Why detroit has converging streets

That's what motivated Marvin Shaouni, Model D's managing photographer, and me to set out for an entire day last month in search of Detroit's most beautiful blocks. Yes, we know the below sampling of sites is arbitrary at best, but we hope to call your attention to some of the lesser celebrated scenes of our city and Hamtramck and Highland Park, too. For your edification, we present our most beautiful blocks in Detroit. Editor's note: You will notice that this list lacks many locations in Detroit widely regarded as beautiful, from downtown to Ferry Street to Boston Edison to Indian Village to Hubbard Farms.

We're aware and mean no offence by omitting these places. Want to suggest a location we missed to be included in a reader-generated version of this story?

Scroll to the bottom of this piece to find out how. Head around the backside of the buildings on the south side of Gratiot and you'll be transported to an older Detroit. The brick pavers of Service Street, the backsides of commercial storefronts, and the steeple of historic St. John's and St. Luke's Church stand in stark, stunning contrast to the modernist high rises of Lafayette Park opposite them.

High-rise apartment buildings like the modernist Jeffersonian and the art deco Kean loom over its perimeter, but the small collection of homes that make up the Berry Sub are single-family beauties of various makes and models, from colonials to Tudors to Spanish revival hybrids. Dwight Street is the neighborhood's best block, featuring none other than the Manoogian Mansion, the official residence of the mayor of the city of Detroit.

Dwight Street in the Joseph Barry Subdivision Klenk and Harbor Islands Jefferson-Chalmers canal district It's hard to think of a city more different from Venice than Detroit, but a boat ride through the canals of the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood on the far east side can be just as enchanting as a Gondola ride through the medieval Adriatic city.

Okay, that's a stretch, but this neighborhood is pretty damn special. Situated near the point where Lake St. Clair empties into the Detroit River, two man-made islands, Harbor and Klenk, feature a stunning variety of homes with canal frontage, allowing the residents of this neighborhood unrivaled access to the city's waterways.

Featuring a solid assemblage of s-era Tudor houses, Chandler Park and E. Outer drives also contain the occasional oddball art moderne mini manse. A drive or bike ride down these fair boulevards can be a healthy reminder that the city is still home to a fair number of strong and stable neighborhoods.

A tudor just off of E. The streets and sidewalks are alive as the city's diverse residents make their way to and from important errands. They are racing to the bank branch or the mosque, strolling to the grocery, or slightly staggering from the darkness of the bar. Here, like in few other places in Detroit, the magic of the city is at work. Campau and Caniff, "Downtown" Hamtramck The residential streets of Hamtramck You can head down any of them, really, and see something beautiful.

Brooks where it meets Detroit. The southwestern corner of Grosse Pointe Park is removed even further from Detroit by the Fox Canal, a road-width body of water which extends for 1. There is only one bridge that crosses the canal with direct access to Gross Pointe Park, but that crossing has been closed since the s there is a narrow sidewalk though. Brooks Rd. Goethe Ave as seen from Grosse Pointe Park. Korte Ave as seen from Detroit. The divide between Grosse Pointe Park and Detroit has been featured many times in many other excellent photo projects, including The Other America , and that Martin Luther King even gave a speech there in decrying the racial and economic imbalance of the neighborhoods this was three weeks before his assassination, and only months after the Detroit Riots.

It's also worthwhile to note that Jefferson Chalmers itself is undergoing something of a renaissance, and there are large gated communities wholly within Detroit which have perpetuated road closures and fenced-off access to the surrounding community just as dramatically.

The Wall. Children weave down the pavements on bicycles, while a pickup basketball game gets under way in a nearby park.

Tax delinquency and debt are still major issues , as they are in most places in the city. Crime and blight exist side by side with carefully trimmed hedgerows and mowed lawns, a patchwork that changes from block to block. In many ways it resembles every other blighted neighborhood in the city — but with one significant difference. You know, just kids having fun, that kind of thing. It was only later when I found out what it was for, and when I realized the audacity that they had to build it.

