Author Archives: Alex B. Hill

Map: Historic Detroit Neighborhoods 1884

silas_nhoods

From “The History of Detroit and Michigan” by Detroit’s first cartographer, Silas Farmer.

Excepts on each neighborhood:

“This the larger portion of the territory on Fifth and Sixth Streets, for several blocks each side of Michigan Avenue, is called Corktown, because chiefly occupied by people from the Emerald Isle.

The eastern part of the city, for several blocks on each side of Gratiot Avenue beyond Brush Street, for similar reasons is often spoken of as Dutchtown, or the German quarter.

That part of the city lying a few blocks north of High Street and between Brush and Hastings, is known as Kentucky, from the number of colored people living there.

A walk a few blocks east and north of this locality terminates in the heart of Polacktown, where many Poles reside.

The portion of the city just west of Woodward Avenue and north of Grand River Avenue, forming part of the old Fifth Ward, is sometimes designated as Piety Hill; for the reason that it is largely occupied by well-to-do citizens, who are supposed to largely represent the moral and religious portion of the community.

Peddler’s Point is the name frequently applied to a part of Grand River Avenue near Twelfth Street. The intersection of several streets at that place forms a pointed block, which locality is a favorite place itinerant hucksters to intercept and purchase supplies from farmers coming in on the Grand River Road.

Swill Point is not the very euphonious appellation sometimes given to a portion of Larned Street near Second, because of a distillery formerly located near by.

Atwater and Franklin Streets, for several blocks east of Brush Street, are frequently designated as the Potomac. This locality is near the river, and in memory of a familiar saying of the last war, the phrase “all quiet on the Potomac” indicates that otherwise disturbances might be looked for in the region indicated.

The Heights is a name applied to a region near the westerly end of Fort Street East, occupied in part by former denziens of the Potomac quarter.”

Many of these names remain with Corktown likely being the most recognizable. The development of the expressways changed the neighborhood, but did not wipe it out as it did to neighborhoods like Kentucky along Hastings Street which barely even exists today. Dutchtown isn’t much referred to today, but Germantown Park (Harmonie Park) can still be visited Downtown. Polacktown seems to have morphed into Poletown and the Polish population moving to occupying Hamtramck.

This map also includes the local historic designations. Beyond the 1884 referenced boundary from Silas Farmer, there are only about 4 other major clusters of historic areas. Downtown was a critical zone for various immigrant communities to make their start in Detroit. Greektown is the well known name today, but a series of immigrant groups have cycled through that neighborhood throughout Detroit’s history.

 

Map: Public Health in Detroit 1955

public-health-detroit-1955

This map is from a booklet published by the Detroit Public Schools in 1958 titled, “Detroit: A Citizens Guide.” Among the many informational sections is a section on “public health” in Detroit.

“The commissioner [Department of Public Health] must also collect information on the cases of diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhoid fever, smallpox, pneumonia, and several other diseases that are reported each day. He keeps a record of where these people live, who is taking care of them, and of any deaths. This information is important for the health of the city because it supplies facts on which the health commissioner may lay plans to prevent the spread of disease and promote health. The map on page 150 gives you some of this information, according to the various sections of the city.”

Map: Detroit Neighborhood Strength Index

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A group of University of Michigan urban planning graduate students completed a 2006 report titled, “Planning for Detroit’s Tax-Reverted Properties: Possibilities for the Wayne County Land Bank.” The project was supported by Community Development Advocates of Detroit (CDAD) and funded by Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). From the report:

“Planners working with the City of Detroit’s Planning & Development Department created an index for the City of Detroit using a ranking system to classify areas, where census tracts with a ranking of 1 are the weakest and 10 are the strongest. The average census tract score is 6. This system uses six indicators that serve as the basis for comparison:”

  • Rate of owner-occupancy
  • Number of occupied units
  • Households above the poverty line
  • Median household income
  • Population below age 65
  • Workers employed in professional or managerial occupations

Map: Detroit Water Affordability

detwater_affordability

The standard for affordable water is set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA attempts to stress equity and consideration for low-income individuals. In 1995, the EPA set the first water affordability rate at 2% which is considered a “large economic impact.” Unfortunately, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) among other non-governmental actors disagree with the EPA and have different ideas as to how to pay for and maintain this basic human need and natural resource.

