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Who will save the bees?
It’s one of the most well-known and beloved sets of hand-painted signs in Eastern Market.
With a new development of the building at 1401 Gratiot Avenue set to start this fall, however, a major question lingers:
Who will save the bees?
The cartoon bees on the former Busy Bee Hardware building are all that’s left of a century-old business that closed its doors in 2017. They were painted by Martin Hirchak as “MPH Signs,” although it’s unclear how long they’ve been there.
Today, despite being weathered and fading away, they’re still greeting folks heading to Eastern Market at one of the main entry points at Gratiot and Russell.
They’re also under threat.
Changing habitat
Earlier this summer, Crain’s Detroit Business reported the former Busy Bee Hardware property is undergoing a $12.5 million redevelopment that’ll turn the main gateway into Eastern Market into 17 apartments and more than 6,000 square feet of retail space. It’s being spearheaded by developer Roger Basmajian. Construction is expected to start this fall.
Even in their current condition (and maybe because of their current state), the bee murals feel and look like the character of the market even as it evolves.
Old-school businesses have closed. Developers like Basmajian and others have moved in. The Eastern Market Corporation itself rides the line between embracing new development and maintaining the foundational meat and produce businesses that act as a backbone to one of the largest outdoor public markets in the country.
American folk art like these hand-painted signs are one of Detroit’s defining hallmarks. It’s been well documented in photographer David Clements’ excellent book “Talking Shops: Detroit Commercial Folk Art” from 2004. More recently, photographer Andrew Anderson built an online database of signs painted by Ron Miller (a.k.a. Ron Signs), known for his signature chrome-style hand-painted signs on myriad Detroit businesses.
You could make the argument that signs like these around the city and the Busy Bee Hardware bees themselves were in part the inspiration for Murals in the Market, the longtime mural festival in Eastern Market that brought large-scale murals into the neighborhood between 2015 and 2025. Detroit artist Kobie Solomon even painted a giant beehive on the back of the Busy Bee Hardware building as part of the mural festival, honoring the original bees.
In the same Crain’s article, developer Basmajian told the paper that he was going “restore the building back to its original glory,” adding that “all the artists that put murals on the building, once we do the tuck-pointing, we are going to ask them to come back and touch them up, if we can locate them.”
In a rendering featured in Crain’s, however, the murals — including the busy bees — are nowhere to be found.
Is that an oversight by the architectural firm helping to redevelop the property, or is it simply developer smooth-talk to promise on preserving this piece of Eastern Market’s character and failing to deliver?
As Eastern Market grows and changes, it’s inevitable that things will change. No one is against seeing the market expand and flourish in new ways.
There’s great artistic character to Martin Hirchak’s bees at 1401 Gratiot. It’s small tangible pieces of art like these and countless other hand-painted signs and murals around the neighborhood, however, that help make something a landmark and add to the cultural memory of thousands of patrons flocking to Eastern Market over the years.
Art like that is also what ends up attracting developers to a neighborhood like this to begin with.
Here’s hoping a new development can honor the character of Eastern Market when construction is scheduled to wrap up in 2028.
Credit: Ryan Patrick Hooper, WDET.
This article was originally published in Midbrow.
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