12512 Dexter Avenue
Arrow Paint Co., Horowitz Dining Room, Diggs Building and Housing Corporation, Neighborhood City Hall, Detroit Police Department 10th Precinct Mini-Station, Video View, Bill’s Door & Lock
Taking photos in Detroit as a form of documentation is extremely anxiety-riddling. That’s not to say I’ve ever felt unsafe in the city—quite the contrary, to be honest. But as anyone who has been here long enough knows, buildings, signs, and ornate details are here one day and gone the next.
This structure isn’t gone, but I’ve been meaning to take photos of it since I moved off Dexter a few years ago. I always dug the design, and if you look closely, there’s a faded and tattered ‘Kwame Kilpatrick For Mayor’ sign on the top of the building.
I always worried it would be gone before I documented it. If it had, I would have kicked myself because it’s within a mile and a half walk from my house. I wasn’t around when he was mayor—I was starting the 8th grade when he resigned, but I recall hearing about it in the news.
12512 Dexter was built in 1948. I’m not sure whom it was constructed for, but by 1949, Arrow Paint Co. had a space in the building. By 1954, Horowitz Dining Room had a space there, too. In the 1960s, the Diggs Building and Housing Corporation and Real Estate Company occupied the building.
From the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, the property operated as a Neighborhood City Hall. The NCH program was set up in 1971 by then-mayor Roman Gribbs. According to the Detroit Free Press, the point of the offices was to ‘open more direct channels of communication between city officials and citizens, and to allow citizens to make their feelings more clearly known to city government.’
I’m not certain when this branch closed, but it existed until at least 1994. The rest of the Neighborhood City Hall locations were shuttered during Mayor Bing’s cutbacks in 2012.
Starting around 1984, there was a Detroit Police Department 10th Precinct Mini-Station next to (or inside) the Neighborhood City Hall. In February and March of 1994, Foot Locker and the Detroit Police Department hosted a ‘Shoes for Guns’ campaign at this location. The program offered a $100 gift card toward shoes at Foot Locker in exchange for guns brought to the station, no questions asked. There wasn’t a limit on the number of guns that could be brought to the station, but citizens could only get one gift certificate per day. The Detroit Free Press reported that the program had collected nearly 6,000 guns nationally. In 2022 terms, that’s roughly $200 in gift cards per gun.
The last mention I found for the station was from later in 1994.
The most recent occupants of the structure were Video View, a VHS and DVD rental and purchase business, Bill’s Door & Lock, a hardware store, and a dog grooming business that may have been inside Bill’s. Looking at Google Street View, the Kwame Kilpatrick sign was tattered back in 2007, so I’d guess it was from his first Mayoral campaign in 2001.
According to records, the property is currently owned by the City of Detroit Planning and Development Department, although there’s a sign for the church across the street on the side of the building.
This one won’t give me anxiety anymore—but about two dozen more in my neighborhood will. One piece at a time.
