"Whether it's a two-week phase or a month phase and if the money is there, I do it."
— Ron Kattoo, quoted in Yahoo Travel.
Ron Kattoo says this about a 116-year-old steamship he has been rebuilding out of his own pocket for close to two decades. He is talking about steel purchases and welding crews, not about grand plans. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because this fall Detroit is running two entirely different kinds of comeback at the same time, days apart, a few miles from each other, and most residents are only going to notice one of them.
A Boat That Pays for Its Own Restoration
The S.S. Ste. Claire opened its first deck to the public on September 3, the first time anyone has been able to board the old Boblo boat since the early 1990s. It's docked at Riverside Marina, 150 St. Jean, on Detroit's east riverfront, and for now it isn't going anywhere. The museum inside walks visitors through the boat's history deck by deck, decade by decade, alongside the original steam engine.
Getting here took longer than the boat's original service life. Built in 1910, the Ste. Claire carried Detroiters to Boblo Island for more than 80 years before the amusement park lost the money to keep running the ferries in 1991. Kattoo, a critical care doctor from West Bloomfield Township, bought the boat with a partner in 2007. Then in 2018, a welding torch sparked a fire while the boat sat docked at Riverside Marina under renovation, and the damage was severe enough that the Ste. Claire lost its National Historic Landmark designation in 2024.
There was no capital campaign after that. Kattoo has been financing the rebuild the way you'd fix up a house you can't afford to gut all at once: check the estimate, see what's in the account, do the phase you can afford, move to the next one when the money shows up again. Tickets are $10 for adults, $5 for kids six to seventeen, free under five, with a family package at $25, and every dollar goes back into the roughly $125,000 to $150,000 still needed to finish the job. The boat is being funded by the same people who are walking its deck.
The History Riding Along With It
The Ste. Claire's return isn't only about nostalgia for a lakeside amusement park that closed in 1993. In 1945, a 24-year-old Black secretary named Sarah Elizabeth Ray was forcibly removed from a Boblo boat. NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall took her case, and it produced the 1948 Supreme Court decision in Bob-Lo Excursion Co. v. Michigan, which desegregated the ferries and is considered a legal precedent that helped set up Brown v. Board of Education a few years later. The boat now docked at St. Jean carried that history before it carried families to an amusement park, and the museum's decade-by-decade layout puts that timeline right alongside the ride tickets and souvenirs.
Days Apart, a Different Kind of Comeback
Walk a few miles inland and the comebacks look nothing like Kattoo's. On August 27, Joe Louis' Southern Kitchen opened its third location at 1528 Woodward, a roughly $2 million buildout with a staff of about 40 in a 4,000-square-foot space designed for more than 80 guests, decorated with photos from the boxer's career. It's the same family business that started in New Center in 2021 and added a Southfield location in 2024, but this one came with real capital behind it from the start, not a ticket booth funding a restoration in real time.
Five days later, on September 1, Ray's Bar opened its fourth location at 19 E. Grand River in Parker's Alley downtown. It's a New York import, backed in part by actors Justin Theroux and Nicholas Braun, serving cocktails named after native Detroiters, including one for Babyface Ray and another built as a nod to the Aretha Franklin song most people know by heart. Over on Jefferson, Antidote has been serving Spanish-leaning brunch and dinner in a velvet-and-teal room, and its wine list picked up a Wine Spectator award in its first year open. Downtown, renderings are circulating for Aurora Italiana at 114 W. Adams, a Prime Concepts Detroit project expected to open later this year.
None of these needed to prove themselves ticket by ticket. They arrived with financing, staff plans, and opening dates set in advance. The Chalfonte, at 4620 Cass, is the interesting middle case: closed since 2022, it's coming back under the nonprofit Chalfonte Foundation, which is ramping up with special events before full reopening in November. Its first event landed on September 12, coinciding with Dally in the Alley, which tells you the Cass Corridor's comeback is being staged on a calendar too, just a nonprofit one instead of a corporate one.
Eastern Market Runs Both Clocks at Once
Eastern Market is the one place in the city where you can watch both economies operate side by side. The market has run continuously since 1891, and on a typical Saturday it still draws between 25,000 and 45,000 people through six historic sheds to shop among more than 500 vendors, most of them small operations that have been building their businesses one Saturday at a time for years, the same slow accumulation that's rebuilding the Ste. Claire one ticket at a time.
Then there's the market's calendar side. Oktoberfest was scheduled for September 25 through 27 with live entertainment, kids' games, food, beer, a raffle, and church tours, and organizers billed it as the biggest one yet. On October 24, the Michigan Brewers Guild brings its 17th annual Detroit Fall Beer Festival into the market's sheds, with general admission running 1 to 6 p.m., gates opening at noon for enthusiast and VIP members, hundreds of Michigan craft beers, live music, and, this year, wrestling on the bill. Those are locked-in dates on a fixed schedule, the institutional half of the same market that also runs on decades of small vendors showing up week after week.
What's Actually on the Calendar
If you're planning the next six weeks around this, here's where things stand:
- Now through fall: The S.S. Ste. Claire is open for museum tours at 150 St. Jean, with hours available through its website.
- October 24: Detroit Fall Beer Festival, Eastern Market sheds, general admission 1 to 6 p.m.
- November: The Chalfonte's full reopening at 4620 Cass, after a slow ramp-up of events.
- Downtown, already open: Joe Louis' Southern Kitchen at 1528 Woodward and Ray's Bar at 19 E. Grand River.
- Later this year: Aurora Italiana at 114 W. Adams.
Kattoo is still checking the account balance before he orders steel. Eastern Market already has its October date locked. Both of those are true at the same time, in the same city, this fall, and neither one is waiting for the other.
If you're watching how a neighborhood invests in itself, whether that's a landmark that pays for its own repair or a corridor betting on a fixed opening date, Five Star Luxury Realty is watching the same thing, block by block, across Southeast Michigan.
