Detroit historian Dan Austin tries to make sure his work outlives him

Dan Austin fell in love with old things in Detroit long before he learned that he would never get to be one.

Now, one of the city's foremost and most admired experts on the past has a plan for immortality — and it's something anyone can help with.

The founder and proprietor of HistoricDetroit.org was 43 years old and still fuzzy from the anesthetic when his doctor told him, "Colorectal cancer. Stage 4."

This was August 2024, and the prognoses were increasingly discouraging for the next year.

Here he is, though, at 45, launching the Austin Past & Future Fund , with a pair of worthy objectives:

First, build an endowment to make sure the nonprofit HistoricDetroit.org carries on long after Comerica Park and Hudson's Detroit become treasured relics. And second, help build Detroit's future with scholarships for young residents who are committed to making the city better.

It would also gladden Austin's heart, he said, "if everyone I know who's my age got a colonoscopy."

Likewise, people he doesn't know. Or people who are younger but have some of the red flags for risk factors , like a family tree with colon cancer in the branches.

"I'm not going to lie. Colonoscopy prep is not fun," Austin said.

But compared to chemotherapy, it's a picnic near the Newsboys Fountain on Belle Isle, which you can read all about at HistoricDetroit.

Making time for optimism

As a general rule, 20% of Stage 4 colon cancer patients get to look back at five years with the disease.

Austin operates day-to-day as though he'll be in that group, because "if you do have a limited amount of time, why be miserable?"

It's an approach that minimizes regrets and maximizes joy, even if he does occasionally feel the need to call himself a dolt.

He explained that process during an early March lunch at his favorite Mediterranean restaurant, Cedarland in Dearborn, a friendly and somewhat quirky spot with excellent lentil soup, a drive-through, and a mural on one dining room wall of happy skiiers.

Among his companions were his wife, Elle Tivine-Austin, who has a business background and will chair the Austin Past & Future Fund board, and publicist Colleen Robar, who is working pro bono on the rollout.

"You remember when I was lying on the couch researching something," he asked, "and I jumped up and shouted, 'I found it! I found it!'?"

"Which time?" Tivine-Austin said.

Most recently, he had devoted 17 or 18 hours to ferreting out the architecture firm for the Lucy Thurman YWCA, a center of Black life from 1933-63 on a piece of land that now rests beneath Ford Field.

"You feel like an idiot," he said, expending so many precious ticks of the clock when "most people don't care that it existed, let alone who designed it."

Then he pictures a scholar, years down the road, reading that the firm was Malcomson, Higginbotham & Trout — and perhaps turning to a spouse and shouting, "I found it!"

Next up, maybe: "I've been putting off a history of the Greater Penobscot Building for 15 years," he said.

There's no time like the present, especially when the near future involves more chemo pills.

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Inspiration in motion

Austin mostly grew up in Milford, the older son of an insurance executive and an English teacher.

"I was a typical suburban kid," he said, in that his experience of Detroit involved in-and-out trips to Tiger Stadium.

These days, he's the communications director for Michigan Central. He has also worked in several roles for the city, including deputy communications director for former Mayor Mike Duggan, and also for a public relations firm.

What sparked his fascination with Detroit was an internship with the Free Press after "my first senior year" at Michigan State in 2002 — which led to countless loops on the People Mover, and endless curiosity about what he was seeing and what lay beyond it.

"It became like a drug," he said. "I had to learn more and more."

Wait ... Harry Houdini died at Grace Hospital? After performing at the Garrick Theatre? And he was staying at the Statler Hotel ?

Yes, yes and yes. Austin could see the Statler from the elevated tram, a 15-story red brick Italianate building on Grand Circus Park, opened in 1915 as one of the first modern hostelries with a shower and toilet in every room.

While most of Austin's journalism career was spent with the Free Press, where he was a generally adored copy editor and editor in opinion, his first full-time job was in Tacoma, Washington. Visiting Detroit for baseball's all-star game in 2005, he rounded a corner on a stroll to Comerica Park, and …

What, they were knocking the Statler down?

"That," he said, "was the moment Detroit got another preservationist."

A built-in audience

Introduced 15 years ago, HistoricDetroit.org exists in large part because it's full of information Austin couldn't find anywhere else — or couldn't quite trust.

Sometimes well-intentioned misinformation gets repeated to the point that it's accepted as fact. Sometimes numbers lie: The cornerstone of Old Main at Wayne State says 1894, but it wasn't laid until 1895.

Assisted by a smattering of contributions from collaborators, Austin has documented the history of more than 1,000 buildings or other structures. The articles are accompanied by some 17,000 photos, with credit due to visual content maestro Helmut Ziewers for a high percentage of them.

The two had what Austin called "a historical meet-cute." He had seen Ziewers' work online, and when the other foolhardy soul taking pictures at the 2022 demolition of the AMC headquarters on a frigid day had a German accent, he asked, "Are you Helmut?"

Their effort and insight have drawn more than 100,000 followers on social media, and attracted 1.5 million page views last year from upwards of 500,000 unique and curious visitors.

The challenge is to translate that into donations.

Making curiosity pay

A dollar from every follower would get the campaign off to a rousing start at www.austinfund.org . Or how about $5 from every repeat visitor?

Tivine-Austin isn't setting a specific goal, but the Austin Past & Future Fund has endorsements from Mayor Mary Sheffield ("Dan Austin's love for Detroit runs deep") and Duggan ("Nobody has done more to document, advocate for and share our city's history") that ring louder than the old tower bell of Engine House No. 11 on Gratiot Avenue.

Scholarships will be awarded to 16- to 25-year-olds who plan to become teachers, urban planners, social workers, architects, or any number of other things that constitute giving back.

The more money there is to invest, the greater number of students will get help and the larger the grants will be.

Austin already has Substack and Patreon pages. As of March, donations through those outlets are being routed to the fund and have become tax-deductible.

A deejay specializing in 1960s Detroit soul, he plans to auction off his sizable record collection come summer, with proceeds likewise feeding the new project.

"The idea is to take a pretty crummy situation, and make it positive," he said.

As Motown's Contours sang, in what Austin knows without checking was their second-biggest hit, "First I Look at the Purse." And their only gold record applies, too:

"Do You Love Me?"

Next in the online line

Austin lives in the Aviation Subdivision, straddling the Detroit-Dearborn border, with its two oddly angled streets that used to be runways.

He's on the Detroit side, and as he made clear in several past relationships that ended soon after, "I am never moving out of the city."

Stephen Malbouef, a 27-year-old historic architect, is moving in. He planned to accept the key Saturday, March 14, to his new apartment in Woodbridge, which is significant because he may also someday hold the keys to HistoricDetroit.org.

"It would be a daunting task," he said, one that he and Austin have spoken about and plan to discuss further.

A succession plan is important even without cancer as a motivator.

Malbouef is not only an available heir, he's a logical one. He has been reading Austin's work since he was in elementary school in Grosse Pointe, where he was the kind of kid who had more fun exploring abandoned Upper Peninsula copper mines than Disney World.

Perhaps, he said, he could team with someone else to keep the website thriving.

One thing he's certain of is that "I'm hoping it's not in the near future."

Austin hopes the same, but he's at a point where he needs to be realistic — at the same time he's being romantic.

"These buildings," he said, "are all these amazing, forgotten slabs of soul."

Someone has to bring their stories to life.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit's Dan Austin, HistoricDetroit.org founder, launches Austin Fund