Thanks to Joe Cialdella, PhD candidate at University of Michigan for sharing this map and great info. Joe has been researching the history of urban farming and gardening in Detroit. He recently published “A Landscape of Ruin and Repair: Parks, Potatoes, and Detroit’s Environmental Past, 1879-1900.”

This map appeared in the Annual Report of the Thrift Garden Committee, 1934, which is part of the Detroit Thrift Gardens manuscript collection at the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library.

I wrote last week about the data shared by the Detroit Historical Society. There were 6,600 gardens covering 400 acres in Detroit in 1932. It is interesting to see most of the thrift gardens around the outer edges of the city where there were smaller populations and likely more open land to use for gardening. How many of these remain as gardens or parks today?