I was just reading this Detroit Free Press piece on the fallout of Tom Gores' purchase of the Pistons means for downtown Detroit. The first suitor was Tigers and Red Wings (and Little Caesars) owner Mike Ilitch, who would have been inclined to possibly move the Pistons out of their current Auburn Hills digs to a new stadium downtown.
It doesn't seem like it was 30 years ago when Joe Louis Arena was the new stadium downtown. I can remember helping at Eastern Michigan U's cafeteria in the summer of 1980 serving a bunch of Young Republicans bunking down at the EMU dorms during that summer's GOP national convention at "the Joe." A year later, I was visiting the Joe myself, as a delegate to the state Democratic convention (everyone has a few things they did as a college kid that they'd like a mulligan on;-) at neighboring Cobo Hall and checking out the new arena during the lunch break with my dad, watching a bit of a youth hockey game that was taking place.
However, that was 30 years ago, and the Joe doesn't have the luxury box bells and whistles of more recent stadia. Financing a replacement will be a challenge, especially when you can expect little help from state and local governments, even when the new Detroit mayor is an ex-Pistons great. Former ace point guard and Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson hasn't been able to translate that NBA background into money for a new arena there; Dave Bing will likely be up against a similar 8-ball.
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Another story of premature obsolescence is that of Blockbuster Video. The fairly new Blockbuster in Midland just east of the tennis center got closed a few months ago, leaving a gaping hole in a nice strip mall complex with a corner view of Wackerly and Jefferson, the latter being one of the main roads out to our mall quadrant. Great location, but the market for post-theater movies has changed since it got built circa 2006. Blockbuster went Chapter 11 last fall, and that closure was likely part of the restructuring of the company.
You have Netflix taking a high-tech niche of quick mail-order movies if you can wait a day or two, or download them right now; cable and satellite providers have gotten into movies-on-demand in a larger way in the last year or two as well. For the pick-up-a-movie side of things, automated kiosks like Red Box have turned movie rentals into a commodity. What's left is an increasingly niche market for folks who aren't tech savvy and want a broader selection of movies than a Red Box machine has; for now, it isn't feeding the bulldog.
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