Cruising by Mr. Fish on my to Grosse Pointe on the East Vernon Highway, I stumbled onto a mirage, a neighborhood of perfectly preserved houses along several long blocks with stately trees known as Indian Village due to several, but not all, of its streets being named after Native American nations.

Indian Village is pretty much cut off from the surrounding urban prairie, with its own private school system. It reminds me of this episode of Star Trek where an entire planet was annihilated except for one house, except in this case it’s one neighborhood. It even looks different from Google’s satellite. Historic Detroit has an extensive page on the houses in the neighborhood. Just like the two survivors in the Star Trek episode, the inhabitants of Indian Village seem blissfully unaware of why they survived.

The houses are on average nowhere near as large as the ones we looked at yesterday on West Boston Boulevard, but they still reflect the automotive boom in the early Twentieth Century.

Just as in St. Louis, the move away from red brick is almost complete, with a preference for brown or buff colored brick.

I loved the house below, which looked like it could have been straight out of Marie Antoinette’s Hameau in the Trianon and was almost certainly influenced by it.

There is also immense about of influence from English styles such as the Tudor Revival and Georgian styles.

But then we continue east on the East Vernon Highway, and the vacant lots and abandoned houses pick up almost immediately.