Architect, Artist, Historian Bill Moss
Reported by Erik Smith
Web produced by Christiana Ciolac

Bill Moss paints pictures of Detroit. Video

A local man is preserving some of Detroit's glorious past in pictures.

We call them traditions, places and eventually memory. Some traditions last well beyond just years, stretching into decades. Others perish quickly, overtaken by the demands of the present. Still others are assigned to linger in that never land between a hallowed past, a neglected present and an almost certainly uncertain future.

Meet Bill Moss, architect, historian, artist.

"It was something I always liked, old Detroit buildings, and I was into architecture and I thought it was kind of fun to illustrate it," Moss said.

You won't find his work featured at the Institute of Arts, but you can find it hanging on walls, in offices, in galleries all over town, because, well, Bill Moss paints our town, literally. In photographs of the mind, in Technicolor snapshots, reproduced in a prism of crystal and light that extends half of a century into our past.

Much of this is the stuff of memory. "Yes, it is. It's just recent memory, though, things that go back 50, 60, 70 years, that we can remember, anyway," he said.

He paints his Detroit as he knew it, as he saw it, and as he loved it.

"People get such a kick out of remembering being certain places. They'll come up and say, 'I used to go there all the time and do this and that.' That's the way it looked in the picture. So it's kind of just bringing back a little of our past," Moss explained.

A picture of city hall hangs on the wall which Moss says it's from about 1960, 'just about a year before they tore it down.'

As a student at Cass Tech and later on at Wayne State, Bill Moss knew the city streets, knew the riverfront, the monuments, landmarks and traditions, the stuff of life in the motor capital of the world. Images, fleeting moments that he has now carefully saved from the constant dimming of our own memories.

Columbia on the Detroit River

"That's the Bob-Lo boat in the middle of the Detroit River."

"I guess it all would have started when I was about 12-years-old and I remember all of these beautiful things that Detroit had we started to lose," Moss said. "Things just started disappearing everywhere so I got to thinking about it and what would be a neat thing to paint. I was thinking, well, woodwork, something like that with the Bob-Lo boat and found out a whole lot of people remembered it."

The Tiger Stadium

As the city looks forward to the new millennium and with it a new ballpark, Bill Moss is closing out this century by saving yet another tradition for us. The thrill, the magic of the 1984 Tigers and the last World Series at the corner.

"The painting I'm doing now, I'm going to do the print of, and that on that afternoon, about two hours, say, before the actual game starts, and people are just coming and walking toward the building and cars are going by and buses and things. It's as it looked," he said.

One moment frozen in time.

"We're talking about 15 years. It hasn't been too long, but, still, it's frozen in time," Moss said. "It's Detroit history and with the new stadium opening, we have no idea what may become of that one, so wanted to kind of show it as it did look just a few years ago, before all that passes away, too," Moss said.

The Detroit riverfront

She'll live on now with a piece of Bill's heart, captured forever in a 24 by 30 inch rectangle on canvas and then delicately reproduced brick by brick and memory by memory in the lithographs that soon will grace the city's galleries, another Detroit tradition saved for any one of us who was there on a summer's day and cares to remember it again.

"We all, I'm sure, spent a lot of time there and remembered the place and everybody was used to it, like our old theaters and the old Bob-lo boats and everything else, just things we remember. When they pass, you can't replace 'em. I don't think there really isn't any way to," Moss said.

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