Perhaps there is no better place to start our examination of Detroit than the Brush Park neighborhood, just northwest of the downtown area, separated by one of many interstates, in this case, the Fisher Freeway, or Interstate 75. The aerial photograph captures the neighborhood in 1998. It is certainly not 1998 anymore! The whole area…
Tag: In-Fill
Gary, Indiana, August 2023
I’m sure these two photos, above and below, are the classic “ruin porn” photos that most people seek out to take when they visit Gary, Indiana. And I’m not going to pretend that the city doesn’t have serious problems, and no one who lives there, I’m sure, is going pretend there aren’t thousands of acres…
JeffVanderLou and St. Louis Place, Early Summer 2023
Heading east of St. Louis Avenue, I looked at the north side of that thoroughfare, having looked at the south of the street in two parts, here and here back in July of 2022. There is still a large part of JeffVanderLou west of North Grand Boulevard, even if most of the huge neighborhood is…
The West End, Early Summer 2023
The West End neighborhood is one of my favorite parts of the city, and I recently went back to explore some more. I discovered that while many streets are seeing revitalization, there are others just east of the border with St. Louis County that are struggling with abandonment. These houses are off of streets such…
Fire at the Former St. Liborius, SK8 Liborius
The unthinkable happened late on the night of June 28. The former St. Liborius Roman Catholic Church, which had been closed in 1992 by the Archdiocese. It became SK8 Liborius approximately ten years ago. The people behind SK8 Liborius had been working tirelessly over that time to fix up the former church, and I had…
North Side of Lynch Street, Benton Park
Heading east down Lynch Street, we skirt the southern edge of the slender Barsaloux Addition, platted in 1866 after having originally been surveyed in 1858. It’s another one of those French farm fields that came up from the river; you can see the addition surveyed on the left in the plat above. Lynch is an…
Indiana Avenue Between Lynch and Pestalozzi, West Side
Turning around at Pestalozzi and heading north, we see that originally the west side of Indiana Avenue was fully built up like the east side, if not as densely. It’s also interesting to see that already in 1876, towards the north end of the block, a substantial portion of a hill had to be cut…
Indiana Avenue Between Lynch and Pestalozzi, East Side
A reader recommended I look at the 2800 block of Indiana Avenue in Benton Park, which is in between Pestalozzi Avenue and Lynch Street. I’ve looked at the block of Indiana just to the north back in December of 2022, as well as a section to the south back in June of 2015. I’ve also…
Pennsylvania Avenue Between Haven and Fillmore Streets, Carondelet
Leaving behind Haven Street, formerly Nebraska, which we’ve looked at before back in March of 2021, we then see newer construction, including an early Twentieth Century gas station and then even more recent in-fill. Beyond Mott Street, formerly Malt and Miller streets, the next block is completely dominated by the retaining walls of the Sisters…
Henrietta Street and Environs, Compton Hill
I am still trying to understand the so-called Gate District, which I still stridently refer to as Compton Hill, its historic name. I wrote an article about it back in 2020, but one thing I can’t do is go back in time and see the area before redevelopment began. Was it as bad as claimed,…