Christmas in Detroit back in the day.

**Dfd** · December-08-13, 02:47 PM

If you lived in Detroit back in the hey day of the 40s and 50s, tell us what Christmas was like!

**Dan Wesson** · December-08-13, 03:07 PM

That's easy Downtown, Hudson's with their window displays and Crowleys where my Mom worked. We would take the DSR every where back then. If memories serves me right Cobo hall had a big to do about the holiday too.

Ice skating on Belle Isle.

Piling up discarded Christmas Trees in the alley and set them on fire the flames would go as high as the telephone poles.

**MotorCityTrikes** · December-08-13, 03:38 PM

Now yer talkin' My mother worked the holidays at Montgomery Ward at Grand River and Greenfield. They had a cool toy dept. and a cooler Santa. My parents would take my sisters and I for rides thru Rosedale Park to see the lights on the houses. [[I grew up two blocks north of Fenkell on Braile) I attended Burt school and we'd have a Christmas play and party. It was easy to feel the Christmas spirit in those days.
Nothing was super fancy but it was just nice to grow up at that time.

**Dfd** · December-09-13, 10:23 PM

**ronaldj** · December-10-13, 06:46 PM

Curbed Detroit has a gallery of photos of the downtown area culled, I belive from the WSU archives.

**ronaldj** · December-10-13, 06:48 PM

Can spell, can't type.

**Gistok** · December-10-13, 06:52 PM

J. L. Hudsons downtown store Christmas 1961 window display...

**A2Mike** · December-14-13, 10:44 AM

Originally Posted by Dfd

If you lived in Detroit back in the hey day of the 40s and 50s, tell us what Christmas was like!

Starting in about the eighth grade, in the late 50's, through high school my friends and I made the day after Christmas our favorite day for an excursion downtown. We liked spending some of our holiday loot at Hudson's or Crowley's, of course, but the key draw was always whatever big movie had just opened. One year it was "Seventh Voyage of Sindbad" at the Madison, another it was "Journey to the Center of the Earth" at the Fox. Part of the experience was always a pizza lunch at Luigi's, behind the Stouffer's on Washington Blvd., or the place across from the Fox [[whose name I can't remember). One year we were particularly flush and rode out to Belle Isle in one of the limousines you could hire in front of the Statler [[$6/per hour then!) and finished our ride at the Michigan to see a Jerry Lewis movie. Our group broke up when we entered college but the draw of Christmas downtown lingered for us individually in one way or another, perhaps until the mid-70's, but those early trips remain one of the happiest memories of a vanished Detroit.