West Vernor: Where Southwest Detroit Found Its Voice
Near Detroit, Michigan
The stretch of West Vernor Highway running through Southwest Detroit tells the story of immigrant America in layers. By the eighteen eighties, a Catholic parish anchored what would become Most Holy Redeemer Church, drawing Irish and then German parishioners. Lithuanian immigrants arrived in waves, first early in the twentieth century and again after nineteen forty-five.
They built the Lithuanian Hall at thirty-five sixty-four West Vernor in nineteen twenty-one and kept their language alive in clubs and parishes for decades. The district spans a hundred and sixty acres and forty-four commercial buildings, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand two. Today the neighborhood is largely Mexican American, its taquerias and panaderias filling storefronts that once sold Lithuanian rye bread.
The names on the buildings change; the pattern of newcomers building community stays the same.
