The Pyramid

 

                              September 16, 2024            

                

Dan Gilbert’s new tower was supposed to be the tallest building in Detroit – all of Michigan in fact – and it was. But when that pyramid showed up, I think most would agree that it for damned sure was no longer the most impressive. Size matters, and so does height. But in Detroit? Style is really the thing. If you know, you know.

And if there’s one thing that pyramid has, it’s style. It’s been there, right across the street from what I call the Gilbert building, for about a month now. Actually, it has been there exactly a month. To the day. I remember I was on the Q-Line rail headed to work, but I was sitting on the Gilbert side of the train (Gilbert being Detroit’s biggest developer, the Q-Line being Detroit’s not-exactly-anybody’s-idea-of-mass-transit train that shuttles between downtown and just outside of downtown). So when the Q-Line came to a screeching halt, my first thought was maybe some homeless person had jumped on the tracks. Or maybe (much more likely) some clueless individual wearing earpods and staring vacantly at their phone had simply stepped in front of the oncoming train without bothering to look up.

But I don’t wear earpods and I keep my cellphone in my pocket, so I kinda noticed when the passenger seated across the aisle from me on the Not Gilbert side of the train who had been staring out the window suddenly exclaimed, “Gott damn. SHIT. You see that thing?”

I was seated up front, so I could see through the locked door that the driver of the train was staring at the same thing that was causing all the chatter. Looked like he was in shock. And when I got a good look at that pyramid through the Q-Line window – a pyramid – spread out in all its ancient majesty right there in downtown Detroit, I felt like shock was probably the appropriate response. But also maybe a bit of …pride…? Because of all the cities in the world, why would a pyramid pick a city like Detroit to just show up?

A PYRAMID.

Nobody can really remember what buildings were there before, only that there were other buildings there in that space before the pyramid showed up. But then who cares? Style, when done right, can be blinding.

The pyramid takes up an entire downtown block at its base, and it reaches up to roughly two-thirds the height of the Gilbert building. It looks exactly like the ones I’ve seen pictures of that are over there in Egypt, but I gotta say that when you see the actual real deal there is just no way any picture from a magazine or online, or any scene from a movie can honestly convey the true power of this thing. Just by being what it is, and realizing how impossible it’s mere existence is supposed to be.

And not just today in downtown Detroit, but all those thousands of years ago too, right? Because we all know how the Gilbert building got built, and we all watched it. Pretty impressive. But to this date, no one has figured out how in the hell those Egyptians built those pyramids because it should have been impossible.

“What you think it’s doing here?” someone asked.

“It’s a reminder of who we are,” I said.