Corktown Neighborhood - Detroit, Michigan - Irish-American Historic Places on Waymarking.com

The Corktown neighborhood is Detroit's oldest surviving neighborhood.

"At mid-century, the Irish were the largest ethnic group among Detroit's newcomers, prompted by the Potato Famine in Ireland in the mid-1840's. The Irish moved into the near West Side. Since many of these came from County Cork, their neighborhood came to be known as "Corktown." In 1853, half the population of the Eighth Ward (which took in Corktown) was of Irish descent. The Corktown neighborhood was originally much larger than the fragment surviving today. It extended westward from Third Street by a dozen or more blocks away from the Detroit River past Michigan Avenue towards Grand River Avenue. The area south of Michigan Avenue was much reduced by clearance for the Lodge Freeway and for urban renewal for offices and light industry by the 1960's. The surviving residential fragment is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is designated as a City of Detroit Historic District. The district includes about 300 structures housing about 2,000 people. In spite of its relatively early time of platting, Corktown still offers a full spectrum of house fashions of the whole second half of the nineteenth century. Houses in Corktown are typically built close to each other on narrow 25-foot lots extending perhaps 130 feet from front sidewalk to back alley. This is a land pattern dating back to the London of King Charles II over 300 years ago. Towns like Detroit were built to limits of convenient walking distances until the arrival of public transportation extended the radius. Our first horse-drawn trolley cars appeared on Michigan Avenue in November 1863. More important to Corktown was the Baker Street Trolley line, opened in 1873. It passed along Bagley Avenue (originally "Baker Street" in Corktown)."
June 1996 by Gordon Pritchard Bugbee (1934-2000)

Website with background information about this Waymark: [Web Link]

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Date Logged Log User Rating   07/18/2013 The D Zone visited it 10/16/2011 elyob visited it 04/10/2010 Superted visited it 03/17/2009 The Zachalope visited it 03/05/2009 Rattrak visited it 10/24/2008 CorktownMum visited it

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