The LOVE Building is open

The entrance to the LOVE Building. Credit: Viola Klocko

On September 7th, 20203, the LOVE Building officially opened with a soft launch celebration. We gathered with our tenant partners and our many close collaborators, whose support over five years made the LOVE Building possible.

LOVE Building supporters gather in the community event space. Credit: Kenny Karpov

Read the remarks from the soft opening by LOVE Building Interim Director, Jeanette Lee:

Welcome to the soft opening of the LOVE Building.  

My name is Jenny Lee and I am the LOVE Building’s  interim director. I am so excited to be able to celebrate our arrival at the LOVE Building with all of you tonight.  The past four years have been a wild, wild journey, filled with twists and turns we could never have imagined. Our original plan was to be moved in by the end of 2020.  So we only missed our target by about 3 years.  

As frustrating as some of the roadblocks have been, I am also grateful for the slowness of our process.  As any cook will tell you, the flavor is richer when you go low and slow. The flavor deepens as the ingredients deepen their relationships to each other.  Over the past four years, we have been in relationship with such a vast array of incredible humans who have contributed their particular flavor to the LOVE Building.  I am overjoyed that so many of you are here tonight.  

Let me start by uplifting our tenant partners: Allied Media Projects, Detroit Justice Center, Detroit Disability Power, Detroit Narrative Agency, Detroit Community Technology Project, and Paradise Natural Foods. The work you do to advance justice, shift narratives, create access and develop the liberated, equitable infrastructures we need is the heart of what the LOVE Building is and will do.  I’m  thrilled that over the past 4 years, despite endless delays, not one of you abandoned this vision we share. Our organizations have each weathered tremendous challenges and transitions over this period and through it all, we’re still doing this thing, together (finally!).  Now the next phase of work begins as we all learn to co-habitate this space.  

As much as tonight is about celebrating new beginnings and what will come, I want to acknowledge that many people here tonight also have deep connections to what the building was.  For nearly 20 years 4731 Gallery was a home for artists from across the city.  We are grateful that many of those artists have remained in relationship with us on our journey, advising us and co-designing with us, and even creating new works of art that honor the legacy of the 4731 Gallery, such as the piece, installed this morning by Dino Valdez Jr. and OneSingleRose, our illustrious host of the evening. It can be painful to see our places change, even if the new thing coming is amazing.  We’re remembering Octavia Butler’s words, inscribed in the lobby, that kindness eases change and love quiets fear.  Your kindness and love has been so nourishing.  

And we are so fortunate to belong to a community that is rich with artists. Thank you to the quilters, painters, printmakers, photographers and many more whose work adorns the walls the building (or will soon once we get it framed).  Your artworks are blessings for this space. 

Our Neighborhood Advisory Council, which was assembled and facilitated by our beloved friends at Sidewalk Detroit, has also been a blessing.  This committee joined us for zoom meeting after zoom meeting throughout two years of the pandemic.  Their insights on the needs and qualities of the Core City neighborhood shaped not only our Community Benefits Agreement, but the design of our logo, the colors of the elevator tower, and the new ancestor memorial mural that will be going up on the West facade of the building later this year.  

The Community Benefits Agreement we finalized with the Neighborhood Advisory Council is a thing of beauty.  That’s a rare descriptor for a CBA in my experience.  One of the beautiful features of the LOVE Building CBA is the disability justice and access addendum that was just finalized in June.  That addendum details the ways in which we will operationalize our values of disability justice at the LOVE Building.  Thank you to the DJAAC members who worked so hard on that over the past year and a half.  

I also want to give an extra shout out to Detroit Disability Power, whose insights and feedback from the very beginning have shaped the building you’re experiencing today. Access is a journey, not a destination and we will be continuing to refine and adapt this space through ongoing feedback as we use and navigate it together.  Towards that end, please use the comment cards to tell us about your experiences tonight.  

We have learned so much through this process about the ways that ableism, racism, and every other toxic system is baked into market-driven real estate development.  

We have been so fortunate to work with funders who understand the resources it takes to build spaces rooted in care. We are grateful to the many institutions who provided capital support to the LOVE Building and also to the specific humans inside of those institutions, who work daily to unlock as many resources as possible towards liberatory futures.  

Our movements have powerful critiques of the current world and beautiful visions for what else could be.  The LOVE Building has been an experiment in forging a vision into brick and mortar.  Turns out it is hard to build the things we need.  It’s hard because capitalism denies our movements the money we need, yes.  But once we have the money it’s still really hard to build things beautifully, safely, cost-effectively, sustainably.  So we need talented architects and tradespeople, and civil engineers, and lawyers, and owner’s reps, and property managers, even city inspectors.  And the LOVE Building is opening today because we had all of that on our team.  Thank you especially to our architects DJDS and Quinn Evans, our owner’s rep IFF, our consultants at Beanstalk Real Estate Solutions, our lawyers at Butzel Long, and of course MiG Construction for your tireless work over the past 4 years.  

Thank you also to the AMP team — staff and board past, present, and future.  From the earliest days of purchasing the LOVE Building and BZA hearings, through the meticulous tracking of every single expenses, contract, and cashed check, through the obstacle course of securing new markets tax credits, communications and design work, and so much more, AMP staff have served as the backbone to an incredibly complex process.  

I want to acknowledge that when we set the date for this event it was in May, and we fully anticipated securing occupancy by June 1st so planning a soft opening to happen three months later felt like we were being really generous with ourselves.  As we navigated the wondrous world of elevator inspections, final fire alarm tests, three months turned to two, turned to 3 weeks, turned to less than 1 week with a holiday in between.  I have to thank both the AMP staff and our small but mighty LVB staff for making miracles happen so that we could have this event tonight.  

Up until this point I have avoided naming names because that would have added at least a thousand words to this speech and we can’t keep you all standing that long.  But there are two people I’ve leaned on particularly hard throughout the past two years. 

Kyle Rawlins, who carries an external monitor around like an accessory, has been my guide and mentor, teaching me how to navigate the tumultuous world of real estate development financing.  

Lydia Esparza, our furniture fairy godmother and design strategist, has attended to every detail of how this space looks and feels.  She is also a chef and hand made tonight’s tortillas in her sister’s kitchen in Corktown.  

Thank you to everyone who has poured their love into this vision, this building, the land it stands on, and the neighborhood it belongs to.  And may all of that love seep into every interaction we have within this space.