racial undertones and 37 words that rhyme with truck — were written by Jonathan Edison, a 50-year-old children's author, motivational speaker and self-described “success strategist.” His anthology includes the children’s book “The Big Adventures of John John" and letters to his next-door neighbor that read like the car rental scene from "Planes, Trains and Automobiles."
Edison sent the letters to neighbor Fadie "Frank" Kadaf, a 44-year-old telecommunications chief executive, after a member of Kadaf's family parked a rental car in front of Edison's home in fall 2022 in the neighborhood near Six Mile and Sheldon roads.
"GET OVER YOUR F------ SELF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I WISH YOU WOULD HAVE F------ STAYED IN DEARBORN WHERE YOU'RE F------ FROM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" one letter reads. "THERE WERE NO PROBLEMS AROUND HERE UNTIL YOU F------ MOVED NEXT DOOR TO ME!!! YOU OVERBEARING RIDICULOUS A------!"
After writing the letters, Edison was charged with a crime, prompting him to file a defamation, free speech and civil conspiracy lawsuit against the township, a police officer, Kadaf and Kadaf's brother in federal court in July. The lawsuit brought a neighborhood squabble to a court more accustomed to handling civil rights disputes with broad implications for the public and complex criminal cases involving public corruption, terrorism and international intrigue.
January 18th, 2024 at 4:38 PM ^
In my neighborhood they'd describe the lunatic as "safe" and a "nice guy"
January 18th, 2024 at 4:43 PM ^
The "stayed in Dearborn" was a particularly nice touch from the children's book author.
January 18th, 2024 at 3:15 PM ^
The place was a ghost of its former self once they went full-in on simulcasting in the '90s. If anything, they're lucky it lasted this long. What goes in there, now, that's an open question that the usual Northville NIMBYs are delighting in making the most tedious process of all time. Now that they got through the local crisis of whether to let the young folks enjoy the closed streets downtown...
January 18th, 2024 at 3:18 PM ^
I worked up the street from the downs for 5 years in the late 90s; lived in the ville for a few decades. Good riddance. Smelled awful. Brought a lot of needless crime to the area and required constant police presence paid for by the city (all of the tax benefits went to the state). It's an eyesore right in the downtown area, almost anything else there would be an improvement.
Do something productive with the site. Perhaps even a Jake Moody statue though on the corner.
January 18th, 2024 at 3:48 PM ^
I'm downtown every weekend and have never smelled anything and there is no police presence or crime. Everytime someone sets off a firework the entire town posts about it on Nextdoor. I can imagine what would happen if an actual crime occurred.
January 18th, 2024 at 4:17 PM ^
I'm mostly referring to stuff like DUIs and D&D -- not violence. Which most definitely happens because the place I used to work at is where many patrons went before/after to buy their alcohol and they often arrived drunk (having driven no less). As for the smell, you wont catch it downtown because that's NW of the downs. But go hangout in the area to the east, or slightly southeast, and yeah you can smell it depend on the weather.
January 18th, 2024 at 4:45 PM ^
Did you work at the Wagon Wheel? That was one of my favorite haunts (before the big fire at least).
January 18th, 2024 at 7:44 PM ^
Me too!
January 18th, 2024 at 8:52 PM ^
If you smell anything, it’s probably blowing from mount trashmore at 6 and Napier.
January 18th, 2024 at 5:22 PM ^
Be careful what you wish for. Livonia was in the same boat with DRC. Enormous real estate that didn't push anything back to the city and generated more police calls than any other similarly sized patch in the entire city.
Finally the course goes under and in short order a large mall of sorts goes up at Middlebelt & 96. Result? It's *still* the cause of more police calls than any other place in the city. Tax dollars help but the trade was nowhere near the boon they hoped.
January 18th, 2024 at 3:22 PM ^
Good -- archaic sport.
January 18th, 2024 at 3:43 PM ^
For the first 12 years of my life, we lived in Northville, and I have many memories of walking past there, riding my bicycle past there, and watching my parents wander in the door late on Friday night from various gatherings there.
TRUE STORY:
When I was 8 years old, my parents decided to give me an allowance - $5 per week, which was not as paltry then as it is now. My father, being the schemer that he was (now you know where I get this from) almost immediately put the racing form in my face and asked me if I wanted to bet my allowance on a horse at Northville Downs.
I did this, not really knowing better at the time, on a longshot horse. That evening (it was a Friday), I was still up watching a movie when my parents came home from a party and some event at the track, and my dad handed me my revised allowance - $200.
...and this is how I was introduced to the idea of a deposit account at NBD the following week.
January 18th, 2024 at 4:31 PM ^
Your TRUE STORY sounds like a prologue to a movie starring De Niro, Liotta, and Burgess Meredith...
<record scratch> "You're probably wondering how I ended up working as an enforcer and part-time horse trainer for a broken-down racetrack in suburban Detroit..."
January 18th, 2024 at 4:52 PM ^
I miss DRC & Hazel Park. We didn’t know it at the time, but wife & I took in just about the last night at Hazel Park. We drove away planning another outing to take our teenage son. He would have loved it.
January 18th, 2024 at 5:10 PM ^
Lived in Canton Plymouth are for years and never went to that place.
January 18th, 2024 at 5:22 PM ^
You didn't miss much. I live in the area and thought, last summer, "Let's see what this place is all about."
To say it was run down would be an understatement. It had a scoreboard that was a) digital with orange pixels and b) over half of them didn't work. Most of it looks like it hadn't been updated or cleaned in decades.
The races themselves were impressive (horses are magnificent animals) but it's a very good thing it's going to be replaced by housing and a park. Tons of people want to live in Northville; this will give more people the opportunity to do so.
January 18th, 2024 at 5:12 PM ^
Ehh, been a long time coming. I live in Northville and pretty much everyone I speak to is happy to see that land be used for something else.
That said, we're all kind of worried about the cascading effects of the move. No one is really particularly enthused about some bland as hell overpriced townhomes replacing the downs. Additionally (as referenced elsewhere in the thread) no one in Plymouth or Northville (the neighborhoods down Beck/Ridge) are excited for it to relocate to that intersection either.
January 18th, 2024 at 5:56 PM ^
I spent many happy hours as a teenager being lured into the "gaming" world by my uncle (who loved to gamble) at Northville Downs.
I really enjoy living in DC, but I SO miss Detroit. Especially now. Michigan football. Lions. Red Wings don't suck anymore. Pistons...ok, so no city is perfect...
January 18th, 2024 at 6:21 PM ^
My family moved to Northville when I was 10. My parents moved out after the last of us kids did, I was about 30 at the time.
A part of me feels sad. I went there... I dunno, a couple times.
But also, it was wayyyyyy out of place culturally with everything surrounding it. It was a sad, kinda ugly relic of a past no one really wants to go back to, surrounded by high end retail and nice homes.
So... RIP?
January 18th, 2024 at 7:54 PM ^
Went there a few times in college on a summer night. Was a fun diversion for a few bucks but then ate downtown - which is what made the experience more fun. These were days before any simulcasting (mid 1980s) to my knowledge.
Agreed that real estate is prime ($$$)
January 18th, 2024 at 8:15 PM ^
I wonder if this will open up off track betting in MI?
My understanding was that MI laws precluded OTB if there were operational tracks in the state.
January 20th, 2024 at 9:21 PM ^
People dont know this, so I will tell you so you can look smart to your friends: The racetrack is being moved to 5 and Ridge. A brand new track wii be built.