Oxygen Alley: Impossible Overnight Transformation
Folks in Poletown have been seeing tractors on these streets for decades.
Paul has been the kind of busy that one could see from space. Maybe you have noticed. His work is especially obvious in Oxygen Alley, which seems to have gone from parking lot to park overnight. Well, it wasn’t overnight. It was in broad daylight with 4 people working full time, alongside the bobcat, the tractor, and the dump truck. Paul operates the unsung heroes of Arboretum Detroit and our Poletown neighborhood. Paul moves them around the neighborhood like a kid using his index finger to drive them around the kitchen floor: beep, beep, beep, dump truck waiting to be loaded with debris over here, tractor moving back and forth scraping up landfilled concrete chunks right here, and bobcat grabbing asphalt and garbage over here. This was the scene all week in Oxygen Alley. With 4 people and these amazing tools we moved an amount of concrete, asphalt and brick, equivalent to the weight of the 21 boulders we placed in the ring: 30 tons. We humans, with all our combined might, could not budge a single boulder. However, over the course of the week picking chunks off the ground and hauling them with wheelbarrows, we lifted many times the weight of a boulder, which is about one ton each.
Arboretum employees Robyn and Idris working alongside volunteers Paul and Sarah to depave the world.
We do a lot of remediation around here, but never have we achieved something quite like this. It is appropriate that this has been our biggest clean-up job ever because Oxygen Alley is, itself, a monument to our community’s fierce battles against, and victories over, the waste industry. You may have heard that this park is a giant air filter and memorial to all of the years we fought, and are still fighting, for environmental justice. On the near East side we bear a heavy burden of the waste industry and spend our time cleaning up after capitalism. Capitalism always dumps on someone, that’s what it does. Some have the luxury of looking the other way, some do not. We are here to stare it down and make change.
We completely removed 400 feet of asphalt driveway and dozens of parking spaces. We tilled 50 yards of compost and 80 yards of leaf litter into the dry dust. We shaped 500 feet of pathway using 30 yards of wood chips, and planted 50 trees, and 30 shrubs. This is especially transformative because of the dearth of life that was obvious here. Underneath this impenetrable petrochemical surface, just as atop it, there was almost zero life. This poisoned and desiccated earth capped by asphalt has not seen a drop of water for 60 years; it is completely inert. This is how we practice for digging on the moon. For the first time in half a century life and water are filtering their way down and things are growing here.
The dump truck full of 5 tons of asphalt, one of several loads removed from Oxygen Alley.
Above ground there are dozens of places for birds to land and loads of native foods for them to eat, hundreds of feet of pathway for people to stroll through, and an acre of surface for a wildflower meadow to grow. Under the surface there will be worms, and microbes, and fungi spreading and bringing the soil back to life. On the once neglected and unnoticed corner of Moran and Kirby there is a giant tilted ring of stones to amaze and focus energy. This ring also demonstrates to me that boulders are more valuable than diamonds. This whole project can help us recalibrate our priorities. Imagine what all of our neighborhoods could look like if we could trade some of the diamonds, hiding in dark drawers, for parks like this with boulders and trees standing in the sun. Let’s imagine that in cities all over the world people will trade their precious diamonds and their conspicuous concentrated personal wealth for vast and beautiful community spaces for life to thrive.
Hey, we can do this. We are doing this. It’s tons of work, but we have proven precisely what it takes to perform this task. The heavy lifting was done with all volunteer labor, over 300 hours of it. But the financing was not taken care of by a diamond, but by a Neighborhood Beautification Grant from the City of Detroit, and a Tree Planting Grant from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Urban and Community Forestry program and the DTE Energy Foundation. We also have two organizations to thank for their in-kind contributions: the Greening of Detroit for an amazing tree planting, and US Fish and Wildlife Foundation for a native meadow installation .
21 tons of Michigan boulders delivered first by glaciers then by Paul into this cosmic Ring.
Oxygen Alley is a dream come true, a profound treealization. And we dream it for all of us. It would be one thing if this were just someone’s private estate that provided all this beauty and wildlife value just for its own sake. But this is a public park to be enjoyed by anyone and everyone forever into the future. Lots of parks, not parking lots, right? Parks in perpetuity. We are figuring out more and more every year how to be the Detroit we want to see in the world, to plant the Detroit we want to live in.
KT Morelli leading a Greenspace Healing Tour through the new meandering path through Oxygen Alley. With hard work there is life after asphalt.
This is what we do. Please come out and visit. Come out and be a part of it. If you would like to, and can, please support this work with a donation that will help us ensure that the trees are watered and this essential equipment is kept working. Help us help trees help us. We can only lift boulders together. We are so grateful for you to even just sit peacefully on a bench if that’s your role. Welcome home!
Kids love boulders. Finn test drives all our boulders before we invite the general public.