Architectural Nerd Detroit (Part 1 of 3)
Sung to the tune of the chorus in the song Uncontrollable Urge by Devo I am an Architectural Nerd is what I hear in my head driving around the city of Detroit .
Neighborhoods is what Detroit never really had …a name / ongoing neighbor hood id in Detroit is RARE.
In Detroit, we usually identify ourselves as East Side or West Side ! The first impulse is to say that.
Not Rosedale Park. Not Indian Village. Hmmm...
Only Wikipedia identifies areas in Detroit by real estate . Quite a few of these names have been around since 1915. Thankfully, Detroit neighborhood names are not for real estate branding .
Northwest Goldberg? Named after the highly mobile Jewish population that tends to move Northwest from the river. Core City ? Who cares??
Is it partially due to devastation that Detroiters lack pride in their districts? There are no more wards. Chicago we are not. Our claim to fame is still music, but digitally is where music lives. There is no Brill Building or Motown skyscraper , and United Studios is in peril...Again
Motor City
Motown
Arsenal of Democracy ... none of these civic sounding names work anymore. Can it be fixed by letting the actual inhabitants identify with the names that have always been there?
We can try.
Architecture defines most of the neighborhood names . If you grew up in Morningside, zip code 48224 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MorningSide,_Detroit - telling someone that fact does not initiate a map in ones head.(Hint: Morningside is near the Grosse Pointes)
Finally racial border coming down
If you accept the very real damage caused by redlining, Blacks were happy when they could get around it. Architecture was not important :neighborhood names maybe. The point was this- you lived on the newer west side as opposed to the older east side. Curious? See the link below:
https://detroitography.com/2018/11/07/map-cityscapes-historic-detroit-neighborhoods-2003/ This link allows for exploration of every neighborhood : its name and history. Thanks Alex B. Hill and Detroitography!
After the 1967 riots any black person with money lived in either Northwest Detroit or outside of Detroit in the suburb called Southfield. These 2 specific areas had names thanks to the fall of redlining. Jewish families had no objections selling/breaking redlining practices to others because they were also being discriminated by the establishment - mainly WASPS (white Anglo Saxon Protestants.
Eventually , redlining made suburb names more important than neighborhood names . When white families fled it was often less than 10 miles from Detroit, in non descript bedroom communities . Bedroom communities were bordered by mini strip malls . Every mini strip mall had a decent grocery store, sometimes a major chain like a Trader Joes or more recently a Whole Foods , a drug store, a cleaners and a take -a- date restaurant and a gas station on the opposite corners. When whites moved into bedroom communities, the suburb name told you what amenities where available, not what type of houses were in those communities.
Architecture? Whats that?
You got the house. Who cares about the style ? ?
From birth to 9 years old , I grew up partially on the East Side of Detroit.
From 9 to legal age of 18 I grew up on the West side- specifically the Northwest side.
Then I attended college in Midtown
Before moving to NYC I lived in a tiny section of sophistication near Highland Park aka
Palmer Park Apartment Building Historic District
Very few people know where the greatest concentration of apartments built between the 2 world wars, recently featured in the movie No Sudden Move. Like Who Killed Roger Rabbit , it has a real life premise, and a lot of the shots are filmed on Whitmore featuring my old apartment building. It is still in great shape but other buildings have not fared as well.
With the exception of my stay in the Palmer Park Historic District ,(at the time populated with white LBGTQ professionals , creatives and little old ladies) I was in predominately black striving to middle class professional neighborhoods. It was a turning point in Detroit depopulation. Obvious white flight accelerating in the mid 70s. Blacks like me living in areas with Moderne (Outer Drive) Frank Lloyd Wright (7 mile) , etc. I am naming streets because typical Detroiters know streets over neighborhoods.
Partied hard here :2760 West 7 mile road
East side is Easy
The naming of areas on the east side tends to be obvious. Its an older area (from 1701) The west sdie is a parchwork quilt of not so obvious names or areas. Why is Lasher named Lasher or is it LAW SHer ? is about as interesting as it gets west of Woodward. If you want to figure this stuff out quickly - go here curosiD podcast on WDET https://wdet.org/posts/2016/12/06/84312-curiosid-why-are-there-5-grosse-pointes/
OR
Fall into this and lose an afternoon : http://www.historydetroit.com/places/streets.php
The East side has French names, people names like Sylvester , Famous People names like Brush. The West side has British countryside and manor names: Abington, Asbury Park ,Cambridge . Or geographic names like Artesian , Cloverlawn, Crocuslawn and people names that are not French: Belton, Cass, Ewald Circle. Have fun with the list- it also quickly maps the street either east or west of Woodward. https://geographic.org/streetview/usa/mi/detroit.html
The Neighborhoods that are actually central (Midtown) are on either side of Woodward. Midtown is quite old and has a confusing street grid thanks to several generations of planners. East side and West side of Woodward have Victorians and Brownstones. Farms generally ran from the river to almost the medical center on the East. Early car companies and breweries were at the north end of Midtown. Mostly importantly the housing was close to the work. Plus the housing indicated the wealth/lack of as the city grew from the river. Initially from the river it is easy to see how the architecture names the neighborhoods. East Side names (click on them - they are links)
A $500 House in Detroit: Rebuilding an Abandoned Home and American City
Part Deux : Transportation for the Masses
Here is a subway map (yes the subway never occurred!)
https://detroitography.com/2018/12/03/map-detroit-freeways-reimagined-as-subway-lines/
Instead Detroit got a trolley that preserved the terrain and houses but terminates below West Grand Blvd (the growth boundary in 1915)
https://archive.org/details/reportondetroits9582pars/page/n227/mode/1up?view=theater&q=map
Travel North from West Grand or East Grand Boulevard and run smack into the cities within a city Oh well... Highland Park/Hamtramack are worth blogs in and of themselves...