Detroit’s water rate was increased by 8.7% in July 2014 effectively making an average monthly water bill at $70.76 (or $849.12 annually). In order for this $850 annual rate to fit within the EPA’s standard of “affordability” a household would need an annual income of around $40,000. Anyone aware of the situation in Detroit and Census data could tell you that the majority of households in Detroit do not have that level of income and that the median income in Detroit is $26,955. That goes without saying that 40% of Detroit residents live below the poverty line. For the Detroit average household of 3, less than $19,790 is living below the poverty line.

All of these numbers show that 303,389 households in Detroit have an income less than $39,900 making almost 80% of Detroit households vulnerable in regards to water affordability.

Event: Network Detroit 2014 – Detroit Cartographies

Network Detroit is an event focused on digital humanities. I was approached to give a presentation on the efforts of this blog to catalog, share, and create maps of Detroit. I get a lot of information and maps from both digital libraries hosted by universities as well as public libraries and archives.

Bringing together the libraries, universities, and museums of Southeast Michigan, Network Detroit is a conference aimed at sharing and promoting cutting-edge digital work in the humanities. The conference will be held at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan on September 26-27, 2014.

Friday, September 26th

11:00-12:30 p.m.

Panel I:  Detroit Cartographies

  • Peter Leonard, Yale University, “Ghost Streets of Detroit: Towards an Online Historical Gazetteer of the Motor City.”
  • Alex B. Hill  Wayne State University, “Archiving Cartography as Method to Understand Detroit’s Present and Future.”
  • Kim Lacey, Saginaw Valley State University, “’Detroit is a Shithole’: Matthew Barney and the City.”

I will be part of the first panel discussion. I’m not sure the direction of the discussion based on the other panelists, but am looking forward to sharing what I have learned over the past year of digging up Detroit’s history to understand its present through maps. The event is free to undergraduate and graduate students, so please consider coming out to support. There will be a number of presenters from Wayne State University’s Anthropology program later that same day.

Map: Detroit Postal Area Codes 1946

PostOfficeMap1946small

Thanks to the DetroitYES forum post by MikeM:

This map from 1946 shows the postal zones (forerunners of the ZIP code system) for Detroit. I think these were introduced around the time of WWII. Each zone had its own office and a lot of the zone numbers eventually became the last two digits of the ZIP code. As the city grew some of the zones were further divided.

 

 

Map: Detroit Percent of Land in Farms 1900 – 1959

se_mi_pct_land_in_farms

This beautiful series of maps, among many others, come from a three volume set of books commissioned by DTE in the 1970s titled, Emergence and Growth of an Urban Region: The Developing Urban Detroit Area. Constantinos Doxiadis was hired by DTE because of his focus on the “science of urban settlements” which he called Ekistics.

These maps help to show how the Detroit region shifted from an agricultural focus to industrial as population and industry grew over time.

 

 

Map: Detroit Transit Dependency Index

Screen Shot 2014-08-10 at 7.22.55 AM

This is another map from the research work of Nicholas Grisham, Terra Reed, and Kevin Shelton of the University of Michigan. As part of their deeper look into the Social Justice Impacts of Transit Reductions in Detroit, they developed a “transit dependency index” (TDI) index score for each Census Tract.

The TDI score is based on vehicle owership, elderly population, youth population, and median income within each Census Tract. The score doesn’t reveal any clear pattern across Detroit, but does show an interesting set of darker TDI areas along Detroit’s major avenues: Woodward, Grand River, and Gratiot. These routes have some of the highest bus ridership, but due to the nature of Census Tracts, might not make sense for all residents of Detroit.

 

 

Detroit Flood Insurance Map 1981

Detroit FEMA 1981

This map (with an interesting take on the Detroit border) is unfortunately timely in its discovery after the recent flooding. The map is a part of a 1981 study of flood insurance and flood plain issues in Detroit.

“This Flood Insurance Study investigates the existence and severity of flood hazards in the City of Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, […]”

The study was to cover areas of low development for potential upcoming flood risk as far into the future as 1983 and there was a focus on the shoreline because it was highly developed and “susceptible to flooding and erosion.” The report later notes that the shoreline area of the City of Detroit had a very low likelihood of flooding. There haven’t been ferry boats on Downtown streets since composite photography made some stunning fake postcards in the early 20th century.

Source: Detroit Historical Society

The 1970s also saw some serious flooding:

“One of the most sever recent storms which affected the eastern portion of Detroit occurred on November 13 and 14, 1972. Storms on these dates, combined with a high lake St. Clair level, caused flooding which inundated approximately 800 homes within the city. This resulted in gross property damage estimated at $2 million. The storm of March 17 and 18, 1973, inundated an estimated 600 acres of the urban Detroit area.”

