Schaerges Interview, 1

Cass Corridor Documentation Project

Oral History Project

Interviewee: Allen Schaerges

Relationship to Cass Corridor: Collector, Willis Gallery Property Owner, Initiated

Interviewer: Elizabeth Gruber

Date of Interview: April 7, 2011

Location: Schaerges’s law office on Second Avenue, ,

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 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.

Gruber: Do any art shows or exhibits stand out to you as being particularly important?

Schaerges: Well, the “Kick Out the Jams” show was the first real big one, with a real catalog and there was back in 1980, I and a partner acquired what was then Cobb’s Corner Bar. Which is now the Avalon Bakery building, but before then it had been the Willis Gallery, which had started in the early seventies and it was a cooperative venture.

Gruber: It was ’71. Schaerges Interview, 8

Schaerges: ’71 and it was kinda run and lead by artists. They lasted about three or four years at

Willis and Cass. And shut down there and moved the gallery up to the Fisher building. So the building sat vacant and unused for two or three years. Anyway, Steven Goodfellow came to me and said the space was empty, everybody knew where it was, you said Willis Gallery and you didn’t have to give anybody directions and could he have an art show there. I said sure, I’m not doing anything with it. So he had, Goodfellow had the art show and a lot of people came and I said, this is working out alright. I said maybe we should have another show. See if I can find the

[digging in his desk] card for it, but it was 1980. I had a show and I called it “Willis Revisited” and I took half a dozen of the old, better known artists and had them give me an old work and a new work. We had Chatelain, Luton, Luchs, Faust, Ellen Phalen and one other. Called it the

“Willis Revisited” and the place was packed. From that moment on everyone knew where the

Willis Gallery was. I kept the gallery open. I ran it for a year or two, then I passed the baton on to Trisha Soderberg I think it was. Robert Cobb acquired the building back when I didn’t pay for it, but he liked the idea of the art gallery there too and the little bit of publicity that he got so he kept it open for another fifteen years on the same basis that I did, charging no fee, letting the artists keep all proceeds of whatever they sell and at the end of the show give me a small piece of work. That was how we kinda restarted the gallery and it lasted well up until was it 2005, no,

1995; that’s how long Avalon’s been there.

Gruber: What was the relationship between the Cass Corridor artists and the more mainstream older artists? Schaerges Interview, 9

Schaerges: I don’t know, I never really knew much about the mainstream, traditional artists except by reputation, I guess, but I never really knew any of them close enough to give you a comment on that.

Gruber: If you had to pick your favorite piece or two in your collection what would it be and what is the story behind it?

Schaerges: You know, the piece by Chatelain of the “Little Men” was, I think that was one of his that was in the “Kick Out the Jams”.1 He this gave me this piece early on and its, I think its sat in my living room, in the same place right behind the television for thirty years. And that’s probably my favorite, one of my favorites. The other one that comes up is the portrait that Pat

Otto did and that was in lieu of a divorce fee in 1978 or so.2 This picture, this painting that she did of me, this portrait it hung in her MFA show and I remember walking down Cass Avenue, some guy stopping and pointing at me and saying you’re the guy whose [in the] painting is in the masters show and sure enough it was. And so those are two that have always hung prominently in my house and when I walk in the door I look around to make sure they’re there so I know where I am. It’s been a little disconcerting with them being [noise] gone for six weeks or eight

1Little Men, Jim Chatelain, oil on canvas, 24” x 24”, 1974. 2Portrait of Schaerges, Pat Otto, oil on canvas, 24” x 24”, 1978. Schaerges Interview, 10 weeks, but I’m going to get them back on Saturday so then everything will come back to normal.3

Gruber: There is another painting of you that is up at the Cass Café.

Schaerges: Oh, the Jerome Ferretti- painting within a painting within a painting.4

Gruber: What was that like? I am assuming that you sat for that.

Schaerges: Yeah, he asked me. I’m not sure how it came about. But I suggested, I think it was that we put the painting behind the desk so you have a painting within a painting. That was kinda

Jerome’s doing. There’s one, another portrait, that’s a little harder, but that’s from an Ann

Mikolowski painting that when we came to put it in the show, it was a real small. It was a 3 inch by 5 inch painting and we were afraid that you’d have to put it someplace where people could get close to it in order to see it. Then we were afraid that it might disappear and the hassle, the trouble, the cost of putting it in a lock box and guarding it and worrying about it. Because it’s

3At the time of the interview the items were in an exhibit “Corridor Collects Three: Selections from the Allen and Carol Schaerges Collection” at the Cass Café; February 12-April 9, 2011.

4Portrait of Schaerges, Jerome Ferretti, watercolor on paper, 18” x 24”, 1998. Schaerges Interview, 11 one of the few pieces that might actually have any value. It wasn’t worth it to do it all and put it in the show, but I put it on the back cover anyway, just because I wanted to.5

Gruber: That’s the way to do it.

