2024 Detroit Road Trip: Windsor, Ontario

As part of our 10-day road trip to Detroit, Ann Arbor and Toledo, we scheduled overnight stays in Windsor, Ontario in order to have a break from the 4-hour drive from and back to Toronto.  It turned out that Windsor was not just a strategic stopping point but was also a fun place to visit in its own right.  We spent almost two full days exploring the sights and still there is more to see including the Willistead Manor which is not open for tours until later in the season.

When we first arrived in Windsor, Ontario and drove north on Ouelette Avenue towards the riverfront, we marveled at the pretty skyline that we saw in the distance including some impressive skyscrapers.  Upon reaching the riverside, it became apparent that the buildings that we admired was actually part of Detroit’s skyline, a mere 1-1.5miles away across the Detroit River. Interestingly, a part of Windsor is actually south of Detroit—one of the few places in Canada that is located south of the United States.  We had lunch on the outdoor patio of the Bistro At the River, which gave us a great view of the Detroit River and Detroit's shoreline as we ate our sandwiches.  Rich had a Reuben sandwich, which he would order several more times throughout our trip.  At the end, he declared that this one was the best with the tastiest pastrami, perfect proportion of meat to bread/sauerkraut/dressing and nicely grilled bread.  We watched a long cargo ship sail slowly by, one of many that we would see from both sides of the river.

The Detroit skyline boasts an eclectic mix of heritage and modern buildings.  From a distance, the top of the red-brick clad building with ornate patterns decorating the top floors reminded me of Buffalo’s City Hall.  It turned out to be the Guardian Building which we would visit a few days later during our tour of downtown Detroit.  I was also drawn to the sleek black buildings that formed the General Motors Renaissance Centre (REN) which reminded me of the shiny black buildings of PPG Place which we toured during our trip to Pittsburgh, PA last year.

Windsor has a wonderful stretch of parkland following along the Canadian shore of the Detroit River that includes several floral gardens, fountains, war memorials, playground areas and an extensive sculpture park.  The Windsor Riverside Trail spans 5km from the Ambassador Bridge to the west over to Hiram Walker Distillery in Walkerville to the East, providing paths for pedestrians and cyclists. We found the “Spirit of Windsor Engine 5588”, a steam locomotive built in 1911 for the Canadian National Railway which provided freight and passenger service in Southern Ontario until 1961.

A walking path along the waterfront gave us great views of the rest of Detroit’s skyline including the skyscrapers that we saw from a distance when driving through downtown Windsor.  There were remnants of some rusted docks that might have been part of an old train ferry like the ones that carried locomotives over a river at the start of the 20th century.  On our stroll along the river, we saw many fishermen trying their luck along the railings.  Nearby there was a family of Canada geese with the parents protectively watching over their goslings.

War memorials found in Dieppe Gardens commemorate veterans from multiple wars including WWI, WWII and the Korean War.  Dieppe Gardens is named in honour of those who lost their lives in the disastrous Dieppe Raid in 1942.  In particular, the Essex Scottish Regiment from Windsor was amongst the first Canadian units to see combat in that raid, leading to 121 fatalities.  A beautiful sculpture with the inscription “Pray For Peace” depicts a young family with their heads bowed in prayer.  While you only see a couple when looking at the figures from the front, when viewing from the back, you can see the outline of a child hugging his mother.  An RCAF memorial consists of three slabs of concrete, each carved to depict a WWII pilot standing in front of a WWII aircraft.  Two male pilots stand in front of a Hurricane fighter and a Spitfire fighter plane respectively.  A female figure represents a member of the Air Transport Auxiliary who transported newly constructed planes from Canada to Britain during the war.  A model of an Avro Lancaster bomber plane emanates from the centre slab as if it is just taking off.  There was also a section with multiple monuments dedicated to the Royal Canadian Navy with inscriptions including “Canada and the War At Sea”.

The Bert Weeks Memorial Garden honours the former mayor of Windsor (1975-1982) who was known for his humanitarian efforts in welcoming refugees, his involvement with UNICEF, and creating connected parkland throughout Windsor including Riverside Trail. Located at the east end of Riverside Trail, this garden includes an elaborate fountain and reflecting pool as well as a bronze bust of Weeks. Walking along the riverside at dusk, we admired the sun setting just beyond the Ambassador Bridge where trucks continue to cross between Canada and the United States at an extremely slow crawl.  Standing just underneath the bridge, you can see the Canadian flag that possibly demarks the Canadian vs the American side of the bridge.

