Ethel Claes and the West Side Industrial Project

On October 9, 1982, a Detroit Free Press obituary declared, "The Queen of Corktown is dead." Ethel Claes, a Corktown resident for over fifty years and longtime president of its homeowners' organization, had passed away at the age of sixty-nine. The neighborhood--or at least what was left of it--partly owed its existence to the co-owner of a Corktown book shop run out of a Victorian house on the corner of Leverette and 11th Street.
http://corktownhistory.blogspot.com/...ndustrial.html

A long and very interesting blog post. I never realized quite how much of Corktown was destroyed by urban renewal until I read this.