A Model Home - 1940

A Ladies Home Journal model home in 1940, 22920 Wellington, designed by Architect Lewis Welch and built by Gerhardy Construction Company has both Dutch-Colonial and Cape Cod style. Featured in The Detroit Free Press as a “distinctive home,” a June 1940 article highlights many new advances in building materials used in its construction. “The exterior is finished in oyster white asbestos siding and the roof is in contrasting green asphalt shingle and window shutters are in matching color.  All windows are of the wood casement type.” At the time it was built, at a cost of $5000, the house consisted of six rooms and one bathroom. Today, the home is well-preserved, looking much the same after 84 years, just with updated shutter color and and the covered porch removed.

First owners Stanley and Edith Case became local celebrities.  The popular series “How America Lives” in the Ladies Home Journal documented the Case family’s move from their $35/month rental on Audette Street into their newly built Wellington Street home on Stanley’s $1,600/year salary as a tool inspector in the Cadillac plant.  The Cases even starred in a film about themselves, called What So Proudly We Hail, produced for GM. They were shown to be a “typical” family, economizing during the war years and striving for the American Dream. 

In 1953, The Detroit Free Press followed up with the family 13 years after they moved in. The family reminisced about when they first moved to Wellington Street, their home felt like it was out in the country. There were only 5 other houses on the block and they picked wild blackberries in nearby fields. In 1953, the Cases acknowledged that the wild blackberries were gone and houses lined their street, but by that time, they were close to paying off their mortgage and had a mature garden of their own.

Visit Preservation Dearborn on Facebook or Instagram for all our features on historic homes and buildings! Research by Elizabeth Podges. Visit Preservation Dearborn on Facebook or Instagram for all our features on historic homes and buildings!

 “Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration….” -- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities  

This North Brady house, which was built in 1953 as a showplace home in the just-developing Country Club Estates neighborhood, has been skillfully “regenerated” for more modern tastes.  In May of 1953 a feature in the Detroit Free Press described the home:  “Five-level house is under construction on North Brady Street near Cherry Hill in Dearborn. On main level are kitchen, dining room. Few steps above this are two bedrooms, bath. Living room is on a third level, large activities room on fourth. Basement contains laundry.  Richard B. Pollman is builder. Brook runs near house.”  

The Richard B. Pollman company was headquartered in Detroit and built prestigious homes throughout the Metropolitan Detroit area.  Advertisements for the company at the time used the marketing slogan:  “Let us custom design a Convenient Living home for you on your lot or ours.”   They offered over 400 home designs to choose from. 

The first owners of the home were Alf E. and Florence Dietrich.  Alf was living in Highland Park and working for Dietrich Funeral Car Service when he left to serve in World War II.  In 1950, he was back in Highland Park living with a brother and running his own Detroit-based business, London Luggage. The year 1953 was a big one for the Dietrichs – they were married at Greenfield Village and bought the house on North Brady.   Alf and Florence raised two daughters and two sons in the home.   Alf was 100 years old at the time of his death in Florida in 2019.  

📸 Zillow,  research by Sharon Morton

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The oldest home in the Levagood neighborhood is this little-known modernized farmhouse on Silvery Lane, just south of Ford Road.

It wasn’t built there. Originally, this home anchored an 80-acre farm stretching from Ford Road to Wilson. 

John and Gertrude Wilhelmi, both German immigrants, first settled this 80-acre farm in 1866. John had just returned from Civil War service. They lived here together for nearly 40 years. Their home was probably built in the 1880s. Their son ran the farm into the 1920s. But he couldn’t hold out against subdividers.

Detroit real estate mogul Edith Mae Cummings purchased the entire Wilhelmi farm in 1925. Within 3 years, she platted the Cummings Park Annex Subdivision, and began selling lots for suburban homes. She saved the best lots for herself – and built the famous Kingsbury Castle in 1928.

Their little house, meanwhile, lived on. The Wilhelmis rented it to neighbors William and Ida Lab after their marriage in 1914. Around 1926, William Lab moved the home to Silvery Lane. The home has been modernized through the years, but retains the characteristic shape of a classic Michigan farmhouse today. 

📸 and research by Ian Tomashik

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Charles Chauvin, Sr. built this brick foursquare home on Michigan Ave. around 1915. It was later moved to Charles Street, where it stands today. 

His ancestor, Francois Chauvin, arrived in the area in 1636. Chauvin was sent by the French government to survey the ‘New World.’ He became close to the Potawatomi Indians who helped him portage around the Niagara Falls to the Detroit River and on to the Rouge River. He decided it would be a good place to live.

