History

The Voice of Detroit Neighborhoods: Midtown as a Planned Mixed-Use Neighborhood

As Detroit once again rises and experiences growth, rebirth, and reconstruction in many areas of our City, including the near-completion of the El Moore , we are experiencing how Detroit is attempting to balance the maze of freeways that cut through our neighborhoods and the goal of many neighborhoods to become more walkable and pedestrian-friendly. …

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A close-up look at Cass Farms

Local history and architecture nerds, rejoice! While doing some web research on A.C. Varney, the original architect of the El Moore (1898), we discovered a remarkably detailed document about the history of our neighborhood that we’ve never seen before. We thought you might like to have a look, too. The unassumingly titled Historic and Architectural Resources of the Cass Farm …

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Where Did Everyone Go?

  It has been well publicized. Decades of severe loss of population, an under-performing public school system, an economy heavily dependent on just one industry, abandoned homes, crime out of control (including the infamous title of the nation’s murder capital). Yes, I’m referring to Washington D.C. a few decades ago. OK, well, maybe it has not been …

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What’s In a Name?

Well, apparently, a bit more than we thought. In an earlier post, we introduced readers to Charles W. Moore, the person who, for $24,000, funded the construction of the El Moore apartments in 1898.  After a bit more research, we discovered that there were, in fact, two Charles W. Moores who lived in Detroit during that …

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Construction Update – Week of December 1, 2014

At a certain point in any construction project you begin to notice things coming together, and you view the project in a different way. You are able to identify the building as something greater than the sum of its parts. This week I believe we reached that tipping point. The addition of cobblestones and permeable …

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The Greenhouse – Using Our Past to Build Our Future (podcast)

This episode of our podcast series Stories of the El Moore shares the stories about the new Greenhouse building at the El Moore project in Detroit.  It is part of a larger project to explore the nature of sustainable urban living centered on an 1898 abandoned apartment building in a small neighborhood in Detroit.  It describes …

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