Cerveny, Northwest Detroit

North of Grandmont and directly east of North Rosedale Park across the Southfield Freeway is a largely intact neighborhood bound on the north by 6 Mile and on the south by Puritan and Greenfield on its east. Largely residential single-family homes of the brick bungalow type you see in this area of town, it houses a single park, Fields Playground, in its eastern section, what looks to have been an old school on Puritan with the name "Isaac Crary" on it, and mid-century modern apartment buildings line Greenfield.

Anyway, the name of the neighborhood on maps is "Cerveny." I've never heard this area called that by anyone who lives there. Does anyone know the history of the name, and when this neighborhood was developed? I imagine the answer to the latter would point towards the former. Cerveny appears to be a Bohemian [[Czech) name, but that's about all I know.

Cerveny was a Junior High at Strathmore near Puritan. It was there for many years. Closed around 2010 [[could’ve ended with a different name). It was a feeder school to Cooley HS. Many of the renamed neighborhoods do not have historical/cultural reference points...like Littlefield.

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Originally Posted by SFDS

Cerveny was a Junior High at Strathmore near Puritan. It was there for many years. Closed around 2010 [[could’ve ended with a different name). It was a feeder school to Cooley HS. Many of the renamed neighborhoods do not have historical/cultural reference points...like Littlefield.

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It is now the John R. King Academic and Performing Arts Academy: https://www.detroitk12.org/JRKing

John R. King is home to 800+ preK-8 grade students, and is now a part of the district's DSA Pathways program. JRK, Spain, Brenda Scott, and Duke Ellington Conservatory @ Beckham Academy are all now feeders into the Detroit School of Arts.

www.detroitk12.org/dsapathways

I went to the school, never heard that name for the neighborhood.

Interesting. I figured the neighborhood was bound by Greenfield on its east, but some real estate sites are showing Ardmore being the boundary, which is strange, because Google, Bing and such maps seem to show this area west of Greenfield called Belmont, at least south of Puritan.

In any case, then, it seems as if the area is known after the old school. So that answers part of the question. I went and did a bit more research, and apparently the school - and thus neighborhood - is named after officer Edward Cerveny, a Greenfield Township police officer who was killed in the line of duty in 1923 at the age of 42. Interestingly, this whole area on both sides of Greenfield south of 6 Mile would be annexed the following year to the city of Detroit. I imagine, then, that tha area began platting in the 30's? Or was it already developed when Detroit annexed it?

Shows you the twists and turns of an area's name. I'd have never have guessed this.

The majority of these neighborhood names never existed before Google.

I agree about the neighborhood naming comment. I grew up around 6 Mile and Gratiot, as had my Mother's family since the 19th Century. I never heard of "Burbank" "LaSalle College Park" "Mohican Regent" etc. Detroit has had several named neighborhoods for a long time, but as I recall many neighborhoods were not named. I believe those names were given as part of a planning study performed in the early 2000's that Google has used. There is an old thread on this.

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Originally Posted by Wheels

The majority of these neighborhood names never existed before Google.

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Exactly. Most Detroit neighborhoods didn't have names, beyond basic geography. For the most part, only those neighborhoods that were developed as notably different from the surrounding areas, like Indian Village or North Rosedale Park, had names. Other areas, like the one being discussed here, were referred to as something like "northwest Detroit, near Puritan and Southfield".

The historical reason for this is that most of Detroit was developed in large swaths out of open farmland. Unlike eastern cities where there was usually a village or town or settlement of some sort there first.

For some reason though, the people who designed Google Maps seem to have decided that all urban neighborhoods had to have names, as they actually did in many eastern cities. So they just slapped names on areas from local things like schools, even if no one who lived in those neighborhoods ever used those names [[like Cerveny) to describe the area where they lived. I also notice that that seems to have caused a lot of people new to the City of Detroit to use names for neighborhoods that no one who lived here before the advent of Google Maps recognizes.

Pretty sure there's more to it than that. Probably original development or planning names that show up in records somewhere that we commoners never knew.

Cerveny-Monnier is a subdivision plat name for the area.

Created February 1925.

Attachment 40375

Thank you, Mike! So then it looks like the neighborhood name wasn't taken from the school, at all. It makes since this was platted in 1925 because the area was annexed in 1924. The Cerveny family looks to have been a big one. I get a kick on the plat document how it has to list that some of them are "unmarried." lol

Anyway, got interested in this because I saw an ethnic map of the city from the early 70's, and this was one of the few subdivisions still left in that was colored "German & English." Everything else around it was marked as "Mixed." Seeing that names Holtzman, Hoffmann, Keil and Freeman on the original plat document, then, makese sense.

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Originally Posted by EastsideAl

The historical reason for this is that most of Detroit was developed in large swaths out of open farmland. Unlike eastern cities where there was usually a village or town or settlement of some sort there first.

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Yeah this is true but it's rarely understood that most of Detroit is uninterrupted suburban sprawl. Long commercial corridors take the place of coherent neighborhood centers. We tend to think of Detroit as the "city" with the suburbs only existing beyond 8 Mile. But it's better to understand the Detroit metropolitan area as a single city which has seen successive layers of suburban housing developments built over the decades. Even in the suburbs, only a handful of "downtowns" exist amid the otherwise fairly uniform rings of sprawl.

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Originally Posted by Wheels

The majority of these neighborhood names never existed before Google.

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The majority of these neighborhoods weren't named before Google.

And ain't it Grand!

Most days, Google is annoying -- putting us into 'bubbles' where we only see and hear a slice of the world -- and hiding so much from us.

Here, Google is creating value by sharing naming with us. Our lack of neighbourhood names is true, but unfortunate. Thanks, Google for bringing us together.

In the 50's and 60's the neighborhoods around Outer Drive and Van Dyke were known as Polish Grosse Point

Also known as Crary/St. Mary's Neighborhood.