Detroit’s population swelled after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825. So entrepreneur Edmund Busch — recognizing the rising value of his family’s plot just north of downtown — began developing the area as a neighborhood for the city’s emerging elite. Three hundred homes had been built in Brush Park by the time famed architect Albert Kahn built himself a house in the ’hood in 1906. But the advent of streetcars and automobiles eventually led people to seek homes farther from the city’s center, and the area — now bounded by Mack, Woodward, Beaubien, and the Fisher freeway — fell into disrepair. More recently, however, the neighborhood has undergone a resurrection. Now among the loft and condo developments, a little piece of pre-industrial Detroit’s stately stance still stands. This regal residence, built in 1901 by lumber baron Joseph F. Weber, sits near the northern border of the neighborhood.
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