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A brief portrait of Highland Park

04.19.07 | technician | In history, highland park, woodward, urbanism

The Detroit News is running a series on the history of Woodward Avenue and they published a story on the history of little Highland Park, which straddles Woodward just a few miles north of downtown, where “the managers and workers of the burgeoning auto industry found an urban oasis — small neighborhoods of tidy bungalows and tree-shaded lanes.”

Highland Park is a suburb but not your boring everyday sterile suburbia. Back then it was “a model American suburb, home of leafy streets with distinctive bungalows, thriving main streets and community-minded corporations.” Today, it is in many ways in worse shape than the Detroit neighborhoods that surround it, having lost many residents and their income. Yet the city still retains its urban character, something some suburbs today are desperately trying to re-create. There is still a thriving, if downmarket, retail scene and two neighborhoods, Medbury’s-Grove Lawn and Highland Heights-Stevens with some 700 homes on the National Register of Historic Places. While suburban New Urbanism may be a step in the right direction old urbanism with its historic homes and neighborhoods are superior in a way that can’t be reproduced, not overnight.

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