Jazz fans, you’ve now got a place to find great music on your Houghton radio dial.  If you like jazz, then The Other Eric Hall Show on Michigan Tech’s radio station, 91.9 WMTU, is not to be missed.  The show runs on Sunday evenings from 6-8 p.m. and offers a wide variety of jazz, blues and other instrumental music, along with some tongue-in-cheek “commercials” for local businesses.  Artists heard on recent shows include Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis and John Scofield.  Pretty straight-ahead, pretty great.

Too bad the show only runs two hours – its host, Eric Hall, clearly knows his stuff and often peppers the program with interesting background on the artists, their tunes, or the time period in which they were written.

It’s great to see this new addition to the radio music scene in the Copper Country; we hope it’s around for a long, long time.  And if live music is your thing, you can keep abreast of the many live music concerts of all kinds that happen in the area every weekend on the Keweenaw Music fan page on Facebook.

Support local music in the Copper Country!

With this post we introduce a new section to Home Sweet Houghton, Quick Bites, in which we’ll offer brief reviews or suggestions on where to go for a good meal in the Keweenaw.  The peninsula is a little short on fine dining establishments, but there are plenty of great places to get a tasty meal and if you’re a fan of breakfast you’ll feel right at home.  Whether it’s French toast, pancakes, eggs or sweet rolls the diners and similar establishments in the Copper Country offer an embarrassment of riches.

Suomi Restaurant

My favorite is still Suomi Restaurant and Bakery in Houghton for Finnish French toast, made with a Finnish egg bread called nisu, and pannukakku, which is often called a pancake but is really more of a baked custard.  Visits there, particularly during the winter, are a fun distraction for our family, and Suomi’s become a regular stop for us when we have guests in town – a delicious meal, loads of local color and a guaranteed introduction to the Yooper accent (PS: Don’t miss the meatball sandwich if it’s lunchtime).

This past weekend, however, it was time for a field trip and the decision, on the occasion of a birthday, was to head 40 minutes south of Houghton to the Baraga County township of L’Anse, which is home to the Hilltop Restaurant and its famed sweet rolls.  Recognized by readers of the Detroit News as the #2 sweet treat in the state of Michigan, these things must be seen – and tasted – to be believed.  It was the first time I’d ever been brought a knife with which to slice a sweet roll, but the minute the pastry arrived at the table the logic in the knife was evident: One roll can easily feed 3-4 people.

www.sweetroll.com

According to the restaurant’s Web site they bake these rolls fresh all day, so you’re guaranteed to get a fresh one whenever you go.  Never mind the calorie calculation, these things are decadent and delicious (I did the math but trust me, you don’t want to know.  Ok, if you really want to know leave a comment to that effect and I’ll tell you.).

They’re best eaten warm from the oven and dripping with frosting at the restaurant, but failing that they ship anywhere in the U.S. twice a month.  If you’re in the area though, do yourself a favor and stop by.

A column in the Detroit Free Press has raised a few eyebrows around the Keweenaw Peninsula.  Titled Shades of Detroit in the Keweenaw, it suggests that the Keweenaw is a “miniature Motor City” because the two areas share the visible and infrastructural challenges of communities that were built up around now-declining industries (mining in the Copper Country’s case, and of course autos in Detroit’s).

The author, Bill McGraw, is in no way entirely negative about the Keweenaw Peninsula — he rightly gives a nod to its “natural beauty and friendly Yoopers” amid communities like Calumet (10 miles up the road from Houghton) that still have plenty of charm.   Noting that the Keweenaw is the “Upper Peninsula’s peninsula,” he describes it as “an enchanting land of hills, rocks, forests, bears, eagles, saunas, Lake Superior and pannukakku, Finnish custard pancakes.”

McGraw does, however, also rightly point out some side effects of economic decline that are inescapable for both Detroit and the Keweenaw.  Let’s be honest – it’s hard to miss the neglected buildings that dot the route between Houghton and Calumet and north towards Copper Harbor and the area’s population is not what it was 100 years ago.

It’s negatives such as those that got things going in the comments section of McGraw’s piece, where Yoopers and Detroit supporters traded barbs over the relative merits of city vs. country living.  One man’s unspoiled beauty is another’s animal-infested wilderness, apparently, just as what is to some an edgy, hip urban lifestyle is to others a crime-ridden ghetto.

What those obviously overblown criticisms underscore, as one commenter noted, is that both places don’t have a whole lot of direct contact with each other.  That’s not surprising.  Detroit is a 10-hour drive from Houghton, 3 hours farther away than Minneapolis or Chicago, and the only way to fly between the two is through Minneapolis.   The two communities are almost as far apart from each other as you can get and still be in Michigan.

Image: www.greenwichmeantime.com

And while the article gets it right in many ways, McGraw fails to point out one important distinction between the two: crime.  In a nutshell they’ve got it (like any other big city) and we don’t.  The federal statistics page for Detroit lists tens of thousands of violent crimes per year there, while the corresponding entry for Keweenaw County, where Calumet is located, doesn’t even include an entry for violent crime.

Now, this is not to suggest in any way that there is no crime of any kind in the Keweenaw, nor that you put your life at risk anytime you walk down a Detroit street (being from St. Louis, another city that has faced its issues, I know how statistics can distort reality).  However, there is no doubting that violent crime is minimal in the Copper Country, and that makes it a very safe and pleasant place to be a kid … or a grownup.

What’s your reaction to the Free Press column?  Can Houghton learn anything from Detroit, and vice versa?