Abundance of blight reveals Detroit's wooden treasures

DETROIT — James Cadariu was planning construction of his hip, new coffee bar, Great Lakes Coffee Roasting Company, in 2011 when he first heard about Reclaim Detroit, a nonprofit agency retrieving old and valuable wood and other treasures from Detroit homes set for demolition.

It sounded like material he could use at the coffeehouse he was fashioning on Woodward Avenue in Midtown Detroit.

When he eventually made his way to Reclaim Detroit's warehouse, then located at Focus: HOPE, he was delighted with what he found, stacks of rare, old-forest lumber, hand-carved mahogany doors and antique fixtures, some of it more than a hundred years old.

And something more personal — wood taken from a home on Grayton Street on the city's east side, two doors down from his uncle's house, where he used to visit as a child.

"To me, that was it," he said in an interview earlier this month. "Wood from a street where I used to play as a kid. This material, this wood they're saving, it all has a story to tell. It's so much a part of the city. That's what I really liked about it."

Reclaim Detroit, now more than 3 years old, is gaining national attention as a leader in the burgeoning deconstruction movement, where trained workers remove valuable material in homes set for demolition, and then resell it, creating jobs and sparing landfills millions of tons of debris.

The nonprofit employs 25 people, and has deconstructed 68 homes. It's a small dent in the city's 78,000 abandoned homes, but the momentum is picking up, with big banks, like J.P. Morgan and Bank of America, providing grant money. And the orders are coming in, with interest, from as far away as Japan.

Reclaim Detroit crew member Gary Coklow, 33, of Detroit

Reclaim Detroit crew member Gary Coklow, 33, of Detroit removes nails from wood flooring as he helps deconstruct a house in Detroit. Reclaim Detroit, an organization the salvages valuable wood, fixtures, copper, and other treasures from houses set for demolition, is gaining national attention for its work. A crew works over a house on Ferry Park Street in Detroit Friday Dec. 5, 2014.(Photo: Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press)

"Right now, we're struggling to keep up with demand for the materials," said Reclaim Detroit Executive Director Craig Varterian, adding that they are selling it almost as fast as they can remove if from the houses.

"We had a good supply in the beginning but then we gained a certain amount of notoriety, so now we've got artists, architects, designers, people who are environmentally conscious, people who are rehabbing their homes and have an interest in these design elements, and things just started accelerating."

Most recently, Carhartt, the clothing company that specializes in outerwear for construction workers, has become a sponsor, and sent out a camera crew to create a feature film. And Esquire magazine has been calling.

"On one hand, it's exciting that this is gaining such popularity," Varterian said, "but it's daunting as we develop the supply chain."

Unlike standard demolition, which can take a few hours, deconstructing a home typically takes three days, and the job can be labor intensive, with workers methodically removing nails from old wood, tearing up walls to locate Douglas fir and pine, and removing antique windows, prized for their cloudy, sometimes bubble-filled glass. But when they finish one house, they move right on to the next.

"In terms of raw materials, there is certainly no lacking of that in Detroit," Varterian said. "It's bountiful. No one is doing this in the country on this scale. When we look across this city, it's as if we were looking at thousands of acres of forests sitting in those homes, wood you can't buy anymore."

Blight as an asset

The city's vast blight may prove to be one of its greatest assets.

"The whole blight removal movement in the city is scaling up," said Brian Farkas, director of special projects for the Detroit Building Authority, leading the fight against blight. "It opens up a whole host of opportunities for jobs and job training, and those are jobs that transfer. We're not going to be fighting blight in this city forever, and then the people trained in these jobs can build houses instead of deconstructing them."

The city was once demolishing about 200 homes a month. Now, under Mayor Mike Duggan's stepped-up efforts to fight blight, it averages 200 a week, peaking last summer when 1,000 homes a month were coming down.

“This material, this wood they're saving, it all has a story to tell. It's so much a part of the city. ”

James Cadariu, business owner

The city has developed a method to determine which homes might contain valuable material — and be worth the extra deconstruction efforts — based on the age of the homes. Those homes go out to bid to companies like Reclaim Detroit.

"It's one of the successful things under Duggan and it's not just the city, but across the state and country," Farkas said, noting that the federal government is supplying millions of dollars in aid to the city to fight the blight. "It seems like everybody is rowing in the same direction finally, broad-based teams doing what we need to do."

"It's a very exciting time to be in the city," he said.

Wood that sings

The beauty of the wood sells itself.

While Cadariu was smitten by the oak wood and fir wood from his childhood, he eventually selected wood retrieved by Reclaim Detroit from a home on Carpenter Street in Hamtramck, and used it to construct a massive butcher block bar in his coffee bar and a wine-tasting table that contains the indentations from bullets, fired long ago. "To throw material like this away, it's almost like a crime against culture," he said. "People love that there is a story behind this wood."

Not all of the reclaimed wood ends up in construction projects. Some is so gorgeous it is used to construct one-of-a-kind guitars.

"You can kind of hear the wood sing," said Curt Novara, owner of Woodward Guitar, which he operates out of his garage in Livingston County, where he works as a detective in the sheriff's department.

Using Douglas fir and maple obtained from Reclaim Detroit, Novara has built nine custom guitars since Woodward Guitar opened several months ago.

He works with George Gorodnitski, of Master Guitars in Los Angeles, to create the instruments. Each guitar takes about 60 hours to complete. The old wood makes the instruments extraordinary, he said. Metro Detroit music shops sell them — at about $2,000 a guitar.

His most recent guitars were constructed of wood taken by Reclaim Detroit from a house on Ford Street in Highland Park, near the Detroit city border.

"You can tap that wood and hear it hum," he said. "It's amazing."

So far, Novara has declined to sell them online.

"You have to play it, to get a feel for it, to experience it," he said. "These guitars might be new, but they've got an extraordinary history."