The Belt opened ten years ago this month. Library Street Collective and Bedrock unveiled the alley on November 13, 2014, with food trucks and live music and a mural in progress. Chicago artist POSE, real name Jordan Nickel, was painting in the alley with students from Detroit Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The first work in the rotating Public Matter exhibit, displayed in five large steel frames mounted in the alley, was his. The Belt sits between Broadway and Library Street, connecting Gratiot to Grand River, in what was once Detroit's downtown garment district. The name comes from the alley's shape.
LSC founders Anthony and JJ Curis were two years into running the gallery when they pitched Bedrock on the idea, and the alley became their first public-art project. About two dozen commissioned murals went up in the first run. The artists who have painted The Belt over the decade read like a survey of contemporary public art.
Nina Chanel Abney. Shepard Fairey. FAILE.
Cleon Peterson. Jason REVOK. Vhils, whose carved relief portrait sits next to the entrance to The Standby and works as both mural and signage.
Conrad Egyir, Ellen Rutt, Beverly Fishman, Tschabalala Self, Wendy White, Maya Stovall, Tiff Massey, McArthur Binion, Jammie Holmes, Rosson Crow. The bars and restaurants showed up in waves. The Skip, an open-air cocktail bar known for frozen drinks.
Standby, the speakeasy at 225 Gratiot, behind a curtain. The Post. Mootz pizza on the Library Street side.
The cobblestone got polished. Stamped concrete went down. Lighting was added.
Picnic tables in summer. LSC opened a 1,600-square-foot Snarkitecture-designed flagship gallery on the alley's south end in 2021, in the historic L.B. King and Company Building at 1274 Library Street, with a sculpted brick portal that reads as both mural and window into the gallery.
The Curises have spent the years since extending what they started here outward, into East Village and Little Village. The Belt is where the playbook started. Bedrock owns the surrounding real estate.
The Belt itself is technically still an alley. Between Broadway and Library Street, Downtown.
