Cass Corridor Documentation Project Oral History Project
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Schaerges Interview, 1 Cass Corridor Documentation Project Oral History Project Interviewee: Allen Schaerges Relationship to Cass Corridor: Collector, Willis Gallery Property Owner, Initiated Dally in the Alley Interviewer: Elizabeth Gruber Date of Interview: April 7, 2011 Location: Schaerges’s law office on Second Avenue, Detroit, Michigan Gruber: All right, this is Beth Gruber and I am interviewing Mr. Schaerges. Today is April 7, 2011 and we are at Mr. Schaerges’ office on Second Street in Detroit. Can you tell me about where you were born and where you grew up? Schaerges: I was born in Indiana in 1946 and grew up at Thirteen Mile and Woodward, where I rode my bike. I went to Albion College, spent three years in the army, came down to Wayne State to go to Law School in 1971 and forty years later I’m still here. Gruber: I have to say, I went to Albion as well. So that’s nice to know. What did your parents do for a living? Schaerges Interview, 2 Schaerges: My father worked for an automobile supplier and my mother was a classic housewife who never worked a day after she got married. Gruber: Did you have any siblings? Schaerges: I have a brother and sister who both live in California and I have been married thirty years, to Carol. Gruber: When was the first time you remember being interested in art. Schaerges: For the high school class gift from Birmingham Groves Class of 1964, I think I persuaded my classmates that we should give the school a piece of art. I went to Marshall Fredericks, whose studio was right down the street from where I grew up. I persuaded Marshall Fredericks to design us a grand bronze cast falcon. Gruber: Oh, wow. Schaerges: That we were gonna camp and park in front of Groves High School. And as it turned out, the casting was done in Europe, the falcon broke on the way over here. So, the school wasn’t Schaerges Interview, 3 going to pay for a broken falcon and Marshall Fredericks wasn’t going to do it again for nothing. And so that project didn’t get off the ground, but it was the thought. And so that was probably one of the first times. Although by 1971 when I moved down here, I think somebody that year gave me a print for a present. I liked the idea of having more or less original art on the walls and it took off from there. Gruber: Did you have any early exposure to art besides in high school? Did you have any classes in it? Schaerges: No, when I was in college I was too busy ducking the draft, looking over my shoulder at the draft board. I never took any art classes per say. It actually wasn’t until I got down to law school, in the Cass Corridor and the art and the museum area that I started meeting people that were close to it and took an interest in it myself. I was pretty much self-taught and I don’t claim to be an educated critic by any means. Gruber: You already mentioned that you went to Albion and then you went to Wayne State for law school. What caused you to come here? Was it that you were from Detroit? Schaerges: No, when I was going to law school I told myself I was going to go to class this time. I think I spent four years at Albion not doing very much. And I knew that I wouldn’t go to class if I had to get in line to get off the freeway for traffic jams and stuff, and there actually were Schaerges Interview, 4 traffic jams coming downtown Detroit in the late sixties. So, I told my friend Ted that we oughta get ourselves an apartment near the law school so that we could get up and go to class easily. And that was how I ended up on Cass Avenue across the street from the law school. I didn’t live there very long before I realized that there really was a community down here that I didn’t think existed, but even back then there was and that was kinda what opened my eyes to what else was going on. Gruber: How did you become a part of the actual art scene here? Schaerges: You know, I was living at the Renaud Apartments, eight-five dollars a month for a nice two-bedroom place at Second and Hancock. There were other people living in the building and there was this group of guys who were playing handball one night a week over at Matthaei Gym and I had learned how to play handball in the army and was happy to find some people that I could play with, so I started hanging out with these guys who were mostly artists as it turned out. They were lead by John Egner and Jim Chatelain played and another handful of guys. Some of them are still playing forty years later. I don’t play anymore. But it started off with meeting those people, living in the same complex as them, playing handball with them was how it all got started. From thereafter, I got my law degree I had a service that there was a demand for from time to time. I was happy to trade my services for their art. That’s how a lot of it got started. Schaerges Interview, 5 Gruber: Can you tell me a bit about the general environment of the Cass Corridor art community at that point? Not just the artists but the musicians, the poets, the community itself. Schaerges: There was that school, the Cass Corridor artists, Cass Corridor musicians, Cass Corridor poets, and you used it, you wore the Cass Corridor badge with- it was an honor. Although the name itself derived from the fifties, or early sixties, when the city of Detroit, the skid row so to speak, where the bums were, was down at Cass and Michigan. The city fathers decided the way to clean up the city up was to tear down all the tenements and small hotels that the bums lived in. They decided, they gave the land to Michigan Bell and the Federal Building, the Federal government, and demolished the structures that were there. The closest place for those people to go was up Cass Avenue, where there was a string of old four-storey walk ups that had cheap rent and the skid row kinda changed its locale. They tried to get the Chinese restaurants to follow, and one or two did, but most of the Chinese restaurants grabbed the money and went out to Clawson. But there was Chung’s and a few others that stayed on Cass Avenue and that’s how the neighborhood got its name, which was kinda used in a derogatory fashion for the most part. The cheap storefronts that attracted the businesses also attracted the artists. There was a string of them renting fifty dollar-a-month flats over here in the, oh next to where the Cass Café is now. And that was probably how it got started. But the neighborhood was always open for, there were lofts, kinda underground lofts over at the Forsyth Building I think it was. A number of opportunities for people to get cheap spaces and make good art which was one of the things that Detroit’s always had to offer, cheap places to live. It was Egner, I think, who used to tell the artists that this was a great place to be an artist cause you could make enough money to pay for your rent without working sixty hours a week and you had plenty of time left over to Schaerges Interview, 6 devote to your craft and that was what he encouraged people to do, leading the way himself, the king of the fifty dollar-a-month storefronts. Gruber: I suppose that works as long as you have enough time to do it. Schaerges: Well, we’re still living on it. The city still has thousands of empty houses that you can get relatively cheaply and I think you see that phenomenon going on in other little neighborhoods around the city where groups of artists have got together and put little housing projects together. There’s one over on Farnsworth Street and what was the one out at Eight Mile Road, where they have the Halloween Party, the Theater Bizarro [Theater Bizarre] is another one where they actually own a couple of acres of land with lots of outbuildings on it and they used to make it pay by having one party a year and it was a good one. This year the city shut it down. Gruber: I remember hearing about that in the news. Schaerges: But that’s evidence of what can be done. Gruber: What do you remember about some of the institutions in the Corridor and in Detroit more generally that were involved in supporting the artistic community? Schaerges Interview, 7 Schaerges: I’m going to draw a blank on the name, at the DIA there was- I think its Sam Wagstaff. Gruber: Yeah, Samuel Wagstaff. Schaerges: He was one who kinda crossed the border between the classic high-brow artists with Birmingham studios and in particular Gordie Newton, that was his favorite, and Egner, Chatelain and Luchs were right up there with him. They kinda gave the Corridor artists legitimacy, when the DIA took at a look at them and even hung a piece there from time to time.