About Looking for the Past in the Present: A Walking Tour of SCS

 

As a second part of this project, I set off on a walking tour of my neck of the woods in SCS. When doing so, I was inspired by several ideas. First, in her book about place and its relationship to writing, Nedra Reynolds argues that a physical place is like a palimpsest, a text that has been written over whereby only small traces of the original exists. Reynolds also encourages walking as a means for analyzing and thinking about place. I also was inspired by Hayden's claims in her book, Building Suburbia, when she describes several different types of suburbs. Since much of SCS was developed in the 1950s, again, Hayden might call it a "sitcom surburb." But she also points out that "[m]ost American suburbs contain more than one physical [pattern]." Like Reynolds, Hayden encourages us to look around and remember when she writes, "Identifying old patterns means asking, 'What time is this place?'" (235). Even though many of its buildings were built in the 1950s, I hypothesize that SCS is also a type of "Edge Node" suburb described as such by Hayden. Such suburbs grew out of 1920s road culture, when roads, small restaurants and gas stations were built to encourage and accommodate proliferating drivers as car ownership became standard. Edge node suburbs are often vulnerable to sprawl because their development has been organic and there is often no center. Perhaps this is why SCS has no real "downtown." It grew from its edges and from the small businesses supporting travelers in cars along its main drags--Harper and Jefferson Avenues.

In sum, I headed off on my walking tour of Harper Avenue looking at my suburb as a "palimpsest" where I hoped to find "traces" of 1920s road culture like the cottages along Jefferson Avenue that also serve as memory keepers of the city's past. While walking along a few miles of Harper Avenue, I indeed found several buildings that look like they might be old roadhouses, gas stations and businesses built before the city's growth spurt when SCS was a mere "edge node" of Detroit.

  
1920s era homes that are along the lake. (Read more)

 

 
An obvious remnant of 1920s road culture is the Blue Goose Inn which still stands and operates on Jefferson Ave.
 

 

 

 
An early SCS gas station at Harper and Little Mack, Blue Sunoco. In 1928 SCS had at least nine gas stations. Like today, early gas stations were stocked with food and maps and provided restrooms for "pleasure drivers." (Bienek 23).

 
Cars along Harper Avenue.
This was called Margolie's Inn and is pictured here around 1912. It was once on Jefferson and Nine Mile Rd. It was sold during Prohibition which was the beginning of SCS's first growth spurt after World War I (Black 19).

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I found several buildings that definitely looked like they were built long before the city's growth spurt in 1950, "traces" of the city's past. One of the buildings on the left I think might have been a gas station. The building in the middle looks like it could be on Main Street, USA. I have since visited Grissam's Pub on the right to learn that its business predates cars. I will be looking into these histories more!

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