For me, the best part of the Riverside Trail is the Windsor Sculpture Park, a unique outdoor gallery featuring over 30 large-scaled contemporary sculptures by renowned artists from around the world.  It was fun interacting with some of the sculptures including a pair of bronze figures by British Sculptor Elizabeth Frink.  Titled “Flying Men”, the pair appear to be racing along the grass, so I joined in the chase.  I also couldn’t resist trying to take a bite out of Edwina Sandys’ whimsical sculpture “Eve’s Apple” consisting of a large hand with red painted fingernails holding out an apple that already has a bite taken from it.  I tried to follow the gaze of Joe Rosenthal’s Lady to see what she was looking at and I found his other sculpture titled "Consolation" consisting of two seated figures gently giving comfort to one another to be really touching.

Rich and I each took a seat on Sorel Etrog’s pair of metal sculptures titled “King and Queen” that continue his trend of creating bronze works that look like combinations of screws and bolts. Several animal-related sculptures included Morning Flight by Gerard Gladstone consisting of a series of colourful birds made from painted steel that are stacked together to represent a flock taking off towards the sky, Anne Harris’ giant sculptures of a pair of swans made from bent steel that she titled Tohawah which is a native term for swan, Morton Katz’s comical stainless steel outline of a chicken hatching a marble egg and Pauta Saila’s delightful bronze dancing bear. 

As we continued along the path for the Windsor Sculpture Park, we found more animal-themed sculptures including a bronze series depicting Tembo the elephant trailed by her two babies created by prolific elephant sculptor Derrick Hudson.  This work seemed immediately familiar since an identical one was once found in Commerce Court in Toronto’s financial district.  A plaque dating the Windsor work to 2001 disproves the thought that this was the same sculpture since the one in Commerce Court was not removed until 2017-18.  Windsor holds an annual event where the public are asked to come out to help wash Tembo and her babies.  The event is part of a conservation program that teaches the public about the regular maintenance that is needed to protect outdoor sculptures which are exposed to pollution, moisture, ultraviolet rays and other factors.  

Jack Byng’s A Butterfly’s Wings is bronze sculpture resting on a granite pedestal depicting a pair of outstretched hands about to release a pair of butterflies is a tribute to those suffering from brain injuries.  The Billy Goat Spring by Leszek Rymczuk  is a replica of a fountain from Windsor’s twin city Lublin, Poland, who gave it as a gift to celebrate the Polish community in Windsor.  The fountain bears the Lublin coat of arms but unfortunately does not seem to be functional.  At the far west end of the park by the Amabassador Bridge is  The bronze sculpture Union 6 by Bruce Watson reminds me of works by Henry Moore in terms of its abstract, curvy shapes.  It is sometimes known as the “Odette” sculpture since a plaque beneath it indicates that this is a gift from Mr. & Mrs. Odette.  In fact the entire sculpture park used to be called the Odette Sculpture Park after the family who funded the initiative but was renamed to Windsor Sculpture Park in 2012 at the request of the family, in order to be more inclusive to the whole Windsor community.  Stephen Cruise's giant work titled "Bell Measure" is actually two adjoined sculptures.  The bell at the bottom harkens to past use of church bells, dinner bells or school bells to announce the time for congregating, while the handle is actually a "bar measure" which is a calibrated ruler used by archaeologists to measure depth and range. 

A large section of the sculpture park was closed for construction which made the sculptures located in that area unavailable for viewing.  This must have included William McElcheran’s “Businessman On Horse,” since this was listed on the website for the park, but we did not see it.  One of the last sculptures that we saw was a peace monument featuring four different coloured hands (white, yellow, red and black) hoisting a globe inscribed with the saying “Peace for All.  Hatred for None”.  Nearby, the Aylmer Comfort Station has a series of murals which reflect the heydays of the Grand Trunk Railway Depot (later a CNR station) at the foot of Goyeau St. on Riverside Drive which was a landing point for the Windsor/Detroit railway ferries.  The murals depict departures and homecomings throughout the decades including soldiers leaving for war, and visits from British royalty, ranging from 1911 when Prime Minister Sir Wilfred Laurier arrived through to the closure and demolition of the depot in 1961.

