Ghost town renegade

The stench fouls the wind, bringing reminders of what this place has become.

It's the smell of raw sewage, the stink of compost, the fumes from those dirty clouds billowing from the smokestacks. It's the smell signifying that this is Delray.

After so many years here, Dave Zammitt doesn't notice it anymore. He's the owner of Lockeman's Hardware and Boats on West Jefferson Avenue near West End Street, seated in the closest thing to the center of town in a town that's gone away. 

But visitors still wince. "I have customers that'll come in the first or second time and say, 'How can you do it here?'"

Lockeman's has been in the same building since 1918, when Delray was a small village recently swallowed up by Detroit, which over the coming decades would herd as many industries and factories into this riverfront community as it could. Ever since, just about anyone who could leave did, and most still here are so poor they have little choice but to live in a toxic place.

"This area is truly the dump of the world," says Dave, 59. "And nobody cares."

He began working at the boat store in 1975. "I thought this would be my job for a couple years, then I'd go get a real job," he says with a laugh. The store's founder died, soon his son did too, and an out-of-state relative who inherited it told Dave to buy it or else he'd close it. Dave, who'd started as a mere apprentice here, became its owner.

These days it's one of the last mom-and-pop businesses left in Delray. And unlike just about every other small business that was here or won't be much longer, it's not only staying put, but actually expanding.

Lockeman's sells and services boats and their motors, but carries a full hardware selection too. The store seems small and out of place among the industries defining this area, but once there were marinas all along the riverbank, and a boating business made sense here. With the marinas and the boaters now long gone, nearly all their customers drive in from somewhere else, many from as far away as Toledo or Brighton, or Downriver, where the Zammitts live. If the store moved, some of their customers would have even longer drives to make. So here they stay.

The store is so old that the top drawers on the aged wood cabinets behind the counter are labeled for harness rings and belt lacing, supplies for the horses that people still used to get around when it opened. It's so old that Dave filled a glass cabinet with antiques and artifacts he'd found around the shop over the years. "My museum," he calls it. 

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