Well put the time when Detroit rose to prominence was both fortunate and ill fated on the one hand there was a good symbioses in the interwar period between automobile and mass transit. But I’ll fated to suffer through the Great Depression and have the post war boom wasted tearing up the inner city to accommodate growth that only came to the suburbs.
I surprised myself here a lil bit but I had gotten together with my dad and 103 year old grandpa and we had been talking about the home & neighborhood my dad was born Monica st now demolished for the lodge freeway. Kinda went over what I wanted to say and show with a couple pics but this is Detroit before and after so why not.
The near east and west sides developed in the 10s - 20s were packed with detached single family homes built so close as to almost resemble townhomes especially on the brick heavy westside while accommodating car ownership with narrow driveways and alley access garages.
This area was street car centric with multistory apartments interspersed and the peak of Detroit’s uniqueness and the anchor between the true urban core and the leafy semi suburban outer drive ring neighborhoods.
Even getting out into the outer drive ring area with its wide boulevards and houses are planned to have 2 cars in every garage much of the development took place in the 20s through 40s where much of every day transit was facilitated by streetcar. The great old traditional suburbs Dearborn & those of The Woodward Corridor were built up during this time and along this model.
This is period is where the first cracks appear in the city’s planning efforts major projects downtown are lost to the depression as are efforts to build a subway. The city got hit harder than most at first by the depression but it recovered quicker. The great migration of southern blacks and whites found housing scares and new development geared towards building more profitable middle class and wealthy neighborhoods.
This is where the core anchor neighborhoods begin their slow slide into decline as demographics shift towards smaller families single family homes were chopped up into flats and duplexes the results of this would rear its head after generation of lacking investment.
The breaking down of single family homes and the forcible dismantling despite its popularity of the street car left the urban transition zone being repurposed as a car centric area it was never meant to be. Perhaps if during this tumultuous period of shake up economic and social conditions were different such as in LA the transition into the modern ear could have left the city more whole.
However there are still a lot of neighborhoods especially the west side brick ones that were built so well that they were able to wether the storm. Such is the luck of the last great American city the time it fully boomed was cut short and its post war boom was wasted on refitting the city for a continued boom that was about to shift fully to the burbs.
The bones are strong and the city is restitching back together slowly but surely a lot of effort in place such as with the Joe Louis Greenway. This connect the urban core and with the strong surrounding innermost neighborhoods of 10s and 20s vintage and on to the uptown university district south of Ferndale and Dearborn.
Keller Williams Advantage
Keller Williams Advantage
Here’s a couple pics of the Russell Woods - Oakman Neighborhood area a prime example of the kind of near in neighborhoods that once reconnected with areas like The University District and Rosedale Park will truly have the city on the road to recovery.
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