We saw some interesting sights while wandering around downtown Windsor including the neon Lazare’s Furs sign that was affixed to its Art Deco building around 1942.  The sign received heritage status in 2015.  We admired the beautiful door at The Chelsea, a boutique apartment at 511 Pelissier which used to be a YMCA.  We wondered what was happening in the building with a bright orange neon sign that read “The Bitcoin Building” with dollar sign bars through each B.  Google revealed that these were fully furnished luxury short/medium-term rental units that feature Bitcoin art pieces and claims to be the first “Net Zero” building in Eastern Canada with solar panels, air filtration, and zero carbon emissions.  The electricity generated by the solar panels will be used for bitcoin mining.   A statue of Mary Ann Shadd Cary stands in front of the University of Windsor Continuing Education Building.  She was a teacher, abolitionist, author and the first black woman in North America to publish a weekly newspaper, which she is depicted proudly holding in her hands.  The historic Capitol Theatre, designed in a neo-classical style, was opened in 1920 by the Lowe Theatre Company and was designed by Thomas Lamb who also designed the Ed Mirvish, Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres in Toronto.

Downtown Windsor has several alleyways and a parking lot that it has designed as “Graffiti Alleys” where street art is encouraged and fostered with large-scaled pieces created by a wide range of local and international street artists.  A public art project called “Free 4 Walls” was funded through an Ontario Trillium grant to pay for materials and artist fees.  The alley off Maiden Lane West between Pelissier St. and Ouellette St. as well as the Pellisser St. Parking Garage have been turned into “Art Alley” with massive murals painted on the sides of buildings and painted lanterns hanging from the ceilings of the parking lot.

One special “street art” work found on the façade of the parking lot is a reproduction of an artwork by Vancouver -based artist Elizabeth Zvonar who had an exhibition on display at Art Windsor-Essex, Windsor’s major public art gallery which we visited earlier in the day.  Titled “Old Happy”, the image depicts the car that won the Great Automobile Race of 1895 between Bordeaux and Paris, but with a happy face painted on it.

We found another street art space that runs between University Avenue and Pellissier Ave. just south of Chatham St. West which we later learned was called WIFF Alley since it is a corridor that connects venues for the Windsor International Film Festival including the Capitol Theatre which is just a block away.  To celebrate WIFF and turn this space into an “entertainment corridor”, street artists were commissioned to create murals and other art installations to celebrate art in general and cinema specifically.  At one end of WIFF Alley is a mural by David Dorkatz (aka DERKZ) depicting the hands of a director holding a movie camera while film reels swirl around.  Local street artist Daniel Bombadier (aka Denial) painted a montage mural depicting iconic film images such as The Little Tramp, Princess Leia from Star Wars, Marilyn Monroe and Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Visual Artist Kristina Brandt beautified an old fire escape staircase by painting it in rainbow colours and adding famous movie sayings like “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup” spoken by Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.  Brandt was also responsible for the work on an adjacent brick wall depicting a series of silhouettes of iconic figures including Alfred Hitchcock in profile and Dorothy with Toto from the Wizard of Oz.  An art installation resembling a whirling tornado includes the sign from the Bates Motel, the hockey mask from Friday the 13th, and the image of Eliot flying with his bicycle with ET in his basket.

After seeing some murals by Denial, we actually met the street artist when he found us peering into his shop Terribly Good Studio wondering what it was and invited us in.  He told us about helping to organize the Free 4 Walls Street Art festival in 2023 and showed us where he did some of his work where he makes custom stickers and Denial clothing for sale.  His shop also sells spray paint, caps, and markers to other street artists.  We left with one of his business cards shaped in the form a spray can with the word “DENIAL” on it.

Art Windsor-Essex (AWE) has the mandate to showcase works by local, regional and national artists, with a permanent collection of around 4000 artworks focused on Canadian, Indigenous and contemporary art.  The gallery was originally housed in Willistead Manor in Walkerville when it was first founded in 1943.  Its current home is a 60,000 square foot glass-filled modernist building that was built in 1999 on Riverside Drive West on the location of the old Carling Brewery warehouse.  The first floor of the new building is occupied by the Chimczuk Museum with exhibits on the history of Windsor.  The AWE occupies the second and third floors which include an open-air terrace and a glassed-in space floor facing the river on the third floor provide stunning views of the Detroit Skyline from above.

The main exhibition at AWE during our visit presented a collection of Elizabeth Zvonar’s sculptural and collage works which she titled “Cracks in the Clockwork”.  Her collage work layers images from fine art catalogues with contemporary art images and other popular print materials in order to create a new piece that invokes new concepts.  Her collage titled “Astral Apollo” starts with an image of Moschophoros, an ancient Greek statue from 560BC that is also known as the “Calf Bearer” since it depicts a man carrying a calf for sacrifice.  She next layers the silhouette from the grave marker of a fallen soldier named Kroisos from 540BC.  Zvonar then fills in that silhouette with colours from abstract painter Paul Jenkins’ 1964 work titled “Phenomena Astral Signal” where astral relates to the stars or spiritual realms.  The combination of the mixes an “ancient past with an alien future.”