Black Bottom was blessed with rich bottom land dirt and farmed by the French. Later it was where you landed unless you could build a mansion for yourself. Then you went uptown and located on either side of the main road -Woodward.
Black Bottom is gone because it was too old, but was where Immigrants worked for the rich - all they had to do was cross Vernor/ Fisher Freeway Service Drive . Blacks were either unloading freight (Dequindre Cut ) or polishing silver until the panics of 1893 & 1896 . The huge fortunes made previous to the 1890s included the Whitney Mansion on Woodward and extended as far as Mack Avenue aka Martin Luther King Blvd, on the East Side of Woodward. Woodbridge, also a Victorian Neighborhood but less wealthy was Piety Hill also had Big Houses. Both were central to Woodward and survived. Someone had the good sense Not to turn Woodward into a freeway.
I rarely rode above WSU campus into this area, because it was still holding on despite being too close to the epicenter of the 1967 riots https://pietyhill.org/- Anything west of Woodward and above the NorthEnd and West Grand Blvd was really post 1915 to me. Wayne State University campus had homes from that era as offices and the Association of Black Engineers and Applied Scientists had a cubbyhole office in one of them - where you could study in almost complete silence. When it was time for exploration edifices from 1880 and earlier were mapped out on my bike routes. See the annexation map of Detroit here by Detroitography/Alex B Hill.
Piety Hill has a Diana Ross link (Love Child)
Was the passion behind this song from the Piety Hill (actually @600s block of Belmont street North End ) move to the Brewster Projects move due to a bad economy for blacks in the 1950s...?? In any case the house was solid and this variation of an American Foursquare style can still be found in Grixdale neighborhood.
| Brush Park / Woodward East Bounded by Alfred, Edmund, Watson, Brush and John R. Sts. 42°20′43″N 83°3′9″W | Brush Park is the 22 block area bounded by Mack on the north, Woodward on the west, Beaubien on the east, and the Fisher Freeway on the south. This neighborhood is within the larger area known as Midtown.[citation needed] The Woodward East Historic District, located within the locally designated Brush Park historic district, is particularly known for the High Victorian style residences constructed for Detroit's wealthiest citizens. Although many of the once-grand houses have been demolished, the 21st century has seen many of the remaining homes restored. |
Back to the Future?
I first fell in love with Piety Hill /Brush Park /Woodward East neighborhoods when attending WSU Back then the area was basically abandoned Adams Family
1n the post riot era what could be more scary than a walk through Cass Corridor?
On my bike I went EVERYWHERE. I pedaled down to the border of Black Bottom /Woodward East /Brush Park easily found south of Vernor/Fisher Freeway Service Drive , and then proceeded to zig zag ride each street.
I was looking for Piety Hill first (north of WSU but similar in architecture to Brush Park / Woodward East.) If it was not for the similar housing stock I never would have found these abandoned neighborhoods.Detroit never had much love for big, unless it was cars. By the time I discovered these houses I came to appreciate an era with no income tax. Heating these monsters? Yikes. Besides, Woodward East sounds like a real estate agents attempt to rebrand the area. Re branding occurs every time it made sense to ride a new gentrification wave. Only this time your pockets have to be waaay deep to maintain the castles that remain.
https://www.detroityes.com/mb/showthread.php?18241-What-happened-to-Brush-Park-in-50s-60s Keep scrolling this is one great WIKI
From Detroit Yes
An additional factor in the late 60s and early 70s, there was an effort to gentrify the neighborhood and the area was called Woodward East. It did not go well. There was an ongoing, unresolved culture clash between the mostly poorer and black long-time residents and the new mostly relatively richer and mostly white. This lack of a unified front made it easier for the neighborhood to slip away.
Post 67 Riot Detroit
Urban renewal did not deliver. (Just visit the Bookstore on Wayne States University Campus and visit the Detroit Book Section) Fixing Detroit to make it livable? It was more complicated than that-. Here is the Theory
Detroit - the Federally paid for Urban Experiment , paid for with US tax dollars trying to fix the racial gap that was totally exposed here post riot. The explosion in 1967 gave Washington a chance to redesign America 100 years too late. Hello Great Society /Reconstruction. Goodbye Style .
Not being a fan of Mies Van Der Rohe and Lafayette Plaza (which replaced the river end of Black Bottom) the fun went out of finding old buildings Lafayette Park / Mies van der Rohe Residential District
Part 2 of Architectural Nerd after Thanksgiving I promise to map Black Bottom based on historical accounts because it moved northward as different groups including the Russians !!?? left the area...
https://detroitgetlucky.blogspot.com/2021/12/architectural-nerd-part-2.html
posted by Detroit: Get Lucky at
8:03 PM
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