“Detroit’s living room” That’s what Roula David hopes people will find when they check out her combination bar, art gallery, coffee shop, music space, record store, and dance floor called Spot Lite. This Villages neighborhood location is one of several spaces in Detroit that seamlessly blend entertainment, arts, and drinking. More than just bars that happen to have music, places like Spot Lite and The Upright, in Milwaukee Junction, serve as a showcase for some of Detroit’s top talent in music, art, and cocktail creation.
For David, a background in both art exhibition and craft bartending finally culminated in the May 2021 opening of her east-side bar. As the founding director of Red Bull House of Art and the executive festival director of Murals in the Market, David brought multimedia experiences to Eastern Market. Visual art isn’t the only kind David cares passionately about: She and her husband, Jesse Cory, “fell in love over house music,” she says.
Spot Lite’s record shop evolved from the private collection of David and Cory and has amassed a sizable selection of vinyl representing many genres of music but focusing especially on Detroit artists. During the day, the manager of the record shop chooses favorites to play. Customers can sip wine made specially for Spot Lite in Oregon, with labels designed by Detroit artists; any of a number of craft cocktails; or a coffee from building tenant Cairo Coffee. The cocktail program is helmed by beverage director Julian Spradlin.
The walls of the industrial-style space are hung with a rotating exhibit that lasts a few months at a time, rather than the single month that many galleries dedicate to solo artists’ shows. “I like to let the pieces breathe,” David says. “These artists had [spent] so much time working on it, it shouldn’t just be up for a month.”
In building Spot Lite from the ground up, David “really wanted to have a space that combined all of the elements of the things that we love: great cocktails, great music, great sound system, a proper art gallery with the rotating show of art,” and a place to gather people together in celebration, she says. “I want … to have a conversation with art and music” in the 5,000-square-foot space, she says.
David spends a great deal of time and effort planning out her musical and visual arts collaborations. In the truest sense of the word, “it really has so much to do with curation,” she says. “If you’re very intentional about the music and art in your space, and you make it a focus of your space, everything else kind of falls in line behind it.”
Not far away, the same sentiment applies to Rebecah Hunter and Jamie Metz, co-managers of The Upright. All three women use the same word — intentionality — to describe how they approach creating an unforgettable bar environment. An intimate, moody cocktail bar downstairs from Oak & Reel restaurant, The Upright gets its name and inspiration from a piano that was initially intended to adorn the space. It was only after the space was built, according to Hunter, that they “realized it is really, really, really difficult to get a full-sized upright piano into that space and down the elevators.”
Instead of adding a piano, Hunter and Metz concentrated on building out a series of events centered on the musical heritage of Detroit. “You kind of think of [it] like a record collection,” Hunter says, “and our series represents pulling out a record from that collection, whether that’s jazz or R&B” — or disco, as in their spring/summer series. Their first series of pop-up events explored the inextricable connections between disco and the origins of Detroit’s DJs and electronic music, timed to coincide with Movement music festival. Cocktails like Le Freak, Disco Inferno, and Pan Am 757 combined modern ingredients with an ode to classic ’70s-era drinks like the martini and bubbly, brightly colored beverages.
The Upright’s current VINYL series entry is all about jazz, just in time for the Detroit Jazz Festival across town. Hunter and Metz have designed a cocktail menu that highlights Detroit’s Prohibition-era jazz roots. “We like to say ‘inspired by’ rather than ‘themed,’” Hunter says. Metz agrees. The Upright’s space “looks like a tiny little recording studio. It’s just very old-school in there, so [we’re] paying homage to the era with the space that we have. [We’re] grouping all those things together, tying in stories of the time, the era, to create an overall vibe.”
Spot Lite’s massive space hung with contemporary art and industrial, record shop-meets-dance floor scene may seem to contrast with the jewel-like setting of The Upright at first glance. But bringing them together is a commitment to honor- ing both Detroit’s cocktail legacy and its deep musical roots, as played on vinyl. As David says, “This is so specifically made for Detroit.”
This story originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on Sept. 6.
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