Exploring the maze-like layout of Manuel’s Tavern is like walking through a museum. And, like museums, the bar is up for its first facelift since it opened nearly 60 years ago, meaning it will close down for several months.

“Not much in this room has changed at all since 1956,” says Brian Maloof, the youngest son of the bar’s original owner.

Brian Maloof took over Manuel’s Tavern after his father, Manuel Maloof, a well-known Atlanta Democrat, died in 2004. Now he’s leading it through a challenging time.

In the narrow room where the tavern started, he points to a nude painting on the wall.

“The artist that painted that picture, that’s his wife,” he says. “He would pay off his bar tabs by leaving us paintings.”

Above the bar stools, Maloof points out a dozen or so plaques that belong to regulars who once took those seats as regulars.

He then gestures to a doorway behind the bar, to an urn. The four urns here, all the photos, posters and other mementos put up by staff and customers will have to come down.

“The renovation has been a very scary thing,” Maloof says.

“Essentially all the people that love this place, know this place, I’m rearranging their furniture in their home. I mean, they think of this place as their home,” he says.

Many people have called him, worried their contributions will be lost, or even just moved.

So when Georgia State University lecturer, Ruth Dusseault approached him about preserving it all digitally, he was relieved.

In a back room at the tavern, Dusseault uses a special camera to take high resolution images.

“The idea really started, because I’m also a resident of the neighborhood and every time I’ve come here, I’ve walked around and looked at all the images,” she says.

Her idea turned into a project that involves professors, artists and students, who are digitally archiving hundreds of objects and the stories behind them, explain Dusseault and Emory University’s Michael Page.

“The end result will be an interactive website, where the public can move around inside of Manuel’s,” says Dusseult.

“And as they see pictures on the walls, they can click on it, and then they get a high resolution photograph of the image but they can also click and get user stories or the story about, you know, the John F. Kennedy photo or Jimmy Carter, just some of the rich history that’s on the walls of Manuel’s,” Page says.

Sure, the objects in the archive speak to the bar’s role as a Democratic hangout, but also as a cop bar, a hub for professors and a meeting place for journalists.

Sitting in a booth, eating lunch is Andy Klubock. In a rapidly-changing city, he says, the tavern’s images are a view into the past.

“I’ve been coming here since ’77,” he says. “I could probably tell you how each picture is there. It’s a great sense of history here in Atlanta.”

Manuel’s Tavern will still be different after the renovation. But now, at least, Brian Maloof says he can make sure all the objects go back to their original place.

It’s been a year since Detroit emerged from the nation’s largest-ever municipal bankruptcy. The city has made strides in improving services, is enjoying a construction boom and, unencumbered by the billions of dollars of debt erased through bankruptcy, just gave the underpaid police force a raise before their contract is up.

“I want to get the bankruptcy behind us. We have to move this forward. It’s no longer the Motor City like it used to be. It’s no longer Motown. But we can write a new history,” said Mark Young, head of one of the city’s police unions, at a recent news conference about the police force raise.

Nevertheless, Detroit is walking a financial tightrope.

Detroit emerged from bankruptcy with a razor-thin financial cushion, where even being a few million dollars off in its billion-dollar general fund budget could trigger another fiscal collapse. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan says even with the state having final say, the city is still making substantial progress.

“We have almost 90 percent of the lights in this city replaced. We have a full contingent of buses and the ambulances are arriving within eight or nine minutes, which is the national standard.”

But some financial analysts say Detroit’s bankruptcy has made the national bond markets leery of loaning money to any municipality.

Stephen Spencer represented Detroit’s major bondholders. He testified at a recent U.S. Senate hearing that the bankruptcy court allowed Detroit to pay far more of what it owed to city retirees than to bondholders.

“Detroit wasn’t a bankruptcy. It was a stick up,” Spencer said.

Yet even those who Spencer claims received preferential treatment say they don’t feel favored at all.

Fear Of Two Cities

Some city retirees lost a portion of their monthly pension payments, all the savings the city had invested for them and their health care benefits. Now retirees like Sheila Baker say they’re paying five times more for health insurance while the city’s downtown is booming with new construction.

“All of a sudden you got money in your pocket? They knew what they were doing,” she says. “You know, it’s all just a racket — literally — and they waited till we were older to do this to us? It is just unbelievable to me.”

New development is erupting downtown. There’s a new hockey arena complex and a new light rail line.

Construction continues on Orleans Landing, a housing development along the Detroit riverfront. A year after its exit from bankruptcy, new development is booming downtown. Carlos Osorio/AP hide caption

toggle caption Carlos Osorio/AP

Trying to walk through a maze of construction at a downtown park, Detroiter Paul Garrison calls the efforts a godsend.

“Bankruptcy, in my perspective and opinion, was 10 years overdue. But fortunately it did finally take place,” he says, “and so the money the city is bringing in will not have to all go to debt.”

But only a few blocks away, at Detroit’s major transit center, bus rider James Jordan says he’s yet to see the new development touch the city’s outer-lying neighborhoods.

“OK, they’re opening a Nike shop. But you never hear about a new housing development or a new grocery store being built in the heart of the neighborhood.”

For their part, business leaders say Detroit cannot survive by becoming, in essence, two cities: one of haves and one of have nots.

Detroit-based businessman and auto racing legend Roger Penske is helping redevelop the city’s downtown. He says Detroit’s success depends on making it a city people want to live in.

“I’m gonna be sure it’s not two cities,” Penske says.

City officials are tearing down tens of thousands of blighted buildings and offering cut-rate prices to those who will move in and fix up salvageable homes. But Detroit still needs more jobs and a better school system.

If efforts to make those improvements fail, Detroit’s fragile financial forecast could again falter.

Two of America’s oldest and most important industrial companies are tying the knot. DuPont and Dow Chemical plan to merge in a $130 billion deal that would create an agricultural and chemicals powerhouse. If the deal is approved, the new company would be split into three separate businesses — agriculture, materials and specialty products.

Transcript

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

Two giants of American industry say they are merging in a deal worth $130 billion. NPR’s Jim Zarroli reports that Dow Chemical and DuPont have both been under intense pressure from shareholders to do something about sagging profits.

JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: The new company will be called Dow DuPont. Within the next couple of years, it will be broken up into three separate companies for agriculture, material science and specialty products. Officials are hoping the new companies will be leaner and more focused. Emilie Feldman is an assistant professor of management at the Wharton School.

EMILIE FELDMAN: Right now you have these big, sprawling companies that are doing lots of different things not very well, and so they’re going to slim themselves down and each do things well that they can focus on.

ZARROLI: Dow and DuPont are both venerable names in American industry. Dow introduced Saran Wrap and Ziploc Bags. DuPont invented Teflon for cookware and Kevlar for bulletproof vests. But the companies have been hard-hit by the slowdown in global growth and the drop in commodity prices. Both have fallen under intense pressure from shareholder activists who wanted to see them broken up and reorganized. DuPont CEO Edward Breen, who will keep the same title in the new company, says the deal announced today will be much better for shareholders.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

EDWARD BREEN: I mean, we looked at every possibility, analyzed every one financially. There’s nothing that financially compares to the value creation for a DuPont shareholder.

ZARROLI: Breen spoke on CNBC. Like all big mergers, this one will have to be approved by regulators who will decide whether it hurts competition. Company officials say they’re not expecting a lot of problems. While Dow and DuPont are the two biggest U.S. chemical companies, they are in a global market and face plenty of foreign competition. They also don’t tend to compete in many of their biggest product lines. Still, federal regulators have been more skeptical of big mergers lately, and this one is likely to face a lot of scrutiny. Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.

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