Madison Heights: Metro Detroit's Little Saigon
Near Detroit, Michigan
Madison Heights incorporated as a city on January seventeenth, nineteen fifty-five, carved out of Royal Oak Township by residents who wanted their own government in the booming postwar suburb twelve miles north of Detroit. For decades it was an ordinary working-class community shaped by the auto industry. Then Vietnamese refugees began arriving in the area after nineteen seventy-five, and over the following generation a stretch of Dequindre Road between John R and the expressway transformed into the Vietnamese commercial heart of Metro Detroit.
Today Madison Heights is home to many Vietnamese restaurants, grocers, bakeries, and social institutions. The Vietnamese American population here is more concentrated than in most surrounding communities, making this quiet postwar suburb a significant Vietnamese cultural center in Metro Detroit.