A later Chauvin descendent purchased a ‘ribbon farm’ stretching from the Rouge River to Michigan Avenue, in 1795. The parcel once included 196 acres. The Chauvin family maintained the property through the French, British, and American Colonial periods until it became part of Springwells Township.
 

Starting in 1923, the home became a showroom for Robert Ford’s fledgling dealership. A 1931 ad remembers, “we used the living room of the home as an office, and the front lawn as a showroom. The service department… was located in a barn at the rear.” Eventually, Ford’s dealership grew and became Fairlane Ford, now Mission Ford. The home was moved to Charles Street around 1929.

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While Robert Oakman is primarily known in Dearborn for his development of the Oakman Boulevard neighborhood spanning both Dearborn and Detroit, a parallel experiment was underway in the spring of 1931 when new home construction was booming. 

Aiming to provide better housing in the lower rental bracket, the land company planned and constructed three terraces with a $200,000 investment. The size of the undertaking was impressive: the terraces, on Schaefer and on Miller Roads, would house 64 families. “West Side Terraces Add to Spring Construction Volume” read the headline on February 15, 1931. One terrace was designed along English lines; the other two had American Colonial precedent. The larger terraces are two stories in height and include a full basement but even the smaller terrace homes had “a Murphy bed and combination kitchen / diner”. Walls and partitions were constructed throughout of solid brick to be relatively sound-proof and damp-proof, also reducing heating costs, while future tenants could be assured that “every improvement and comfort known in modern home construction will be incorporated”. 

These quaint row houses with less than 1000 square feet on Miller Road attracted such tenants as Thomas Flanagan, a mechanic for the fire department with his wife, Bessie, or Frank Mosher, a credit manager for the Universal Credit Company, all able to set up home within comfortable and affordable surroundings. By 1932, salesmen, clerks, die makers, commercial engineers and a serviceman for the Kelvinator Company were among the tenants on Miller Road. Oakman had achieved his objective, providing modern housing for every price range. 

📸 by Paolo Mastrogiacomo, research by Mariya Fogarasi

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This amazing building on Warren, near Shatila Bakery, is a remarkable design by Albert Kahn and was once called "one of the largest and finest furniture warehouses in America".
 

It was erected in 1929 by the People’s Outfitting Company between Maple and Williamson Avenues. Kahn was quoted as proudly saying: “This structure incorporates practically every ultra-modern feature of warehouse design. It fronts 321 feet on Warren Avenue and extends 600 feet south along the railroad. By using a decorative face brick front, with shops along the entire Warren Avenue frontage, it has been possible to develop a beautiful exterior that will be a distinct credit to the community.”
 

The People's Outfitting Company was founded in 1893 in Detroit. The store's motto was: 'It's easy to pay - the People's way!' and allowed shoppers to buy everything from cameras to jewelry to furniture on no-interest credit. It featured a showroom and store on its ground floor and would have been the Aviation Subdivision's premier retailer.
 

The Dearborn warehouse became a J.L. Hudson’s distribution center. In 1995, the Hollingsworth Logistics Management Company bought the building which stands today as a testament to Kahn’s genius and creativity in industrial design.
 

📸 by Paolo Mastrogiacomo, research by Mariya Fogarasi   Visit Preservation Dearborn on Facebook or Instagram for all our features on historic homes and buildings!

The Henry Ford II World Center opened in 1956. 

Often referred to as “The Glass House” for its glass facade, it was designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore Owings and Merrill in the International Style. It consists of a 12- story glass tower with a 3 story “slab” behind it.

Light was the defining feature of the 12-story tower designed by Bunshaft. To this end, the facade design called for alternating rows of tinted heat absorbing glass in aluminum frames and bands of porcelain-glazed steel panels. In total, approximately five acres of glass wrap the building which allowed natural light to flood into the interior. 

The structural design of the building also allows natural light to flood into the interior. Structural columns were pushed to the exterior of the facade and into the core, creating wide open floor plates. This allowed for highly flexible work spaces partitioned by glass and wood panels. Light was further diffused with the use of fiberglass curtains and luminous ceiling tiles.

The three-story slab in the rear of the building was designed by Natalie de Blois, at a time when it was very rare to have a woman in such a position in an architecture firm. The slab consisted of a diverse mix of programming, including dining rooms, a cafeteria, sandwich shops, a barber shop, photographic studios and a parking deck for 1500 cars.

and research by Paolo Mastrogiacomo  Visit Preservation Dearborn on Facebook or Instagram for all our features on historic homes and buildings!

