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.
Brush Park
Edmund Busch, recognizing the rising value of his family’s plot north of downtown, began developing it as a neighborhood for the city’s emerging elite.
