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Located at the foot of West Grand Boulevard, Riverside Park is a narrow green rectangle along an industrial southwest Detroit waterfront. Until recently it has been a simple park, just an expanse of grass, bordered on its west end by railroad tracks whose activity reflects the fortunes of the surrounding industry and on its east end by benches fronting a cement seawall and pedestrian walkway.  Michael Lauchlan uses Riverside as the eponymous subject of one poem, and it is the setting for Mary Minock' s poem "Down by the Boulevard Dock." Both Minock and Lauchlan describe it as a space for simple pleasures: fishing, kite flying, napping after work, and observing children at play. To Minock, it is a place

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where old black ladies
and my old white mama
fish off the dock
and never catch anything. . . .  (51)

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Laughlan describes "a flame" pouring "from the sky like a serpent" which "at the last / jerks its kite face from the river's teeth."

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For generations the park has provided for children the excitement of boats, trucks, and trains that compete with the modest collection of children's playground equipment. Here the river is at its narrowest between Detroit and Windsor so the details of passing freighters and pleasure craft are easily visible. The north end of the park houses both the Detroit Fire Department's fire boat and the "mail boat," a boat with its own zip code. The J. W. Westcott delivers mail and sundry supplies to passing Great Lakes freighters.

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the boy must go too near the water
drags me shivering
to where the concrete drops
"What is an undertow?"
wiggling the toes in his sandals
and so I pull him back to sit
on the benches where we lick good humors;
the freighters drag heavy
the mail boat rides high.... (Minock 53)

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The Ambassador Bridge soars above the Westcott company offices, and trucks thunder across in both directions, looking like matchbox miniatures.

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The bridge towers over him, over the caught
iron river on the spreading shadow
and hums with crawling taillights
flickering behind cables. (Laughlan)

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Riverside Park has been part of a Riverfront Greenway Initiative, so it has received modest physical improvement, but it remained a park without picnic tables or restrooms. Now, however, the City of Detroit’s Riverside Park Conversion Project is expanding the park’s total area and adding substantially to its activities and amenities (“City of Detroit”).                

                                                                                              

Plain and unkempt though the park has long been, its main attraction has remained its glorious view. Looking upriver, the Ambassador Bridge frames a panorama of the Detroit and Windsor downtown skylines:

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I gaze against the wind upriver:
the bridge to Canada and freedom--
the skyscrapers against afternoon sun. (Minock 51)

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Jane Hammang-Buhl is professor emerita of Business and former vice president for academic affairs and dean of the Professional Studies Division at Marygrove College. As a child, she played with her cousins at Riverside Park.

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Works Cited

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City of Detroit Department of Parks and Recreation. Riverside Park Conversion Project. 2009,

https://detroitmi.gov/departments/parks-recreation/community-recreation-centers/riverside-park-conversion-project,  Accessed August 30, 2019.

Laughlan, Michael. And the Business Goes to Pieces. Fallen Angel, 1981.

Minock, Mary. Love in the Upstairs Flat. Mellen, 1995.

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Photos by Anna Fedor (2003).

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First posted 2003, Updated in March 2011 and August 2019.