Hamtramck's border with Detroit on Oliver Street. This is the seventh installment of Detroit Urbanism's series on the borders of the City of Detroit. As with the City of Highland Park ( covered in part six ), because the City of Hamtramck is enclosed entirely within Detroit, this article will focus on the historical development of the city-within-a-city in order to see how this segment of…
When Royal Oak Township was established in 1833, it was a rural community spanning 36 square miles. Its borders correspond to today's Eight Mile Road, Dequindre Road, Fourteen Mile Road, and Greenfield Road. The original borders of Royal Oak Township superimposed over a modern satellite image. Beginning with the 1891 establishment of the Village of Royal Oak, a series of incorporations and…
On the outskirts of Detroit and in the suburbs, the land is covered by a gridiron network of concrete roads conveniently spaced one mile apart, sometimes referred to as the "mile road system" . Some of these roads are named for their distance from downtown Detroit, beginning with Five Mile Road and continuing all the way up to Thirty-Seven Mile Road in northern Macomb County. This grid has such a…
Blue = Farmington Hills; lavender = Farmington. On July 1, 2023, Farmington Hills celebrates the 50th anniversary of its incorporation as a city. This blog post documents every municipal border change which occured in this area, leading up to the shape the city would take on upon its founding in 1973. The cities of Farmington and Farmington Hills today occupy a six-mile-by-six-mile area which was…
Facing west on Highland Park's south border with Detroit at Woodward Avenue. This article is the sixth in a series exploring the Detroit city limits in detail. The last post in this series, The Annexations of 1916 , covers the history of the additions to Detroit which enveloped Highland Park and Hamtramck. Highland Park's border today runs for just over seven miles, sharing the boundary for one…
( Virtual Motor City ) The City of Highland Park once operated its own independent municipal water supply, from June 1915 through December 2012. Toward the end of that period, while the city was under emergency state financial oversight, inspections had found that the facility had suffered from years of deferred maintenance and was therefore "temporarily" shut down as a precautionary measure.…
( Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library ) This is the fourth installment in an ongoing series covering the development history of Highland Park: Part I: Before Ford explores the early origins of the Village of Highland Park as an upper-class suburb which had to borrow heavily in order to provide basic services. Part II: The Road to Cityhood covers the effects of Henry Ford's arrival…
( The Henry Ford ) This is Part Three in a series covering the historical development of the City of Highland Park. Part One documents the original village's founding by silver baron Captain William H. Stevens as an exclusive community, real estate enterprise, and tax haven for the wealthy. Part Two begins with the arrival of the Ford Motor Company, which exercised powerful influence over the…
Facing east down Manchester Avenue in 1911, as a Ford factory addition rises in the foreground. ( Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library ) As we saw in part one of this series, the Village of Highland Park was established in the 1880s with the intention of becoming an exclusive residential suburb with low taxes and constantly rising land values. In order to accomplish this, the…
This blog post started off as another entry in the "Detroit Borders" series, with this installment examining the city's border with the City of Highland Park. But after diving a little too deep into the history, I ended up with more material than could fit into a single article. So now I present to you a series on Highland Park, beginning with the following long and detailed development history ,…
One of the first things you probably notice about the map of Detroit is that there are two large holes in the middle of it created by the cities of Highland Park and Hamtramck: These two communities were encapsulated within Detroit's borders when the city annexed land from Greenfield and Hamtramck townships in late 1916. Although technically comprised of five distinct annexations, taken together…
Seven Mile Road in northwest Detroit in 1930. ( Virtual Motor City ) While studying the borders of Detroit, I've come to learn a lot about how it's grown from a small, congested city into the sprawling metropolis that it's become. I've also recently had a conversation about Detroit's preponderance of single-family houses with journalist Aaron Mondry , for a podcast project that was ultimately…
The border between Detroit & Harper Woods on Kelly Rd. south of Washtenaw St., May 23, 1958. ( Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University ) The final segment of the eastern border of the City of Detroit is the three-mile-long boundary with the City of Harper Woods. It begins where we left off at the end of the last post , at the intersection of Kingsville and Linville streets. From there, the…