The study’s final recommendations were to develop a floodway that could handle a 100-year flood. It seems that the recommendations of this report were not followed.

 

 

Map: Detroit Pingree Potato Patches 1896

pingree_patches_1896Mayor Hazen Pingree launched an elaborate plan to help employ and feed Detroit residents affected by the economic depression of 1893, which was a result of overbuilding and financing of the railroads. In the Report of Agricultural Committee of the cultivation of idle land by the poor and unemployed, John Conline recommended:

“[…] that the city purchase, if practicable, 200 or more acres of land on either side of Woodward avenue, to be used as farms, fenced and provided with inexpensive store houses for tools, seeds, etc. with an intelligent overseer or superintendent for each division.

In short, have the Pingree Detroit Plan so systematically arranged in advance in all its details, that work which is now spread over six weeks, can be concentrated into one week or less time, and the entire issue of lots and seed be confined to a single day.

These farms can, as the city becomes larger, be converted into parks.”

Map: Detroit Transit Efficiency

transit_efficiency_mit

This is another project that comes from MIT Media Lab’s You Are Here that looks at transit efficiency. This one I have less of a problem with than StreetScore. There are glaring issues with public transit in Detroit and this map helps to show how much the system is potentially failing large sections of the city. The missing piece is obviously anecdotal information about how long it really takes to get from one point to another on DDOT buses, such as: wait times, delays, no buses, etc. My only critique would be to include some reference roads and streets because no one knows their Census Tracts. The pictured tract received a “transit efficiency” score of 0.0 out of 10.0. It happens to be the Census Tract where I currently live and indicates that I would need to walk a while before being able to efficiently use public transit.

“This map visualizes the efficiency of the public transit infrastructure for different neighborhoods in the city. For each point in the city, we query the times it takes to reach every other point by riding public transit and by driving a car. We then divide the former with latter. This ratio represents the efficiency of a transit system. We normalize each scores by dividing it by the maximum ratio in a city and multiplying by 10, giving a relative transit efficiency score for each neighborhood. Darker areas (closer to 0) are transit deserts where cars are a necessity, while lighter areas (closer to 10) are places where public transit represents a more viable alternative.”

Map: Detroit’s Black Neighborhoods 1940

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This map appears in The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue. It is often easy to forget that most of what is exciting and “happening” in Detroit today once represented the pinnacle of the Black middle class in America. Paradise Valley, extending from the Riverfront nearly to Highland Park, grew after Black migration to Detroit after WWII. It was a hot spot for music, entertainment, and also the seedy covert businesses that go along. The flip side of all of this was that these areas were also representative of the worst housing and conditions because Blacks were not allowed to live or buy homes anywhere else. This often led to overcrowding, disease, and concentration of poverty. This was the oldest housing and prone to fires. Sugrue notes that Paradise Valley represented 12% of the city’s housing, but one third of all fires. The Lower Eastside was also referenced as the “rat belt” because there were 206 rat bites between 1951-52.

The Westside neighborhood around Tireman and Grand Blvd. was where many sought to get away from the overcrowding. These families represented more upwardly mobile black families (ministers, business leaders, professionals) who took great pride in their “high-level” homes and neighborhood.

Eight Mile-Wyoming was an area settled by Black migrants in the 1920s when it was still empty farmland. Families built temporary homes and usually farmed the adjacent vacant lots.

Conant Gardens was considered the most exclusive Black neighborhood where residents had the highest incomes and the majority owned their own homes. Residents here actually sided with White homeowners in opposing the Sojourner Truth housing complex because it would bring down their exclusive status.

Source: Sugrue, T. J. (2005). The origins of the urban crisis: Race and inequality in postwar Detroit. Princeton University Press.

Detroit Bus Ridership Map 2013

ddot_bus_2013

After looking into the DDOT data via TextMyBus for a while, I had been very interested in ridership and where people were riding the bus the most. All the issues with DDOT aside, my main question was: ‘what routes were transporting the most people.’ The data that I have obviously doesn’t account for where people got on or off, but rather an aggregate number of riders for the year on a particular route. Not surprisingly, the busiest routes are on Detroit’s main artery roads:

Agency Route Num Name TOTAL
DDOT 53 Woodward 3,029,371
DDOT 16 Dexter 2,549,735
DDOT 21 Grand River 2,399,730
DDOT 34 Gratiot 2,038,153
DDOT 45 Seven Mile 1,573,339

The crosstown routes were also busier than others with 7 Mile, 8 Mile, Crosstown, and Jefferson routes all moving at least 1 million riders.