In , 8 Mile was a black neighborhood — segregated by law, segregated by culture, segregated from white Oakland County by the eponymous 8 Mile Road. It was a self-contained community, filled with not only African Americans but immigrants of all colors, some of whom had built their houses with their own hands.

It was also adjacent to empty land — valuable land that developers were rapaciously turning into homes for a surging postwar population. His answer: wall off the white neighborhood with a concrete barrier. Her neighbor, Lou Ross, agrees. This piece and photographs also featured in a Guardian article that I wrote on American infrastructure called "Roads To Nowhere".

Black Bottom. Detroit has always had a love affair with the automobile. After all, this is where they were mass-produced, where America's very first road was paved , and where firms such as GM, Ford, and Chrysler made their fortunes and caused the city to greatly prosper in the early 20th century. So in the mids, when President Eisenhower launched an ambitious plan to connect the country with massive interstates Detroit was fully prepared to offer up neighborhoods like sacrificial lambs to the excavators.

The problem was, many of those neighborhoods were historically African-American neighborhoods, and due to a history of redlining many of them were in a dilapidated condition, making them perfect targets for destruction and fitting into a narrative of "urban renewal" and "social cleansing". One such area was the historically African American neighborhood that used to be known as Black Bottom, a vibrant, dense area in a prime location just north-east of downtown.

Black Bottom had a nationally renowned music scene, and was home to many famous residents, including boxer Joe Louis and the first African American mayor of Detroit, Coleman Young. It is seriously doubted whether there is a single block in the area which does not contain detrimental racial elements … It is hazardous residential territory and is accorded a general medial red grade — Original FHA evaluator report for Boyle Heights, California.

West Oakland in California is a typical example of a redlined neighbourhood. Historically a working-class community of immigrants and African Americans, it stagnated after being redlined. By the s and 60s, during the interstate building boom, West Oakland was in a prime position to be carved up and paved over: full of low-income housing, it offered little to no political opposition.

But it was by no means alone. Nowhere is infrastructure so obviously divisive as with the vast interstate highway system. West Baltimore is an exceptionally bleak area in an exceptionally poor, overwhelmingly black American city. The city recorded homicides in , the highest murder rate per capita in the country. Racial divisions run deep here, a segregation of opportunity, class and even life expectancy.

On a humid September morning, police cars darted furiously through empty streets, their sirens blaring. In front of the housing complex where Freddie Gray was killed in , two white police officers questioned a young black man in an SUV, their hands resting on their weapons.

Many of the homes have boarded-up windows and doors, and even wooden scaffolding to prevent them from collapsing. The city has more than 16, abandoned properties, some of them vacant for decades. In the middle of this blight stands a monument to failed American city planning: a giant ditch that bisects West Baltimore neatly into north and south.

This gigantic project upended hundreds of lives, transformed an entire landscape and cost tens of millions of dollars. And we lost people. People who were stable.

In the s, a vast increase in cars was beginning to clog the roads to and from the new suburbs. The federal government poured money into the brand new interstate system, encouraging radials, arteries and thoroughfares through dense urban neighbourhoods. The road, says Bullock, who also teaches political science at Towson University, was yet another example of infrastructure marginalising black citizens.

Not only from the highway, but also disinvestment, the redlining, the lack of employment. Because if we say housing was lost, churches were lost, we have to remember also businesses were lost.

And oftentimes people have to go outside their communities to spend that money, which never gets recirculated in that community. Moreover, while the freeways opened up routes from the suburbs to the city centres, there were often a conspicuous lack of entrances in black communities. The gigantic concrete ditch in West Baltimore is a perfect example: sunken, without exits — it effectively seals off one side from the other.

Interstates touched the lives of millions of people, in hundreds of cities across the US. From Atlanta to Chicago, Denver to New York, black communities felt the twin pain of urban decay and expropriation of land.

But before the Voting Rights Act , black people had no legal recourse through which to oppose such plans. Now, there is a mandated policy to engage the community, which is a good thing. In recent years those failed promises have included the Red Line. This was a light rail project, heavily championed by the city council, that would have connected East and West Baltimore, and provided thousands of jobs and economic development.