RIP Robin Williams

[FormerDetroiter]

Robin Williams attended Detroit Country Day School when I was a student there. Sometimes the funniest people are hiding the deepest pain....RIP Robin

[Bigb23]

Point well made.
Watch out for your loved ones.

[Hermod]

Shades of Andy "Latka" Kaufman on Taxi.

[EastsideAl]

Sad. I knew a few people who knew him from Country Day and from his early comedy club years in NYC. All of them described him as wildly entertaining and a wonderful giving person, but also as clearly deeply troubled. Like a lot of people, he had compulsive self-medicating problems that drove him to life-long substance use difficulties. Apparently he had recently undergone another rehab for alcohol problems. Despite all of his successes, and so much love from the public and fellow performers, I guess he could never quite escape the difficulties of being himself. Add in the natural disappointments, depressions ,and problems of aging, and it may have just been too much. An extremely sad loss to all who knew him or his work.

[EastsideAl]

Shades of Andy "Latka" Kaufman on Taxi.

Andy Kaufman died of cancer.

[Patrick]

He talked about his childhood home here:

http://www.freep.com/article/2014081...ams-movie-Jack

Anyone have a photo or info about this grand mansion?

[EastsideAl]

He talked about his childhood home here:

http://www.freep.com/article/2014081...ams-movie-Jack

Anyone have a photo or info about this grand mansion?

From the description - corner of Woodward and Long Lake, near a "giant golf course" - it was most likely somewhere around the Bloomfield Hills Country Club, which is on the north side of Long Lake just west of Woodward. There were a number of old mansions in that area that were torn down in the '60s and '70s and their estates subdivided to make way for new houses and office buildings.

[Jimaz]

From the description - corner of Woodward and Long Lake, near a "giant golf course" - it was most likely somewhere around the Bloomfield Hills Country Club, which is on the north side of Long Lake just west of Woodward. There were a number of old mansions in that area that were torn down in the '60s and '70s and their estates subdivided to make way for new houses and office buildings.

There's supposedly a photo of that mansion here. I couldn't find anything in Google Maps that matched it after a brief search.

[knwb]

There's supposedly a photo of that mansion here. I couldn't find anything in Google Maps that matched it after a brief search.

Again with the going back through archives. Sick of me yet?

The long, narrow house with the perpendicular garage in the photo in that attached article is at 400 Dunston Rd in Bloomfield Hills.

https://goo.gl/maps/60psy

It was originally built as the "entertainment complex" for the Frank L. Klingensmith estate [[the manor house, an Albert Kahn design and one of the original Bloomfield Hills estates, is located immediately behind the house, just off-camera to the right in the linked-article photo - if you're curious, it's accessed from Goodhue Road, which is one block to the north. The stone gateposts are beautiful, but you can't see the house from the street). Years ago, my parents were thinking of selling our house and moving to that neighborhood, and that entertainment complex [[now a single-family house) was one of the houses we looked at, and it was AMAZING. As an entertainment complex, it contained both an indoor pool and a ballroom. The ballroom, on the second floor, was still fully intact. The house's grand foyer was the actual swimming pool - the floor was the original floor of the deep end, and there was still a storage closet in what had been the shallow end, with the original sloping white tile floor with black tile lane markers. The house had a sliding wall in the ballroom, a bomb shelter, and a secret passage with a spiral staircase that went from the ballroom down to the kitchen, and I'm still a little bitter that my parents decided against it [[the master bedroom was on the first floor, and the kids' rooms were upstairs, and with my sister and I being young still, they decided that it was too far to have to run if one of us needed either of them in the middle of the night). There was a late 70s/early 80s renovation that was terrific at the time, but is VERY dated now, so while the house was off and on the market a number of times over the past couple years, it is now, somewhat infuriatingly, being marketed solely for the land.

Back to topic, the Dunston neighborhood is close, but not that close to BHCC - the whole of the Cranbrook campus, not to mention the entire Vaughan Road neighborhood, sits between the two. After reading that Williams' was a 40+ -room mansion and that it had a gatehouse [[or at least a gate), looking extensively at 1940s and 60s arial views [[https://gis.oakgov.com/PropertyGateway/Home.mvc is a TERRIFIC site!), and knowing that the Barbour estate was converted to St. Elizabeth Briarbank Home for the Aged in the 1940s [[which would've been a couple decades prior to Williams' family living in the area), the Rathmor estate isn't 40+ rooms, and the Graham family was still living in their house at that time, I'm pretty sure it was either the Hunter mansion that stood on the present-day site of the Woodward Hills Nursing Center [[39312 Woodward Ave, Bloomfield Hills - according to the arial view maps, while the house no longer exists, the facility entrance follow's the original driveway's curve), or the house that stood on the east side of Woodward just north of Opdyke, present-day site of a large office park.

I've scoured the internet to find photos of either/both of these properties, and have come up entirely empty-handed. Be great to unearth something someday!

[knwb]

The following link is for the newsletter archive of the Bloomfield Hills Historical Society.

http://www.bloomfieldhistoricalsocie...cy-newsletter/

Look at the Spring 2010 newsletter - the house on the first page [[Stonycroft, the Charles Stinchfield mansion) is where Robin Williams lived. The house was on the west side of Woodward just north of Opdyke, it was torn down in the early 1970s. Where it stood is now a large parking lot for an office complex.