[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by edale

Amazing image of old Detroit. Lot of thoughts here:

1) Even back in whatever time this photo was taken, Detroit's housing stock appears dominated by detached housing. It looks very dense, but lacking the rows that I associate with these types of historical photos.

Most of the 19th century type of row housing that you probably have in mind would've been near the river. Almost all of it is gone now, and I'm not sure exactly when most of it was razed. These are probably the only remaining structures of that type in Detroit: https://goo.gl/maps/nbaEGGVDEP7WJZDR8. If you spin it around, you can easily tell what happened to the neighbors, lol. Most of the city of Detroit was within one or two miles of the river when this style of housing was common.

There are some examples of early 20th century attached row housing that is still standing, but there is no neighborhood in Detroit today that is overwhelmingly of that type, like you would find in Philadelphia or Baltimore. It is common in the denser prewar areas of Detroit for a block to be a mixture of detached single house, multi-unit flat, and even apartment buildings. Sometimes row houses are thrown in too.

For instance, this street was dominated by row houses: https://goo.gl/maps/qQ4zPLUMmjWaEBjD9

Just a couple blocks away was a street dominated by flat-style houses (the most common style of multi-family housing in the city): https://goo.gl/maps/hATsFgjHmti5dmUp6

Originally Posted by edale

2) Did Detroit have a Hausmann/Moses figure who can largely be pointed to for not just the freeway construction, but also the massive commercial avenues that cut across the city. I see some evidence of a diagonal in roughly the center of this image...I'm guessing that is Gratiot? It looks much narrower and less prominent than its current configuration.

I think most people point fingers at mayors Jeffries and Cobo.

Originally Posted by edale

5) I was poking around Detroit on streetview the other day, and came across this very impressive strip on Gratiot near Eastern Market: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3435...7i16384!8i8192

It gives a glimpse of what Detroit used to be. This is pretty intense urban development outside the downtown core, and one of the few examples remaining that demonstrate how this city must've felt back in the day. It gives me a Wicker Park Chicago vibe, though there is no real neighborhood around it-- just a huge network of weird, insular apartment complexes to the east: https://www.google.com/maps/place/De...!4d-83.0457538

I circled this intersection in red on this photo. All of those buildings were standing when the photo was taken.