PHOTO 02
Brick underfoot, raking light
4:3 landscape
The paving
A brick walkway takes different care than asphalt. It settles, it heaves in the freeze, and repairs happen by hand instead of by machine.
Pallister Street
Two blocks from the Fisher Building, on a street the automobile was politely asked to leave.
In the shadow of the Fisher
Albert Kahn finished the Fisher Building in 1928, and for a while New Center was Detroit's second downtown, with General Motors, the theatre, the shops, and the whole apparatus of a company town built at the scale of a boulevard.
Pallister sits just behind it, and it was never grand. Frame houses on narrow lots, built in the early 1910s for the people who worked in buildings like that rather than the people who commissioned them: two storeys, hip roofs, covered porches, painted siding with wood shake above.
By the 1960s the area had declined, and General Motors funded a rescue called New Center Commons. It renovated houses and, unusually, rerouted traffic around the neighborhood entirely. Pallister stopped being a street and became a brick-paved walkway.
- 1910s
- Houses built
- 1928
- Fisher Building completed
- 1970s
- Closed to traffic
- 1982
- Historic district designated
PHOTO 04
Front steps and covered entry on one house
3:4 portrait
What upkeep means here
The houses on Pallister are privately owned and privately maintained. The ground between them belongs to everyone, which makes it harder to look after.
PHOTO 03
A lamp standard from below
4:3 landscape
The lamps
With no vehicle traffic there are no headlights and no highway-scale lighting. The historic standards along the walk are all the lighting the block has.
PHOTO 06
Canopy from below, full leaf
4:3 landscape
The canopy
Street trees are most of what makes the walkway usable on an August afternoon. They also have a lifespan, and replacing them takes planning well before the old ones come down.
Supporting the block
Historic districts are protected from demolition, but not from deferred maintenance. The shared parts of Pallister (the walkway, the lighting, the trees) fall between what individual owners pay for and what the city budgets for.
We are looking at how neighbors, former residents, and anyone who cares about Detroit's historic districts might help close that gap. Nothing is set up yet. If you want to hear more as it develops, get in touch.