The top SMART routes also follow Detroit’s main arteries (Gratiot, Michigan, Grand River), but tend to have an expected focus on routes that travel North-South from suburbs to city, such as Van Dyke or Southfield-Greenfield. With the passage of the recent SMART millage, these data show that SMART is an important connector for many people to travel between the city and suburbs and vice versa.

smart_bus_2013

Map: Educational Achievement Authority Schools in Detroit

EAA-school-map2

The controversial Educational Achievement Authority (EAA) was established by Governor Snyder as a statewide school district for failing schools. However, the EAA only consists of Detroit Public Schools and has faced difficult legal, financial, and safety concerns through its operations. The most alarming fact that demonstrates that people are not happy with the program is that EAA schools have seen student enrollment drop drastically (24% drop in enrollment).

There doesn’t seem to be anything geographically significant within the city limits. There are notably no EAA schools near the Downtown/ Midtown areas of “revitalization.”

EDIT: 08/07/14 Read this excellent look into the world of charter school profiteering in Detroit, The Charter School Profiteers

Data: 2014 Adopted and Maintained Detroit City Parks

cityparks

Out of 4763.78 acres of city parks, excluding golf courses and cemeteries, 3256.89 of those acres are being regularly mowed by the city or have been adopted by a community organization, church, corporation, etc. What do you do with 1506.89 acres of unmaintained city-owned greenspace? Obviously, maintaining vacant land and keeping track is difficult, but there must be a better system to keep check on these kinds of community assets.

Unfortunately, the adopted parks list, the scorecards, and the mowing schedules lists had many discrepancies in park names, spelling, etc. These various issues must have come from disparate databases. Alfonso is changed to Alonzo, Ramsey is changed to Ramsay, Dr. AW Diack Playground is listed as simply “Diak,” Max Sawyer is referred to as Sawyer Playground – I’m not sure how the city can keep it all straight. I couldn’t tell you how many double name parks were just reversed (i.e. Beland-Manning –> Manning-Beland) or hyphen versus ampersand versus “and” versus a slash. You would think that there would be a single database used within the same department. The parks are a good test case for updating and improving city databases and tracking systems. There should be a single, solid database of information on parks, adoption, and tracking.

[Detroit Park Locations – Polygons] “Location of Detroit Park Areas in polygon format (shows boundaries) including size, condition and use of park.” – Detroit Data Collaborative (D3), 02/24/11

[Parks Landmarks] “Municipal Parks and Landmark features for the City of Detroit. Includes golf courses, City Airport and civic plazas. Does not include all school parks, unless they are maintained by Detroit Parks and Rec. This layer was developed by Data Driven Detroit by adding to a GIS file that was provided by the City in 2010. Some parks in the file may have been “abandoned” and are not maintained any longer.” – D3 Open Data, 02/11/14

Even these two openly available GIS files were full of errors with naming and did not match. Not to mention the polygons were different shape and quality.

Data sources:

Highlighting: Yellow (city mowing + adopted), Red (naming discrepancy or missing from city lists)

Map: Detroit’s Class Divide

detroitcityWEB

This map comes from a series by Richard Florida of The Atlantic’s City Lab looking at class in the USA through the lens of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS).

“[…] today’s three major classes: the shrinking middle of blue-collar workers in manufacturing, transportation, and maintenance; the rising numbers of highly paid knowledge, professional, and creative workers in the creative class; and the even larger and faster-growing ranks of lower-paid, lower-skill service workers.” (Link)

It is not surprising to see the pockets of Detroit’s creative class in the well-known neighborhoods (Lafayette Park, Corktown, East Riverfront, Midtonw Palmer Woods, Grandmont-Rosedale) that get a lot of attention while the rest of Detroiters are primarily in service worker roles. The expansive service class represents the loss of Detroit industry and the loss economic opportunity for Detroit’s residents.

More from the author:

“Much of the city outside of the downtown core has literally been abandoned. More than 25 percent of the city’s residential parcels (more than 90,000) are empty lots, and another 10 percent (33,500 parcels) are vacant homes, according to a comprehensive 2010 survey.

Detroit’s creative class is located along the lakeshore in the city, as the map above indicates, in a narrow strip that runs north along Jefferson Avenue from downtown through historic Indian Village towards Grosse Pointe. Home to Wayne State University and major arts and cultural institutions, rapidly revitalizing Midtown has also drawn a growing creative class population.

