Ah, Grosse Pointe! Where you can watch twelve-year-olds ride by on their bikes and listen to them swear like sailors! Grosse Pointe is actually a series of different suburbs, with the Grosse Pointe being one, and then a series of other independent communities an additional modifier such as Farms or Shores. There are multiple shopping districts, such as the one above, which I think was in the Farms, along Kercheval Avenue.

The housing stock is a mixture of building types from the early Twentieth Century to the early Twenty-First Century.

It perhaps reminds me most of a drive down Clayton Road in Town and Country in the St. Louis area.

There are impressive views of Lake St. Clair, and that is also where there are some quite large mansions that sit in between the shore and Lake Shore Drive.

Edsel Ford, the only son and heir of Henry Ford, lived his relatively short life in Grosse Pointe Shores, and probably hastened the area becoming a sought after community of the wealthy in the Detroit metro.

It would have been a long drive to River Rouge.

Now I think is when I crossed over into “regular” Grosse Pointe, which seemed to have more of the older houses in the area.

Just like many of the most affluent areas of St. Louis County, it wasn’t like there was nothing out in Grosse Pointe before the 1930s, but there was definitely a burst of activity as the automobile industry flourished.

And lots continued to fill in during the following decades.

There’s a very nice commercial district, urbanist in design, in an area apparently known as “the village” where you can buy a $6 cupcake, which was quite good. Parking is in the back. I don’t know if people have noticed this, but increasingly if you want to live and enjoy a walkable urban environment in America, you have to pay a lot for it.

I headed back west to Detroit, passing through what I believe is Grosse Pointe Park; I’m not exactly sure where the boundary was because there was road construction that completely closed streets so I ended up on a detour.

I hate how across America, but thankfully not too much in Missouri, where there are two super wide one-way streets that are paired up. Kercheval becomes one way to the west, and that’s how I went back, just like how I took Vernon Highway to get there.

The houses are more modest, more like the built environment across the boundary in Detroit.

I eventually ended up on Mack Avenue, crossing back into Detroit, where I passed this amazing bull head on the roof of what I suspect might have been a barbecue restaurant at one point. It’s for lease if you’re interested.

This house was converted into a church or funeral home.