Mies van der Rohe Residential District, Lafayette Park

About this property

Lafayette Park is a neighborhood located east of Downtown Detroit. It contains a residential area of some 4,900 people and covers 0.37 sq mi. The northern section, planned and partially built in the 1950s by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places; it was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 2015. Lafayette Park is located on the city's lower east side directly south of the Eastern Market Historic District. Lafayette Park is principally composed of two superblocks, which combine low- and high-density housing, in the manner favored by the Federal Housing Administration after World War II. Walter Chrysler Elementary School (Gould, Moss and Joseph, 1963) Lafayette Towers West and Lafayette Towers East (Mies, 1963) Central Park Plaza Apartments (Originally known as Central Park Plaza, Giffels and Rossetti, 1963) Rochdale Court Apartments (1964–1967, demolished 2002) Navarre Place Townhouses (Hausner and Macsai, 1965 and 1969) In 1963, considerable confusion was eliminated when the two phases, along with prior contained (and overlapping) developments variously called the Gratiot-Orleans Development Area, Lafayette Plaisance, and Lafayette Park-University City, were consolidated by the Lafayette Park Development Association, under the name of "Lafayette Park." A greenway runs through the center of the entire development, beginning at Gratiot and continuing to the two blocks to the South, and is known as Lafayette Plaisance (between Gratiot and Lafayette), Lafayette Central Park (between Lafayette and Larned), and Lafayette Entry Park (between Larned and Jefferson). From 1960 onward, both of the superblocks became known as simply Lafayette Park. The conventional city block between Larned and Jefferson also contained two of the indigenous buildings that survived the clearcutting (the University Club and the Somerset Apartments) and several pre-renewal commercial buildings and one church line Gratiot to the north. The development also borders on the Dequindre Cut Greenway, a rail-to-trail redevelopment following below Orleans Street. Although Lafayette Park is most commonly identified with van der Rohe, Gunnar Birkerts and John Macsai played significant roles in the south half of the neighborhood. Several factors came together to create the urban renewal zone that later became Lafayette Park. Firstly, FHA policies following World War II promoted aggressive "slum clearance," under the Housing Act of 1949, providing up to half of demolition costs on projects that often impacted African-American neighborhoods. Secondly, Detroit had been completely built out and lacked land that could be developed, which limited property tax revenue. thirdly, Walter Reuther, of the United Auto Workers, had made the development of mixed-income housing a priority.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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