The purple blotch in the north is upscale Palmer Woods, noted for its large Tudor homes close to Detroit Golf Club. The neighborhood was founded in the early 20th century as an exclusive enclave for auto industry barons, including the founders of Fisher Body, and is where a number of Motown recording artists live today.”

Map: The Future of Detroit’s City Parks

cityparks

Parks in Detroit have had an interesting history and have had a busy few years. Some started as urban gardens on vacant land while others have been donated by families. Some parks have historic designations while others still have private land deed holders. This summer WDET has started a Detroit Park Watch blog and has been commenting on how Duggan has been managing to keep parks open and maintained. The volunteer “Detroit Mower Gang” sees fewer parks that need help, but also community gardens and greenspaces have been cleared or mown down by the city. There is also controversy over the city selling 15-acre Lipke park to the Salvation Army.

I did some mapping with parks data in 2012 when Mayor Bing announced the closing of 51 city parks, but it was very difficult since park names were listed differently in different databases. Bing was able to raise $14 million to keep the parks and recreation centers open that summer as part of the “Active & Safe” program. 119 churches and nonprofits stepped up to “adopt” parks and a 10-14 day mowing schedule was instituted for high use parks, while low use parks were placed on a 3 week mowing schedule. The program also allowed for a permanent staff member at 5 parks: Palmer, Patton, Clark , Farwell, and Lasky for daily maintenance.

Mayor Mike Duggan has continued a similar program of selecting “premier parks” (n=23) and encouraging park adoption (n=76) to keep as many parks open as possible. There is a current list of 76 adopted parks ranging from corporations to churches. Something new that Duggan’s administration has started is a scorecard for groups that have adopted a park based on how well they have maintained mowing, trimming, etc. Partners who have adopted a park are given a score between 1 and 9, the average so far is a 6 for most parks. The city has mowing schedules for 165 city parks, but these also overlap with 16 adopted parks, so it is unclear if they are scoring themselves or their park “partners.” Additionally, that leaves 112 “city maintained” parks without a clear plan. Among those 112 is one of the city’s “premier” parks, Stoepel No. 1.

 

Detroit Rapid Transit Planning Map 1945

det-highway-planning-1945

It is always interesting to find old transit plans in Detroit. In 1945, the plan for rapid transit was still young. You can see the East-West route slides down to Jefferson near Conner Ave and seems planned to end where the Jefferson North Assembly Plant is today. This plan I think still holds relevance today because the continued importance of Detroit’s spoke streets and main road arteries. Grand River, Woodward, Gratiot, and Michigan Avenues are all still very busy and key routes in and out of Detroit.

What stands out the most from this plan is the various modes of transit: streetcar, trolley, rapid bus routes, and even a planned subway. Just imagine if today the M-10 Lodge Freeway was instead a subway system? How many parking lots would we see Downtown?

 

Map: Watch Detroit’s Businesses Wake Up

Detroit_awake

This fascinating visual from The Social Computing Group at MIT Media Lab called You Are Here relies on opening hours of Detroit businesses. By 8am the whole city seems to be awake and into the early hours of the night/morning there are only a handful of 24 hour businesses. There is obviously a lot of businesses focused Downtown, but I wonder how comprehensive their dataset is for smaller businesses outside of the Downtown/Midtown area?

They also did a cool thing where they paired down roads to the most active for businesses throughout the day.

Map: Detroit Motor Bus City Routes 1924

DMB_routemap-city1924I came across this map from the Detroit Transit History website and immediately thought of The Detroit Bus Company.

Organized back in 1919 by Herbert Y. McMullen (an automobile accessory and supply distributor), the Detroit Motorbus Company would become the first permanently successful transit bus company to provide motor coach service within the city of Detroit.  To help gain the support of the public as to the type of service it would be providing, the company began operating a sample prototype double-decker bus on demonstrator trips to hotels, banks and department stores within the central business district, and along Woodward Avenue.

It is hard to imagine a time when buses did not traverse the city of Detroit, but largely up until 1924 public transportation was all street railways. The Department of Street Railways (DSR) began its first bus lines in 1925. By 1930, the Detroit Motorbus Company (DMB) was running 395 buses within the city and the suburbs. In 1931, the city began negotiations with DMB to takeover its operations as a way to eliminate competition. By 1932 many of the DMB lines had been taken over by the city and many of the DMB’s suburban lines still exist as SMART bus lines today.