“The Castle,” in the Aviation subdivision, was built in 1928. It’s rumored that the builder “met an untimely death” and never lived here.  The home's first residents were Walter and Agatha Swiacki.  Their son later said the home was used as part of a scheme to illegally import rum from Canada during Prohibition.  The Swiacki's divorced, and Walter lived alone in the house. Local lore has it that baseball legend and Tigers manager “Micky” Cochrane once rented here. Meanwhile, Walter and Agatha’s only shared son, Gerald, built a successful life for himself. He married Navy inspector Helen Chlosta in 1942, and eventually became a physician. By 1955, Dr. and Mrs. Swiacki had returned to The Castle. They lived here until 1977.

📸 by Paolo Mastrogiacomo, research by Ian Tomashik Visit Preservation Dearborn on Facebook or Instagram for all our features on historic homes and buildings!

Built for James Edward Greene, this one-and-a-half story house on Alexandrine originally was a wood-framed Craftsman home. In the fall of 1928, a sulfur well in ‘the flats’ (the Rouge River floodplain across the street) developed a crack in its cap. When workers removed the cap to repair it, significant concentrations of hydrogen sulfide vapor discolored area homes, turning them black and grey. Shortly afterward, the Greene house was refaced with brick and expanded in all directions. Additions included a compound-gabled Tudor-style front, a side gabled dormer, and an archway on the left side.  📸 by Alan Balaka, research by Karen Milligan & Christopher Merlo.  Visit Preservation Dearborn on Facebook or Instagram for all our features on historic homes and buildings!

This brick Colonial is the former residence of Henry Ford’s sister, Margaret Ford Ruddiman. Many components of the structure originally comprised the Ruddiman farmstead, a large brick farmhouse located near Southfield Road and Warren Ave. Due to the widening of Southfield, the house was dismantled, and parts of it were reused on River Lane under the supervision of Edward Cutler, architect in charge of building restorations at Greenfield Village. Items reused from the original house included the original walnut banister, hand-hewn fireplace mantle, and a great number of bricks. 📸 by Alan Balaka, Research by Ian Tomashik 

The Buck/Hainline House / Folk Victorian / c.1902 The houses on Mason Street between the railroad tracks and Monroe, along with those on Park between Mason and Tenny, are the oldest blocks of intact neighborhoods in West Dearborn. This lovely folk Victorian home stands on land originally owned by the Sloss family. William and Margaret Sloss, both born in Ireland, moved from Detroit to Dearbornville in the 1830’s. They bought 100 acres south of Michigan Avenue to farm and also ran a store. The Sloss store stood on the present site of Comerica Bank, at Michigan and Mason’s SW corner. 

The grandson of William and Margaret, Arthur, sold lot number 78 to William Buck in 1902. Buck, sometimes listed as Bock in census reports, was born in Mecklenburg, Germany and emigrated to the U.S. in 1868.  Listed as a laborer, he was most likely a retired farmer. Tax assessments indicate the house was built in that same year by either the Dittmer Brothers of Livernois Avenue in Detroit or Gus and Charles Coates of Taylor. 

This charming house was of similar design to others on the street, all built between 1895 and 1904. Materials were purchased from the Wallace lumber yard. On the back of each lot were large red barns which housed carriages and driving horses.  📸 by Ian Tomashik, research by Mariya Fogarasi 

Preservation isn’t always about what’s happened in the past. Sometimes, it’s about recognizing and recording when history is being made – and successfully rehabilitating old buildings, no matter their clout, to serve modern demands. 

The concrete block commercial building at 13810 Michigan Avenue hasn’t always been an iconic landmark. But that didn’t stop Haraz Coffee House owner Hamzah Nasser from choosing this site to help revitalize Dearborn’s East Downtown district. Since at least 1961, this was the home of Stanley Agency, Inc., who achieved an enduring 50-year run in the local insurance sales business. For many years, its textured brick façade advertised the business with large black letters set against a grey-painted background. 

Nasser’s 2020 renovation preserved the building’s signature brick entryway but reimagined its streetscape by cutting a new entrance and several large windows into its parking lot wall. Ornate metalwork and creative lighting now tie both facades into a single patio-like environment that wraps toward the neighborhood. 

Haraz House isn’t just a great place to grab a coffee or meet up with friends. It’s also Dearborn’s latest example of how updating historic streetscapes blends cultures old and new, and opens a window of Dearborn history that we can enjoy in the present. 📸 by Paolo Mastrogiacomo, research by Ian Tomashik