Detroit: In One Home, a Mighty City's Rise and Fall
DETROIT -- On a grassy lot on a quiet block on a graceful boulevard stands the answer to a perplexing question: Why does the typical house in Detroit sell for $7,100?
The brick-and-stucco home at 1626 W. Boston Blvd. has watched almost a century of Detroit's ups and downs, through industrial brilliance and racial discord, economic decline and financial collapse. Its owners have played a part in it all. There was the engineer whose innovation elevated auto makers into kings; the teacher who watched fellow whites flee to the suburbs; the black plumber who broke the color barrier; the cop driven out by crime.
The last individual owner was a subprime borrower, who lost the house when investors foreclosed.
A city that began a slow slide 60 years ago has now entered a free fall, pushed by the twin crises of housing and cars. Detroit's population peaked at 1.85 million in the 1950 census. It is now less than half that. In July, unemployment hit 28.9%, almost triple the national average.
And the median selling price for a home stood at a paltry $7,100 as of July, according to First American CoreLogic Inc., a real-estate research firm -- down from $73,000 three years earlier. A typical house in Cleveland sells for $65,000. One in St. Louis goes for $120,000.
But, battered and forlorn today, both Detroit and 1626 W. Boston Blvd. were solid and optimistic 90 years ago.
Truman Newberry: Laying a Foundation
Early in the 20th century, Detroit was the place to make money, and to Truman H. Newberry, the ground beneath the city's Boston-Edison neighborhood was the way to make it.
Mr. Newberry, the son of a congressman, was a founding investor in Packard Motor Car Co., a maker of luxury autos. A portly man with a pince-nez and bushy moustache, he also dabbled in politics: In the 1918 race for the U.S. Senate, he defeated Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Co.
A campaign-spending scandal quickly brought Mr. Newberry's political career to a halt. But Detroit was growing rapidly -- leaping from the country's 13th most populous city to its fourth in the first two decades of the 1900s -- and Mr. Newberry and his brother owned land in an up-and-coming area called Boston-Edison.
They subdivided it into roomy parcels to accommodate Detroit's newly prosperous.
Clarence Avery: Industrial Innovator
In 1917, the Newberry brothers sold a lot on West Boston Boulevard to Clarence and Lura Avery. The covenants required the Averys to spend at least $5,000 on construction of the new house, which had to sit 50 feet from the front lot line and be built of brick, stone or stucco.
Mr. Avery, born in 1882, taught shop to Henry Ford's son, Edsel."You have an engineering mind," Edsel told Mr. Avery, according to the latter's grandson, Avery Greene.
Soon, through his friendship with Edsel, Mr. Avery landed a job at Ford. He started on a three-month internship at 25 cents an hour. At the time, Mr. Ford was pushing his men to speed production of the Model Ts, each of which then took 12.5 man-hours to build. Today, historians credit Mr. Avery, more than anyone else, for turning Mr. Ford's wishes into a breakthrough that would change the nature of American industry: the moving assembly line.
Mr. Avery wandered Ford's Highland Park plant, stop-watch in hand, learning how the cars were built. He studied meat-packing plants, where hog carcasses were disassembled on a conveyor. His team tested its theories by dragging a car chassis across the factory floor.
The moving assembly line -- on which workers repeated specific tasks as the vehicles passed by -- cut assembly time for a Model T by almost 80%, to 2.7 man-hours.
As Ford and Detroit prospered, so did the Averys. Their move from a small house near the Ford plant to their freshly constructed home on West Boston Boulevard was a steep climb up the social ladder. Henry Ford's own starter mansion stood close by.
The Avery home had four bedrooms and a third-floor suite for the German maid. There was a butler's pantry off of the kitchen and a fireplace in the living room. Mrs. Avery set trellises against the front of the house and hung frilled curtains in the upstairs windows. Shortly after moving in, she gave birth to Anabel in a bedroom facing the street.
"I loved that house," says Anabel Avery Baxley, now 91 and living in Alabama."I don't think I ever felt quite the same about a house as I did about that house."