Zvonar’s sculptures present familiar, everyday objects in a different, often playful fashion that repositions the objects to give them new meaning.  Her series of bags and knapsacks made of bronze are meant to invoke the metaphor of the “baggage” that we carry including “patriarchy, sexism, colonialism and white supremacy”.  Two of the bags (New Bag, Daytripper) hang from chains attached to the ceiling, like “carcasses swinging on meat hooks” while a third sits on a bronze version of a scorched cedar stump.  She titles this last one “Old Bag”, also invoking the misogynistic term for an older woman. Her work titled “Legs” actually consists of a row of twelve mannequin arms with outstretched fingertips that appear to be holding up a wall that is tilted at an 80-degree angle.  But from afar, they appear like the jutted-out legs of a group of Chorus Line dancers.  Her work “Tongue” seems to represent a large ceramic tongue with quills sticking out of it.  The piece is interestingly placed in front of a painting titled “Memorial” by American painter Margaret Lawrence where the pink the painting reflects the colour of the tongue.  Finally there was a series of porcelain works that look like mangled fingers from afar but reading the associated labels, they are supposed to represent famous works including the Tower of Babel (after Bruegel) and The Orgy Scene From The Rake’s Progress (after Hogarth).  After looking intently at these works for a while, I must admit that I don’t’ see the references.

An extremely poignant exhibition titled “I Work” shines a shameful light on the plight of the First Nations children who were taken from their parents and placed in the residential school Mount Elgin between 1851 and 1946.  The children were in the classroom for just half a day and then expected to put in hard labour for the other half, working in the fields of the school’s farm or in the kitchen and laundry. The children were treated like slaves and severely punished if perceived to be slacking in their tasks.  The exhibition commissioned art pieces from Native artists in the community where children were sent to Mount Elgin and therefore heard first-hand about the practices of forced labour endured by their ancestors. Several of the pieces show either painted images or photographs of the children at work.  A large installation that looks like an altarpiece with a cross hanging on the wall is actually made up of recycled pieces of church pews, flanked by farm and kitchen implements.  This seemingly religious imagery highlights the hypocrisy, cruelty and mismanagement of the United Church of Canada who was supposed to be overseeing the school and its pupils.  A red line running throughout the exhibition space and a piece made from porcupine quills sewn onto paper show some of the paths taken by school children who tried to escape, many rounded up, recaptured by the RCMP and returned to the school to face punishment.  A black and white archival film titled Nii Nadahloke shows some of the children driving tractors and working on the farm.  As much as the works highlight the horrors of the past, they also show tell stories of strength and resilience.

A couple of exhibitions relied on new curation of works from AWE’s permanent collection, both related to depictions of cities.  Given that the themes are so similar and the galleries of the two exhibits rather blend into one another, it was hard to keep track of which art pieces belonged to which exhibition.  “Once and Future City” looks at how cities  grow and evolve over time.  Not surprisingly, the works there have a strong focus on the auto industry in general and Detroit specifically given importance of the industry and the proximity of that city to Windsor.  Multiple works in this exhibit depict the Detroit skyline.  Stan Douglas’ haunting photograph of the hollowed out Michigan Theatre with cars parked inside show the city’s decline.  But details from the theatre remain to remind you of its former splendour. Even the one painting that clearly depicted Windsor only did so in relation to the tunnel that took you to Detroit.  Charmaine Lurch created a mixed media piece called “A Mobile and Visible Carriage” which represents a carriage owned by Lucie and Thorton Blackburn who were Toronto business leaders and activists who escaped slavery in 1883 and set up Toronto’s first cab service.  Edward Burtynsky’s large-scaled photograph depicts discarded auto scraps from a junkyard in Hamilton, Ontario.

The other exhibition was called “It Don’t Exist – Imaging the City Within and Beyond the Archive” with the aim to consider the “city in our dreams and daily lives”.  The images here are more abstract, impressionistic or even surrealistic views of cities.  I was fascinated by the story behind John Abrams’ 1997 oil on canvas painting of the half-dressed man hanging out of a car window.  Is he drunk? Is he dead?  Hilariously, Abrams titled the piece “Landscape Painting” so maybe the man in the car is just incidental and you are supposed to look past him to the vista in the background?  I feel like co-opting a line from an iconic movie by saying “Forget it Jake, it’s Detroit”. 

