High Street - Detroit

[gnome]

It figures that High Street would be not too far afield from Plum Street .

thanx for the link jtf, that David Ramsey site is fantastic, and EastsideAl, great info ... I love this site, there are so many experts here.

[EastsideAl]

An interesting thing about that 1873 map is that it fills in a couple of more pieces of the Vernor Hwy. puzzle, namely George St. and Oak St. extending from High St. west of Woodward. These streets had been renamed W. High St. by the time of the 1897 map I have access to.

I also forgot to say above that German St. on the east side, that formed the part of Vernor that runs from Gratiot to just short of Mt. Elliott, was later also called Cleveland St.

[casscorridor]

I like the 1893 map better. its a better representation of the extent of the "old detroit" and you can see how much the city grew in only 20 years, and thats before the huge boom in the early 20th century. The name "North End" [[neighborhood directly north of New Center) makes sense now, because it actually was at the north end of the city.

Also, I can not find Vernor Ave on this map and the Michigan Central Station does not exist yet.

Another interesting thing is how the name "9th St" changes to "Trumbull St." I'm sure there is a lot of other examples of street names changing.

But probabaly the saddest part of looking at these old maps is that there are no freeways to be found. Too bad that still isn't true. The freeways destroyed the urban fabric of our city. It is really interesting to see what streets existed where the freeways are now. Such as Hastings St which is now I-75. Could these streets not one day be rebuilt and the freeways removed?

[mwilbert]

If people had a lot more foresight than they do, then maybe fewer freeways would have been built--however now people have seen the results of building lots of freeways through cities, and they still build them, so I doubt it. Some people just like freeways. On the other hand, if the city fathers had seen the results on Detroit in particular, they might have been a bit less enthusiastic.

There is no reason to build new streets in Detroit--we need fewer than half the streets we have now.