Autos made a number of Detroiters very rich and they yearned for more exclusive housing. The Averys, too, built a grander home on a wooded lot in ritzy Palmer Woods...
Read entire article at WSJ
The brick-and-stucco home at 1626 W. Boston Blvd. has watched almost a century of Detroit's ups and downs, through industrial brilliance and racial discord, economic decline and financial collapse. Its owners have played a part in it all. There was the engineer whose innovation elevated auto makers into kings; the teacher who watched fellow whites flee to the suburbs; the black plumber who broke the color barrier; the cop driven out by crime.
The last individual owner was a subprime borrower, who lost the house when investors foreclosed.
A city that began a slow slide 60 years ago has now entered a free fall, pushed by the twin crises of housing and cars. Detroit's population peaked at 1.85 million in the 1950 census. It is now less than half that. In July, unemployment hit 28.9%, almost triple the national average.
And the median selling price for a home stood at a paltry $7,100 as of July, according to First American CoreLogic Inc., a real-estate research firm -- down from $73,000 three years earlier. A typical house in Cleveland sells for $65,000. One in St. Louis goes for $120,000.
But, battered and forlorn today, both Detroit and 1626 W. Boston Blvd. were solid and optimistic 90 years ago.
Truman Newberry: Laying a Foundation
Early in the 20th century, Detroit was the place to make money, and to Truman H. Newberry, the ground beneath the city's Boston-Edison neighborhood was the way to make it.
Mr. Newberry, the son of a congressman, was a founding investor in Packard Motor Car Co., a maker of luxury autos. A portly man with a pince-nez and bushy moustache, he also dabbled in politics: In the 1918 race for the U.S. Senate, he defeated Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Co.
A campaign-spending scandal quickly brought Mr. Newberry's political career to a halt. But Detroit was growing rapidly -- leaping from the country's 13th most populous city to its fourth in the first two decades of the 1900s -- and Mr. Newberry and his brother owned land in an up-and-coming area called Boston-Edison.
They subdivided it into roomy parcels to accommodate Detroit's newly prosperous.
Clarence Avery: Industrial Innovator
In 1917, the Newberry brothers sold a lot on West Boston Boulevard to Clarence and Lura Avery. The covenants required the Averys to spend at least $5,000 on construction of the new house, which had to sit 50 feet from the front lot line and be built of brick, stone or stucco.
Mr. Avery, born in 1882, taught shop to Henry Ford's son, Edsel."You have an engineering mind," Edsel told Mr. Avery, according to the latter's grandson, Avery Greene.
Soon, through his friendship with Edsel, Mr. Avery landed a job at Ford. He started on a three-month internship at 25 cents an hour. At the time, Mr. Ford was pushing his men to speed production of the Model Ts, each of which then took 12.5 man-hours to build. Today, historians credit Mr. Avery, more than anyone else, for turning Mr. Ford's wishes into a breakthrough that would change the nature of American industry: the moving assembly line.
Mr. Avery wandered Ford's Highland Park plant, stop-watch in hand, learning how the cars were built. He studied meat-packing plants, where hog carcasses were disassembled on a conveyor. His team tested its theories by dragging a car chassis across the factory floor.
The moving assembly line -- on which workers repeated specific tasks as the vehicles passed by -- cut assembly time for a Model T by almost 80%, to 2.7 man-hours.
As Ford and Detroit prospered, so did the Averys. Their move from a small house near the Ford plant to their freshly constructed home on West Boston Boulevard was a steep climb up the social ladder. Henry Ford's own starter mansion stood close by.
The Avery home had four bedrooms and a third-floor suite for the German maid. There was a butler's pantry off of the kitchen and a fireplace in the living room. Mrs. Avery set trellises against the front of the house and hung frilled curtains in the upstairs windows. Shortly after moving in, she gave birth to Anabel in a bedroom facing the street.
"I loved that house," says Anabel Avery Baxley, now 91 and living in Alabama."I don't think I ever felt quite the same about a house as I did about that house."
Autos made a number of Detroiters very rich and they yearned for more exclusive housing. The Averys, too, built a grander home on a wooded lot in ritzy Palmer Woods...