My favourite piece in the AWE was an installation created and curated by Christopher McNamara as part of his “It Doesn’t Exist” Exhibition.  The piece consists of a trio of dioramas depicting storefronts from Windsor and Detroit that he remembers seeing as a child, many of which no longer exist including House of Lee which closed in 2013 and Drake Tavern which was demolished in 1991.  These are not necessarily historically accurate reproductions, but more based on his specific memories.  Behind these scenes, he projects images of the skyscrapers that have replaced the quaint shops of the past.  The exhibit is aptly titled “Wait Til You See What They Built To Replace It”.  If you look closely at the dioramas, you see incredible amounts of detail inside including display mannequins in the window of Volks Department store and tableclothed covered tables and a red Oriental rug inside House of Lee.

While in Windsor, we visited a couple of the historic neighbourhoods including Sandwich, established in 1797 by British settlers making it one of the oldest in Ontario.  Located just west of the Ambassador Bridge, a large arched sign welcomes you to “Historic Sandwich Town”.  Sandwich was the site of the start of the War of 1812 as well as the destination for fugitive slaves escaping through the Underground Railway.  A bronze statue of General Isaac Brock looking through a telescope and a mounted Shawnee Chief Tecumseh sits in the roundabout just outside of the archway.   The Sandwich windmill in Mill Park is a non-functioning replica of the 18th century wind-powered gristmills that once stood along the shoreline of the Detroit River.  The commemorative monument contains public restrooms at its base.  Murals in downtown Sandwich honour its history including a dramatic one that depicts an event that occurred during the Upper Canada Rebellion (1837-38) where townsmen and a reverend raced out to entreat Col. John Prince not to execute his prisoners of war.

The other historic neighbourhood in Windsor was Walkerville, founded in 1890 by Hiram Walker, the owner of Canadian Club Whisky.  Willistead Manor (the home of Hiram’s son) is in this area but was still closed for the season, so we did not get to visit it.  The Hiram Walker distillery marks the Eastern end of the Riverside Trail.  Today, Walkerville and especially its main thoroughfare Wyandotte St. hosts breweries, bars, restaurants and shops as well as the Walkerville Theatre which first opened in 1920.  We saw many references to the past in Walkerville including the old Beaux-Arts Bank of Montreal building that is now the Azule Lounge, a sign above what once was an entrance to a beer hall that reads “Ladies and Escorts”, harking back to the days when women were not were not permitted unless escorted by a man, and a 50s styled sign for appliances.  We were stymied at first by the old coin-operated parking meters since we did not have any coins with us, but soon saw that there was also a phone app available for payment.

We ate dinner in the Walkerville district each of the two nights that we stayed over in Windsor and selected the upscale F&B (Food and Beverage) restaurant for the first night, and its sister restaurant, the more casual Funky Chow Kitchen for the second.  F&B serves creative sharing plates and craft cocktails such as the Paper Plane (Wild turkey 101 bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino and lemon) which Rich ordered.  In terms of sharing plates, we selected the Parisienne Gnocchi with pistachio cream and roasted red pepper, Brussel sprouts with bacon, cashew, poached egg and a balsamic reduction, Seabream with braised leeks served on shrimp bisque and Bacon wrapped dates with almond, blue cheese and a balsamic reduction.  All the dishes were delicious with unusual combinations of ingredients and flavours.

Less formal than F&B with a fun décor that included cartoonish depictions of the Lucky cat with waving paw, Samouri and Godzilla, Funky Chow Kitchen is a hip Asian fusion eatery focused mostly on sushi, dumplings, noodles and buns.  We ordered a specialty sushi roll consisting of yellowtail, cucumber, scallion and avocado topped with jalapeno and kabyaki sauce but found it underwhelming compared to the excellent sushi that we can get in Toronto.  However, we did enjoy the deep-fried lobster Rangoon dumplings with a sweet chili sauce, salt and pepper squid with charred bell peppers, jalapeno, peppercorn and mayo, as well as the crispy asparagus katsu (breading) with Japanese mayo, katsu sauce and furikake from the daily special’s menu.

For our second day in Windsor and last night before heading home, we splurged on our accommodations and stayed at Hidden Gem Bed and Breakfast in Walkerville.  This was such a lovely home, and our loft suite had the unexpected surprise of including a large jacuzzi tub.  This was just the ticket after ten long days of touring.  I love baths and will take one any chance I get, but even Rich who is not partial to them tried out the jacuzzi.  The next morning we had a wonderful breakfast with freshly made muffins, fruit salad and our choice of quiche, bacon, sausage, eggs, potatoes or cereal.  This was the perfect sendoff before our long drive back to Toronto.