Brush Park: Detroit's Little Paris

One mile north of downtown Detroit, the neighborhood of Brush Park is a ghost of Victorian elegance trying to become something new, a place that was once called Little Paris and then spent most of the twentieth century as a cautionary tale about what cities can lose.

Edmund Askin Brush developed the neighborhood starting in the eighteen fifties, and by the final decades of the nineteenth century it was where Detroit's richest families lived. Merchants, industrialists, and prominent professionals built three and four-story Victorian mansions here, Italianate and Second Empire and Queen Anne styles crowding together in what was, by any account, one of the finest residential districts in the Midwest. Joseph L. Hudson, who built the department store empire that would eventually become the anchor of downtown Detroit, lived here. Albert Kahn, who would go on to design many of Ford's factories, lived here. The streets were planted with elms, and the neighborhood's elegance earned it the nickname Little Paris.

The automobile killed it twice. First, it allowed wealthy families to leave Brush Park for newer, quieter neighborhoods farther from the urban core. By the nineteen twenties the great mansions were being carved into boarding houses. Then, over the following decades, demolition removed most of what was left, as the city tore down abandoned buildings block after block. By the nineteen eighties, Brush Park was nearly empty, a scattering of Victorian shells standing in weedy lots.

The city designated it a historic district in nineteen eighty, and a slow revival began. In the two thousand tens, new condominium development arrived on the southern edge, drawing residents back for the first time in generations. Some of the surviving mansions have been restored. Others still stand half-skeletal against the sky, waiting.

Brush Park today is one of Detroit's most vivid arguments about what the city was, what was thrown away, and what might still be recovered.