The first time I hung out at Lincoln Street Art Park was a couple of days before Halloween last year on a crisp autumn evening. The park’s founders were throwing a dedication party to celebrate the completion of the project’s first phase. We ate, drank, listened to tunes, and hung out around a pallet fire while the Amtrak Wolverine Service sped past a mere thirty feet away and a dazzling sundown filled the sky with orange and pink. It was a good day.

Subsequent impromptu bonfires saw us toasting ham and cheese sandwiches in a hobo pie maker or bidding farewell to winter by burning dried-up Christmas trees while Charley Marcuse, also known as Detroit’s singing hot dog man at Comerica Park, presented a speech rousing enough to complement the 20 foot high column of flames.

Pallet fires and trains and interesting people are enough to make a place appealing. At Lincoln Street, there’s also the art, from murals that cover entire walls to small ink drawings on random cinder blocks. There are graffiti tags, metal sculptures, stencils, and stickers. A frequent sightseer with a keen eye will find something new every time they visit. It’s a unique place, so I figured that more people should know about it and have the kind of fun I was having. With this in mind, Gourmet Underground Detroit organized our first event of the year – a late April potluck brunch.

Those who were paying attention to the Facebook event page chatter would have thought that the potluck was going to be a meatfest. And it was: Bob Perye from Rouge Estate was on hand with his smoker and more pulled pork than we could eat. He came armed with four different homemade sauces to complement the tender pork. He was also serving decadent slices of pork wrapped pork wrapped in pork, aka “FrankenBacon”, provided by Tim Idzikowski of Detroit BBQ Company. John Schoeniger of Porktown was grilling sauerbraten sliders while sipping on a fine German weisse bier. And someone even brought a party pack of Cajun fried turkey wings from the nearby Turkey Grill. This place has been on my radar for a couple of years now, but the potluck was the first chance I’ve had to taste the wings. They did not disappoint.

Yes, there was an abundance of meat. But reflecting the diversity of Detroit, there was also plentiful vegetarian, vegan, and gluten free goodies. Assorted salads, pickles, savory tarts, guacamole, and sweets helped balance the spread. Everything was good, and I personally loved a simple cilantro, lime, and chickpea salad that spoke the language of a warm and sunny spring day in Detroit. Thanks to the generosity of Green Safe, there was no shortage of earth-friendly, compostable cups, plates, and utensils.

As with any Gourmet Underground event, the libations were flowing. Evan Hansen revised a punch recipe to allow for single servings over ice that included three bottles of overproof rum. Assorted beer and wine was being poured from the tables, under the tables, around the tables. Towards the end of the day, the few of us that were still around and not wanting to let the day go were sipping Motor City Brewing Works hard cider with a float of corn liquor infused blueberries. Nobody went thirsty.

Lincoln Street Art Park won’t be mistaken for a typical suburban tract with plastic playground equipment and an acre or two of manicured lawn. Some rubble from the building that once stood on the lot still remains. A nearby hydrant has been leaking for so long that a small wetland habitat is growing around it and a sandpiper, typically a shoreline wading bird, has adapted to make Lincoln Street its home. It is the decaying Detroit that most of us know. But when the park is filled with the sounds of mirth, it is a Detroit that’s as alive as it ever was.

While we were cleaning up for the day and polishing off the last of that “City Billy hard cider spritzer,” Matt Naimi, in a moment of booze-fueled insight, best described Lincoln Street. He said, “we’re all just kids, and this is a great place to play.”

We dig Lincoln Street Art Park, and you should too. Show your love by voting for their proposed graffiti-style street art gallery in the Let’s Save Michigan Placemaking Contest.

We’ll see you at the 3rd Annual Belle Isle Potluck Picnic on Saturday, June 23.

RECIPES

Cilantro, lime, and chickpea salad

One 15-oz can chickpeas (2 cups cooked), drained and rinsed

2 cups spinach
1/4 cup sweet onion, chopped finely
Juice from 1.5 limes
3/4 cup fresh Cilantro
1/2 tsp sugar (or to taste)
2 tsp Dijon mustard
1 garlic clove
1 tsp extra virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp kosher salt + ground pepper

Directions:

In a food processor, add the spinach and pulse a few times until chopped very small. Add the processed spinach, drained chickpeas, and chopped onion into a large bowl.

In the food processor (no need to rinse the bowl!), add the lime juice, cilantro, mustard, sugar, garlic, cumin, and oil. Process until smooth, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.

Pour the dressing on top of the spinach chickpea mixture and stir well. Add salt and pepper to taste. Let stand for about 10 minutes to let the flavors develop.

Bombay Government Punch (Hansen Remix)

3 bottles of Wray & Nephew overproof rum
3.5 quarts of cold-brewed Darjeeling tea
18 oz lime juice
16 oz demerara simple syrup
2 oz ginger syrup

Ideally, it’d be served on a block of ice so it slowly dilutes, and it’d go from being a bit too boozy and sweet to being pretty much perfect. But it was damn fine poured as single servings over ice.

Beer and wine, of course, fit that mold. Low alcohol, lighter, drier beers or whites in fish-friendly regions. Big wines in regions with spice. Family-brewed beers that fit farming lifestyles or pubs for high-density cities. But I hadn’t really thought much about spirits in that context until this weekend when I brought some Fish House Punch to my co-blogger’s house for a Saturday evening party.

Ted Haigh, aka Dr. Cocktail, writes about the punch:

In 1732, fully 104 years before Texas declared itself a Republic, Schuylkill (pronounced “SKOO-kull”), home of Fish House Punch, was its own colony, and later its own sovereign state. It must’ve been quite a place, too. It had a Navy (well, two boats). It had an army (OK, a cannon). At its core it was a club: The Schuylkill Fishing Company… A recipe as old as Fish House Punch, fervently slurped by the Father of Our Country, has inevitably gone through many fanciful formulations. Jerry Thomas related a simple (and probably accurate) recipe using lemon juice, sugar, water, peach brandy, Cognac and rum in 1862. Another was contributed by Mrs. Goodfellow’s Cooking School in 1907 that added oranges, strawberries or pineapple but called the addition of green tea “an abomination.”

The variations are interesting, and I can’t help but think these variations were spurred on by available ingredients. And more to the point, why rum and brandy? The answer, I suspect, is because of the importance of rum to the early colonies and which would have easily made its way into the areas near Philadelphia, a wealthy city in those days. Not surprisingly, the colonies and territories that would go on to form middle America seemed to acquire a fondness for bourbon, and while they had their own punches and juleps, Fish House Punch was created in a time and place that almost required its invention. Rum was available, and over time, those with access to strawberries or different types of teas or brandies would have altered the recipe to suit their needs, of course. Family recipes would have emerged all around three common ingredients: rum, brandy, and a need to make them easily quaffable.

The recipe I used was based on Haigh’s, with a substitution of some pretty piss poor apricot brandy for his suggested top-shelf peach brandy — in and of itself a choice made because Detroit doesn’t see a big selection of peach brandies.

Fish House Punch

• 2 quarts Jamaica rum (I used Mount Gay silver)
• 1 quart brandy (I used Hennessey and some from another bottle)
• 1/2 pint peach brandy
• 1/2 pint Maraschino liqueur
• 1 quart fresh-brewed green tea
• 1 pint fresh lemon juice
• 1 pound sugar

I’d like to try to make this in the future with some variations: black tea for green tea, slightly more lemon juice, replacing some or all of the sugar with some sort of homemade spicy sugar syrup, et cetera. Regardless, this is a great party punch that represents the fine human tradition of creating something amazing out of whatever ingredients are available. Enjoy it as a powerful social lubricant at your next gathering.