It’s Friday afternoon and Katie, my PT for the last two weeks, has just closed her computer ending my knee replacement rehabilitation. With reservations made for lunch at Cantoro Italian Market & Trattoria, Nan and I left for Plymouth, Michigan, to celebrate. Anyone traveling in southeast Michigan and looking for an exceptional dining experience, make a reservation for lunch or dinner at Cantoro Italian Trattoria and enjoy a true Italian-American meal.
Our favorite Cantoro appetizer is their grilled calamari, prepared in lemon and zucchini, with limoncello vinaigrette, a treat an old craftsman can enjoy. (During our travels we often try the calamari and find most are buried in heavy batter, deep fried with texture similar to a used tire from a diesel truck.)
Detroit’s Eastern Market now has on display the historic “Detroit Unity Bell” from Detroit’s Old City Hall, and we stopped to see it on location: the bell hanging in the riveted frame I designed for Carlos Nielbock, which Bach Steel in St Johns, Michigan, fabricated and delivered to Nielbock’s shop, C.A.N Art Handworks in Detroit, where they also assisted in attaching the 150-year-old bell to the new riveted frame.
It’s Friday afternoon and Katie, my PT for the last two weeks, has just closed her computer ending my knee replacement rehabilitation. With reservations made for lunch at Cantoro Italian Market & Trattoria, Nan and I left for Plymouth, Michigan, to celebrate. Anyone traveling in southeast Michigan and looking for an exceptional dining experience, make a reservation for lunch or dinner at Cantoro Italian Trattoria and enjoy a true Italian-American meal.
Our favorite Cantoro appetizer is their grilled calamari, prepared in lemon and zucchini, with limoncello vinaigrette, a treat an old craftsman can enjoy. (During our travels we often try the calamari and find most are buried in heavy batter, deep fried with texture similar to a used tire from a diesel truck.)
Detroit’s Eastern Market now has on display the historic “Detroit Unity Bell” from Detroit’s Old City Hall, and we stopped to see it on location: the bell hanging in the riveted frame I designed for Carlos Nielbock, which Bach Steel in St Johns, Michigan, fabricated and delivered to Nielbock’s shop, C.A.N Art Handworks in Detroit, where they also assisted in attaching the 150-year-old bell to the new riveted frame.
For more information about the riveted bell frame see the February issue of the Iron & Steel Preservation Chronicle.
No trip to Detroit would be complete without a stop at John King Used & Rare Books, with over one million books shelved on several packed floors. Although selections on bridges and industrial trades are modest, over the years we have found a few books on bridges and the steel industry, along with historic bridge postcards. One find on this trip was a book on the Golden Gate Bridge by Allen Brown (1965), with an interesting piece about the Golden Gate Bridge towers.
“Steel for the two towers — 43,000 tons of it costing $6,970,000 — was rolled and fabricated in the East. There entire sections of the towers were put together, much as precut prefabricated houses are manufactured today, and shipped from the mills by rail to Philadelphia, then by water through the Panama Canal to San Francisco Bay. About 1300 tons of steel rivets, the largest order of its kind ever placed in San Francisco, came from the Pacific Coast Steel Company of South San Francisco, to fasten the fabricated tower sections together” (pp 91-92). These fabricated tower sections were shop-riveted with pneumatic riveters driving millions of different size rivets.
A pleasant afternoon spent in the Detroit, Michigan, area.
Vern Mesler 2022
