Pallister Street

New Center Area Historic District, Detroit

Two blocks from the Fisher Building, on a street the automobile was politely asked to leave.

The Pallister Street walkway at dusk. Brick paving runs the length of the block between two rows of lit lamp standards, under a full canopy of trees, with houses set back behind lawns on either side. — Fig. 1 · The walkway at full length, from the Third Ave end, Dusk

1910s: Houses built
1928: Fisher Building completed
1970s: Closed to traffic
1982: Historic district designated

In the shadow of the Fisher

Albert Kahn finished the Fisher Building in 1928, and for a while New Center was Detroit's second downtown, with General Motors, the theatre, the shops, and the whole apparatus of a company town built at the scale of a boulevard.

Pallister sits just behind it, and it was never grand. Frame houses on narrow lots, built in the early 1910s for the people who worked in buildings like that rather than the people who commissioned them: two storeys, hip roofs, covered porches, painted siding with wood shake above.

By the 1960s the area had declined, and General Motors funded a rescue called New Center Commons. It renovated houses and, unusually, rerouted traffic around the neighborhood entirely. Pallister stopped being a street and became a brick-paved walkway.

A two storey house in dark brown brick with cream painted trim. A deep covered porch with arched openings sits above concrete steps, with clipped evergreens on either side and tree canopy overhead. — Fig. 2 · A covered entry, brick piers and painted trim, 1910s

What upkeep means here

The houses on Pallister are privately owned and privately maintained. The ground between them belongs to everyone, which makes it harder to look after.

Brick paving running the length of the walkway, dappled with tree shadow and scattered with fallen leaves, narrowing to a vanishing point between the trees. — Fig. 3 · Brick underfoot, raking light

The paving

A brick walkway takes different care than asphalt. It settles, it heaves in the freeze, and repairs happen by hand instead of by machine.

A historic lamp standard with a pale ribbed glass globe, unlit in daylight, rising on a black fluted post into a dense canopy of sycamore branches. — Fig. 4 · A lamp standard against the canopy

The lamps

With no vehicle traffic there are no headlights and no highway-scale lighting. The historic standards along the walk are all the lighting the block has.

The tree canopy over the walkway seen from directly below, sun breaking through the leaves, with a lamp globe at either lower corner of the frame. — Fig. 5 · Canopy from below, full leaf

The canopy

Street trees are most of what makes the walkway usable on an August afternoon. They also have a lifespan, and replacing them takes planning well before the old ones come down.

Supporting the block

Historic districts are protected from demolition, but not from deferred maintenance. The shared parts of Pallister (the walkway, the lighting, the trees) fall between what individual owners pay for and what the city budgets for.

We are looking at how neighbors, former residents, and anyone who cares about Detroit's historic districts might help close that gap. Nothing is set up yet. If you want to hear more as it develops, get in touch.

Get in touch