( Archive.org ) Much of Detroit's easternmost neighborhood, Cornerstone Village , came into the city when a half square mile of territory was annexed from Grosse Pointe Township in 1926. Homebuilding was booming on the east side in the 1920s, whether developers were constructing bungalows for middle-class workers, or designing exclusive enclaves for the rich. The various municipal boundaries…
In this series on the City of Detroit border, we are breaking the city limits down into segments and uncovering the history behind them individually. The previous post covered the border from Windmill Point to Mack Avenue , 233 feet east of the center of Alter Road. Continuing from where we left off, the border runs down the center of Mack, 1.3 miles east to the center of Cadieux Road. This line…
Detroit's current borders superimposed over an 1876 map of Wayne County. Researching exactly where Detroit's sometimes confusing borders lie—and how they got that way—has been a long-overdue topic for this long-neglected blog. This post will be the first installment of an in-depth series on the history of the borders of the city. We will begin following the municipal boundaries starting where the…
I began working at the Detroit Institute of Arts as a bookkeeper in April 2007. I had moved to the city two years before, but I was still working in Warren and excited to both live and work in Detroit. In 2011 I was promoted to Accounts Receivable Specialist. If you made a donation to the museum in the last six years, I was involved in processing that transaction in one way or another. In October…
( This is not the post where I explain why I quit my job, or make any radical political statements. This is simply a history of how the DIA came to own its parking lots, in case any readers find this information interesting. ) * * * * * According to public property records, the Detroit Institute of Arts owns the four parking lots seen on the map below. The Cultural Center Parking Lot is the only…
The signs are everywhere--the caution tape, the marking of underground utilities, the removal of trees--that a demolition is near. The Barat House at 5250 John R. Street shows every indication that it is about to be razed. As reported last year , this midcentury building was purchased by the Detroit Institute of Arts with the possibility of being replaced by a surface parking lot for 60-70 cars.…
( This is the second and final installment of an article on the survey of Michigan and Detroit. Click here to read Part One. ) One of Lewis Cass' objectives as governor was to attract enough settlers to Michigan for the territory to achieve some degree of self sufficiency. His plan reached an obstacle when Congress decided that the two million acres surveyed in the winter of 1815-1816 were…
We are living in a 200-year-old matrix marked by brass and iron. It is such an integral part of our daily lives that we barely even notice it. This complex system hides in plain sight--in fact, it is visible from outer space. Shane Kimbrough It's no accident that Metro Detroit--a region historically apathetic to organized urban planning--ended up with a neat grid of roads set one mile apart. But…
One noticeable feature on some old Detroit maps is the slightly tilted, fourteen-square-mile rectangle that lies three miles northwest of the original city core. This is the Ten Thousand Acre Tract, an area that now includes parts of Detroit, Hamtramck, and Highland Park. David Rumsey Map Collection Detail from map of Michigan Territory by John Farmer, 1836 The Ten Thousand Acre Tract is in a way…
A strangely common frustration for drivers in Detroit, especially those who are not yet familiar with the city, is that crossing Woodward Avenue is not always a straightforward task. A driver on Ferry Street, for example, will learn that one must zig-zag over Woodward in order to continue driving on that thoroughfare. And one traveling east on Temple Street will find out that the road ends…
Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library The last of Detroit's radial avenues to be established was Fort Street. In addition to being the youngest and shortest of the radials, it is also the only one never to have served as a US military highway. The Military Reserve As its name implies, Fort Street has a connection to Fort Shelby, built by the British as Fort Lernoult in 1779, just…
Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library Grand River Avenue, the fifth radial avenue to be extended from Detroit, was built to connect the city to the point where the Grand River flows into Lake Michigan. Like Gratiot Avenue, this road roughly follows the same angle as some of the avenues in Augustus Woodward's Plan of Detroit, but it was not actually built where any main avenue was…