Rosedale Park: Detroit's Streetcar Suburb That Held On

The neighborhood just north of here is called Rosedale Park, and it was sold with one of the most honest real-estate slogans in Detroit history: Out of the Smoke Zone into the Ozone.

In nineteen sixteen, the Rosedale Park Land Development Company purchased a large tract in the far northwest corner of Detroit and began platting it for sale. The pitch was aimed squarely at middle-class Detroiters, accountants, doctors, engineers in the booming auto industry, who wanted to stay connected to the city but live somewhere with trees and air and a sense of order. Grand River Avenue ran right to downtown. Outer Drive was being built nearby. The geography was right.

Construction was slow at first. By the end of World War One only fifteen houses had been built. Then in nineteen twenty-six the city of Detroit annexed the subdivision, which meant water mains and sewer lines arrived, and suddenly Rosedale Park became practical as well as appealing. Builders filled the streets with Colonial Revival houses, brick-fronted, modest in scale, consistent in character. The neighborhood was never meant for the wealthy. It was designed for people who worked hard and saved carefully and wanted a lawn.

By the nineteen thirties Rosedale Park was full, and it stayed full in ways most Detroit neighborhoods did not. While the postwar decades hollowed out vast stretches of the city, Rosedale Park's homeowners organized early and organized persistently. The Rosedale Park Improvement Association became one of the more active neighborhood groups in the city, fighting to maintain property standards and city services even as the tax base around them eroded.

The neighborhood was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and later became a locally designated historic district. It contains more than fifteen hundred homes across a compact grid. The houses are not grand. But as a record of what ordinary middle-class Detroit looked like in the nineteen twenties, brick streets, deep porches, century-old maples, Rosedale Park is almost unrepeatable.