Schaerges: That was from a trip up to Grindstone City in the 80’s where the Mikolowskis’ lived and that’s Ken Mikolowski, Bob Sestok and me.

Gruber: Go carts or something along those lines, I don’t know exactly what I would call those.

Schaerges: It’s called The Race.

Gruber: Do you have any stories about the artists? You were down here seeing them, interacting with them; are there any stories that particularly stick out in your mind?

Schaerges: There was one, I think it might have been the Bradley Jones painting that I got for a drag-racing ticket.6 I think it was Bradley and Gordy, had these old beat-up pickup trucks and

5The Race, , 3” x 4”, oil on wood, 1986.

6Untitled, Bradley Jones, 42” x 60”, acrylic on canvas, 1974. Schaerges Interview, 12 they were driving down Third Avenue back when the Anderson Gardens was the prostitute bar.

Anderson Gardens and the Willis Show Bar were kinda notorious for being Detroit’s red light district. These guys were in their old pickup trucks with bad mufflers and they went roaring by the Anderson Gardens and the Willis Show Bar and got drag racing tickets, which were pretty serious actually. We went to court and the judge liked to hang out in Cass Corridor and I had been his bartender for a while. We managed to get the tickets dismissed. I was explaining to the judge with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek that these boys from the suburbs found themselves in this notorious district on Third Avenue and all they were trying to do, your Honor, was get out of there as fast as they could.

Gruber: [laughs]

Schaerges: Case dismissed.

Gruber: So the judge accepted it?

Schaerges: Yep, I think later was when Bradley came walking over with this. Where’s Bradley?

This one. [shows the painting in the exhibit book]

Gruber: So the untitled one? Schaerges Interview, 13

Schaerges: Yep

Gruber: Of the pig eating at the dinner table I guess you would call it?

Schaerges: That one’s hung in a couple of shows, the Bradley Jones.

Gruber: Have you done any other shows besides the one on the Cass Corridor and when you--

Schaerges: No, the “Willis Revisited” and thirty years later this one. It will be awhile before I do another one.

Gruber: Were there any pieces that you wanted to acquire that you weren’t able to acquire? The one that got away.

Schaerges: No, I can’t say that I’ve coveted something that I don’t have. Some of these pieces

I’ve bought, a lot of them were gifts, some were kind of a trade for services.

Schaerges Interview, 14

Gruber: Okay. What do you think about how the community has evolved, since when you first arrived up to what it is today.

Schaerges: You know I’ve watched the decline of a great American city from 1971 until now.

But if you look the city of Detroit, this one area here has held its own. For every building we’ve lost there’s been at least another one that’s been renovated and saved. Housing is still fairly inexpensive here now and it’s a viable neighborhood. You’re watching the decline of the great

American city and be part of the neighborhood that didn’t decline is a good thing. And that says a lot for the viability of the Cass Corridor and it’s because Wayne State, the art center, even to some degree the Medical Center create enough jobs that keep this neighborhood stimulated.

Gruber: How to word this. As the artists have kind of left, the core group of artists that was here in the 70s--

Schaerges: They’ve left but there’s others that take their place. I’ve benefited from having an art collection thirty years ago, that people knew that I had Gordie’s and I had Michael Luchs’ and I had other prominent artists and so the younger people would, you know, give me stuff frankly. I would have to be discerning. Frankly, I declined some stuff that I didn’t think were good enough, or I didn’t like it well enough or it wasn’t my style. That made it even all the more alluring that if

I had a piece that other people would make their work kinda available.

Schaerges Interview, 15

Gruber: I’m assuming since you were a part of the community that you developed friendships with these artists. Did you develop friendships with some of these artists?

Schaerges: Almost all of them. [door opening] I’ve kinda been thinking of this, I sorta looked over the list of the thirty-eight different people in the show at the Cass Café. Of the [door closing] thirty-eight there are maybe five that I’m not personally involved with or friends of I guess.

Gruber: Do you have any stories to tell about those friendships that you’d be willing to tell?

Schaerges: You know, not really, not right now Beth. I’m getting kinda worn out here.

Gruber: Oh, all right, would you like to stop?

Schaerges: No, keep going.

Gruber: What kind of made you stay here? What kept you here?

Schaerges Interview, 16

Schaerges: You know it was 1978 and I bought my house over at Fourth and Willis which was a fine 120 year old Victorian house. It only had two owners and I bought it for about $6,000 which is about what it was worth in 1978. You know my house was paid for and I was a single man with a job and this was a fine place to be. I had no real desire for a bigger house somewhere else with a big mortgage. So, I was able to stay here and not work very hard, frankly.

Gruber: That’s a good enough reason I think.

Schaerges: Always a big fan of the lay-abouts.

Gruber: Starting to think that I’m running out of questions.

Schaerges: Well, maybe it’s a good time to say this has been fun.

Gruber: Okay.

Schaerges: And if you have anything to follow up on it be happy to call me.

Schaerges Interview, 17

Gruber: Okay.

Schaerges: Thank you very much, Beth.

Gruber: Thank you.