Champion Grandparents

The eighteen children of Francis Xavier and Delphine Pilon as photographed at their home in Bay City, Michigan in 1905. Mr. and Mrs. F.X. Pilon are my great-great-great-grandparents on my mother's side. Mr. Pilon's forbears hailed from Bayeux, Normandy, via a two-century stay in the Province of Quebec. Mrs. Pilon (nee Waters) was of mixed Belgian, French, Irish, and English ancestry, though she was born in Montreal. The couple moved to Michigan around the turn-of-the-century and lived in Bay City before eventually settling in River Rouge, a downriver suburb of Detroit.

An article in a Detroit paper in August 1936 lauded the pair as "Champion Grandparents". At press time, Mr. and Mrs. Pilon had 17 living children, 71 living grandchildren, and 54 living great-grandchildren. A mass in honor of their 60th wedding anniversary was attended by over 100 of their living descendants at the now-demolished but formerly grand church of Our Lady of Lourdes.

Delphine Pilon the younger, the third child of Francis Xavier and the elder Delphine, is my great-great-grandmother (pictured second row, second from left). She met and fell in love with Henry Hebert, scion of one of French Canada's most ancient families, whose roots go to the very foundations of the colony. She was widowed at a fairly young age, and she lived with her parents for the remainder of their lives.

Old Detroit Times Building

My current studio project has brought me to Detroit, once one of the greatest cities of the nation, now the poster child for Rust Belt economic and social free fall. Detroit's economic zenith could probably be dated sometime in the 1920s, an era that gave us many of the city's great architectural landmarks. Some of these gems survive - most notably the Guardian Building - but, sadly, many have since met the wrecking ball. One such loss - the Detroit Times Building, particularly piqued my interest.

The Detroit Times was an evening newspaper that was at one point owned by the newspaperman par excellence, William Randolph Hearst (whose California palace at San Simeon is the closest we Americans have come architecturally to the ecstatic revelry of Neuschwanstein). The splendid Art Deco building that hosted the Times was designed by Albert Kahn, a Prussian-born architect who is responsible for much of Detroit's built heritage. Though, we must regret that given Detroit's precipitous decline, knowledge of his work is overshadowed by Louis Kahn, whose work is vastly different (but poetic in its own modernist way).

The Detroit Times building was constructed in 1929 and was finally demolished in 1978, eighteen years after the Times printed its last paper. More information and photos can be found here.