Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan has reached an agreement with Grosse Pointe Park that will demolish the blockade of the Alter Road-Kercheval Avenue border that the affluent suburb erected this summer.
Detroit agreed to get rid of blight along the border, which has long been one of the nation's most notorious crossings between city and suburb.
The agreement comes after weeks of silence from Duggan after Grosse Pointe Park built three wooden sheds and a traffic circle where the two cities meet at Kercheval and Alter -- a crossing that is decades old. It's notable strategy on Duggan's part; some previous mayors likely would have condemned the development first and bargained later, if at all.
“We are very excited about our new partnership, which will improve the area and benefit residents in both Detroit and Grosse Pointe Park,” Duggan said in a statement.
“It became clear during this process that we all share the common goal of creating a safe and attractive environment that links our communities in a neighborly way” and the agreement will work toward that, Duggan said.
Bill Laitner reports in the Free Press:
As part of the deal, Grosse Pointe Park will reopen motorists’ access to Kercheval at Alter Road and construct a new permanent farmers market building that will be “very visually appealing from all directions,” Grosse Pointe Park Mayor Pro Tem Greg Theokas said today.
“The final concept is going to be a plaza, and it’s absolutely going to be welcoming to Detroiters,” Theokas said. The existing wooden farmers market shed is to be removed by the end of the year, he said.
The barricade, which was denounced by a number of Grosse Pointers, came after years of low-level tension over the border, which runs along Alter and then east on Mack Avenue, touching Grosse Pointe Park on two sides. Its other two sides border Lake St. Clair and the City of Grosse Pointe.
With 10.5 percent of its population African American and a pro-Barack Obama voting record over the past two presidential elections, the Park is the most diverse of the five Grosse Pointes. Part of its border with Detroit is lined with modest, tightly packed homes, but much of the city is filled with stately homes on well-manicured lots. The stretch of Kercheval near the sheds is filled with restaurants, bars and shops.
In his 1984 book on the history of suburbs, "Crabgrass Frontier," Columbia University historian Kenneth T. Jackson called the Alter Road boundary the most sudden contrast between a city and suburb in the entire country, noting that locals called the line the "Berlin Wall," "the barrier" or "the Mason-Dixon Line."
In the three decades since, the boundary has grown even more stark as the Detroit side has lost homes, businesses and residents, as its once-crowded blocks reverted to fields. During the same time period, Grosse Pointe Park has erected permanent barriers at the borders with Detroit on several of the 32 streets that it shares with Detroit.
